Breakfast of Champions

4






DWAYNE WAS meanwhile getting crazier all the time. He saw eleven moons in the sky over the new Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts one night. The next morning, he saw a huge duck directing traffic at the intersection of Arsenal Avenue and Old County Road. He didn’t tell anybody what he saw. He maintained secrecy.
And the bad chemicals in his head were fed up with secrecy. They were no longer content with making him feel and see queer things. They wanted him to do queer things, also, and make a lot of noise.
They wanted Dwayne Hoover to be proud of his disease.


People said later that they were furious with themselves for not noticing the danger signals in Dwayne’s behavior, for ignoring his obvious cries for help. After Dwayne ran amok, the local paper ran a deeply sympathetic editorial about it, begging people to watch each other for danger signals. Here was its title:
A CRY FOR HELP

But Dwayne wasn’t all that weird before he met Kilgore Trout. His behavior in public kept him well within the limits of acceptable acts and beliefs and conversations in Midland City. The person closest to him, Francine Pefko, his white secretary and mistress, said that Dwayne seemed to be getting happier and happier all the time during the month before Dwayne went public as a maniac.
“I kept thinking,” she told a newspaper reporter from her hospital bed, “‘He is finally getting over his wife’s suicide.’”


Francine worked at Dwayne’s principal place of business, which was Dwayne Hoover’s Exit Eleven Pontiac Village, just off the Interstate, next door to the new Holiday Inn.
Here is what made Francine think he was becoming happier: Dwayne began to sing songs which had been popular in his youth, such as “The Old Lamp Lighter,” and “Tippy-Tippy-Tin,” and “Hold Tight,” and “Blue Moon,” and so on. Dwayne had never sung before. Now he did it loudly as he sat at his desk, when he took a customer for a ride in a demonstrator, when he watched a mechanic service a car. One day he sang loudly as he crossed the lobby of the new Holiday Inn, smiling and gesturing at people as though he had been hired to sing for their pleasure. But nobody thought that was necessarily a hint of derangement, either—especially since Dwayne owned a piece of the Inn.
A black bus boy and a black waiter discussed this singing. “Listen at him sing,” said the bus boy.
“If I owned what he owns, I’d sing, too,” the waiter replied.


The only person who said out loud that Dwayne was going crazy was Dwayne’s white sales manager at the Pontiac agency, who was Harry LeSabre. A full week before Dwayne went of this rocker, Harry said to Francine Pefko, “Something has come over Dwayne. He used to be so charming. I don’t find him so charming anymore.”
Harry knew Dwayne better than did any other man. He had been with Dwayne for twenty years. He came to work for him when the agency was right on the edge of the Nigger part of town. A Nigger was a human being who was black.
“I know him the way a combat soldier knows his buddy,” said Harry. “We used to put our lives on the line every day, when the agency was down on Jefferson Street. We got held up on the average of fourteen times a year. And I tell you that the Dwayne of today is a Dwayne I never saw before.”


It was true about the holdups. That was how Dwayne bought a Pontiac agency so cheaply. White people were the only people with money enough to buy new automobiles, except for a few black criminals, who always wanted Cadillacs. And white people were scared to go anywhere on Jefferson Street anymore.


Here is where Dwayne got the money to buy the agency: He borrowed it from the Midland County National Bank. For collateral, he put up stock he owned in a company which was then called The Midland City Ordnance Company. It later became Barrytron, Limited. When Dwayne first got the stock, in the depths of the Great Depression, the company was called The Robo-Magic Corporation of America.
The name of the company kept changing through the years because the nature of its business changed so much. But its management hung on to the company’s original motto—for old time’s sake. The motto was this:
GOODBYE, BLUE MONDAY.



Listen:
Harry LeSabre said to Francine, “When a man has been in combat with another man, he gets so he can sense the slightest change in his buddy’s personality, and Dwayne has changed. You ask Vernon Garr.”
Vernon Garr was a white mechanic who was the only other employee who had been with Dwayne before Dwayne moved the agency out to the Interstate. As it happened, Vernon was having trouble at home. His wife, Mary, was a schizophrenic, so Vernon hadn’t noticed whether Dwayne had changed or not. Vernon’s wife believed that Vernon was trying to turn her brains into plutonium.


Harry LeSabre was entitled to talk about combat. He had been in actual combat in a war. Dwayne hadn’t been in combat. He was a civilian employee of the United States Army Air Corps during the Second World War, though. One time he got to paint a message on a five-hundred-pound bomb which was going to be dropped on Hamburg, Germany. This was it:




“Harry,” said Francine, “everybody is entitled to a few bad days. Dwayne has fewer than anybody I know, so when he does have one like today, some people are hurt and surprised. They shouldn’t be. He’s human like anybody else.”
“But why should he single out me?” Harry wanted to know. He was right: Dwayne had singled him out for astonishing insults and abuse that day. Everybody else still found Dwayne nothing but charming.
Later on, of course, Dwayne would assault all sorts of people, even three strangers from Erie, Pennsylvania, who had never been to Midland City before. But Harry was an isolated victim now.


“Why me?” said Harry. This was a common question in Midland City. People were always asking that as they were loaded into ambulances after accidents of various kinds, or arrested for disorderly conduct, or burglarized, or socked in the nose and so on: “Why me?”
“Probably because he felt that you were man enough and friend enough to put up with him on one of his few bad days,” said Francine.
“How would you like it if he insulted your clothes?” said Harry. This is what Dwayne had done to him: insulted his clothes.
“I would remember that he was the best employer in town,” said Francine. This was true. Dwayne paid high wages. He had profit-sharing and Christmas bonuses at the end of every year. He was the first automobile dealer in his part of the State to offer his employees Blue Cross-Blue Shield, which was health insurance. He had a retirement plan which was superior to every retirement plan in the city with the exception of the one at Barrytron. His office door was always open to any employee who had troubles to discuss, whether they had to do with the automobile business or not.
For instance, on the day he insulted Harry’s clothing, he also spent two hours with Vernon Garr, discussing the hallucinations Vernon’s wife was having. “She sees things that aren’t there,” said Vernon.
“She needs rest, Vern,” said Dwayne.
“Maybe I’m going crazy, too,” said Vernon. “Christ, I go home and I talk for hours to my f*cking dog.”
“That makes two of us,” said Dwayne.


Here is the scene between Harry and Dwayne which upset Harry so much:
Harry went into Dwayne’s office right after Vernon left. He expected no trouble, because he had never had any serious trouble with Dwayne.
“How’s my old combat buddy today?” he said to Dwayne.
“As good as can be expected,” said Dwayne. “Anything special bothering you?”
“No,” said Harry.
“Vern’s wife thinks Vern is trying to turn her brains into plutonium,” said Dwayne.
“What’s plutonium?” said Harry, and so on. They rambled along, and Harry made up a problem for himself just to keep the conversation lively. He said he was sad sometimes that he had no children. “But I’m glad in a way, too,” he went on. “I mean, why should I contribute to overpopulation?”
Dwayne didn’t say anything.
“Maybe we should have adopted one,” said Harry, “but it’s too late now. And the old lady and me—we have a good time just horsing around with ourselves. What do we need a kid for?”
It was after the mention of adoption that Dwayne blew up. He himself had been adopted—by a couple who had moved to Midland City from West Virginia in order to make big money as factory workers in the First World War. Dwayne’s real mother was a spinster school teacher who wrote sentimental poetry and claimed to be descended from Richard the Lion-Hearted, who was a king. His real father was an itinerant typesetter, who seduced his mother by setting her poems in type. He didn’t sneak them into a newspaper or anything. It was enough for her that they were set in type.
She was a defective child-bearing machine. She destroyed herself automatically while giving birth to Dwayne. The printer disappeared. He was a disappearing machine.


It may be that the subject of adoption caused an unfortunate chemical reaction in Dwayne’s head. At any rate, Dwayne suddenly snarled this at Harry: “Harry, why don’t you get a bunch of cotton waste from Vern Garr, soak it in Blue Sunoco, and burn up your f*cking wardrobe? You make me feel like I’m at Watson Brothers.” Watson Brothers was the name of the funeral parlor for white people who were at least moderately well-to-do. Blue Sunoco was a brand of gasoline.
Harry was startled, and then pain set in. Dwayne had never said anything about his clothes in all the years he’d known him. The clothes were conservative and neat, in Harry’s opinion. His shirts were white. His ties were black or navy blue. His suits were gray or dark blue. His shoes and socks were black.
“Listen, Harry,” said Dwayne, and his expression was mean, “Hawaiian Week is coming up, and I’m absolutely serious: burn your clothes and get new ones, or apply for work at Watson Brothers. Have yourself embalmed while you’re at it.”


Harry couldn’t do anything but let his mouth hang open. The Hawaiian Week Dwayne had mentioned was a sales promotion scheme which involved making the agency look as much like the Hawaiian Islands as possible. People who bought new or used cars, or had repairs done in excess of five hundred dollars during the week would be entered automatically in a lottery. Three lucky people would each win a free, all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas and San Francisco and then Hawaii for a party of two.
“I don’t mind that you have the name of a Buick, Harry, when you’re supposed to be selling Pontiacs—” Dwayne went on. He was referring to the fact that the Buick division of General Motors put out a model called the Le Sabre. “You can’t help that.” Dwayne now patted the top of his desk softly. This was somehow more menacing than if he had pounded the desk with his fist. “But there are a hell of a lot of things you can change, Harry. There’s a long weekend coming up. I expect to see some big changes in you when I come to work on Tuesday morning.”
The weekend was extra-long because the coming Monday was a national holiday, Veterans’ Day. It was in honor of people who had served their country in uniform.


“When we started selling Pontiacs, Harry,” said Dwayne, “the car was sensible transportation for school teachers and grandmothers and maiden aunts.” This was true. “Perhaps you haven’t noticed, Harry, but the Pontiac has now become a glamorous, youthful adventure for people who want a kick out of life! And you dress and act like this was a mortuary! Look at yourself in a mirror, Harry, and ask yourself, ‘Who could ever associate a man like this with a Pontiac?’”
Harry LeSabre was too choked up to point out to Dwayne that, no matter what he looked like, he was generally acknowledged to be one of the most effective sales managers for Pontiac not only in the State, but in the entire Middle West. Pontiac was the best-selling automobile in the Midland City area, despite the fact that it was not a low-price car. It was a medium-price car.


Dwayne Hoover told poor Harry LeSabre that the Hawaiian Festival, only a long weekend away, was Harry’s golden opportunity to loosen up, to have some fun, to encourage other people to have some fun, too.
“Harry,” said Dwayne. “I have some news for you: modern science has given us a whole lot of wonderful new colors, with strange, exciting names like red!, orange!, green!, and pink!, Harry. We’re not stuck any more with just black, gray and white! Isn’t that good news, Harry? And the State Legislature has just announced that it is no longer a crime to smile during working hours, Harry, and I have the personal promise of the Governor that never again will anybody be sent to the Sexual Offenders’ Wing of the Adult Correctional Institution for telling a joke!”


Harry LeSabre might have weathered all this with only minor damage, if only Harry hadn’t been a secret transvestite. On weekends he liked to dress up in women’s clothing, and not drab clothing, either. Harry and his wife would pull down the window blinds, and Harry would turn into a bird of paradise.
Nobody but Harry’s wife knew his secret.
When Dwayne razzed him about the clothes he wore to work, and then mentioned the Sexual Offenders’ Wing of the Adult Correctional Institution at Shepherdstown, Harry had to suspect that his secret was out. And it wasn’t merely a comical secret, either. Harry could be arrested for what he did on weekends. He could be fined up to three thousand dollars and sentenced to as much as five years at hard labor in the Sexual Offenders’ Wing of the Adult Correctional Institution at Shepherdstown.


So poor Harry spent a wretched Veterans’ Day weekend after that. But Dwayne spent a worse one.
Here is what the last night of that weekend was like for Dwayne: his bad chemicals rolled him out of bed. They made him dress as though there were some sort of emergency with which he had to deal. This was in the wee hours. Veterans’ Day had ended at the stroke of twelve.
Dwayne’s bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to make holes in human beings. It looked like this:


In Dwayne’s part of the planet, anybody who wanted one could get one down at his local hardware store. Policemen all had them. So did the criminals. So did the people caught in between.
Criminals would point guns at people and say, “Give me all your money,” and the people usually would. And policemen would point their guns at criminals and say, “Stop” or whatever the situation called for, and the criminals usually would. Sometimes they wouldn’t. Sometimes a wife would get so mad at her husband that she would put a hole in him with a gun. Sometimes a husband would get so mad at his wife that he would put a hole in her. And so on.
In the same week Dwayne Hoover ran amok, a fourteen-year-old Midland City boy put holes in his mother and father because he didn’t want to show them the bad report card he had brought home. His lawyer planned to enter a plea of temporary insanity, which meant that at the time of the shooting the boy was unable to distinguish the difference between right and wrong.


Sometimes people would put holes in famous people so they could be at least fairly famous, too. Sometimes people would get on airplanes which were supposed to fly to someplace, and they would offer to put holes in the pilot and copilot unless they flew the airplane to someplace else.


Dwayne held the muzzle of his gun in his mouth for a while. He tasted oil. The gun was loaded and cocked. There were neat little metal packages containing charcoal, potassium nitrate and sulphur only inches from his brains. He had only to trip a lever, and the powder would turn to gas. The gas would blow a chunk of lead down a tube and through Dwayne’s brains.
But Dwayne elected to shoot up one of his tiled bathrooms instead. He put chunks of lead through his toilet and a washbasin and a bathtub enclosure. There was a picture of a flamingo sandblasted on the glass of the bathtub enclosure. It looked like this:


Dwayne shot the flamingo.
He snarled at his recollection of it afterwards. Here is what he snarled: “Dumb f*cking bird.”


Nobody heard the shots. All the houses in the neighborhood were too well insulated for sound ever to get in or out. A sound wanting in or out of Dwayne’s dreamhouse, for instance, had to go through an inch and a half of plasterboard, a polystyrene vapor barrier, a sheet of aluminum foil, a three-inch airspace, another sheet of aluminum foil, a three-inch blanket of glass wool, another sheet of aluminum foil, one inch of insulating board made of pressed sawdust, tarpaper, one inch of wood sheathing, more tarpaper, and then aluminum siding which was hollow. The space in the siding was filled with a miracle insulating material developed for use on rockets to the Moon.


Dwayne turned on the floodlights around his house, and he played basketball on the blacktop apron outside his five-car garage.
Dwayne’s dog Sparky hid in the basement when Dwayne shot up the bathroom. But he came out now. Sparky watched Dwayne play basketball.
“You and me, Sparky,” said Dwayne. And so on. He sure loved that dog.
Nobody saw him playing basketball. He was screened from his neighbors by trees and shrubs and a high cedar fence.


He put the basketball away, and he climbed into a black Plymouth Fury he had taken in trade the day before. The Plymouth was a Chrysler product, and Dwayne himself sold General Motors products. He had decided to drive the Plymouth for a day or two in order to keep abreast of the competition.
As he backed out of his driveway, he thought it important to explain to his neighbors why he was in a Plymouth Fury, so he yelled out the window: “Keeping abreast of the competition!” He blew his horn.


Dwayne zoomed down Old County Road and onto the Interstate, which he had all to himself. He swerved into Exit Ten at a high rate of speed, slammed into a guardrail, spun around and around. He came out onto Union Avenue going backwards, jumped a curb, and came to a stop in a vacant lot. Dwayne owned the lot.
Nobody saw or heard anything. Nobody lived in the area. A policeman was supposed to cruise by about once every hour or so, but he was cooping in an alley behind a Western Electric warehouse about two miles away. Cooping was police slang for sleeping on the job.


Dwayne stayed in his vacant lot for a while. He played the radio. All the Midland City stations were asleep for the night, but Dwayne picked up a country music station in West Virginia, which offered him ten different kinds of flowering shrubs and five fruit trees for six dollars, C.O.D.
“Sounds good to me,” said Dwayne. He meant it. Almost all the messages which were sent and received in his country, even the telepathic ones, had to do with buying or selling some damn thing. They were like lullabies to Dwayne.