Breakfast of Champions

8






TROUT WANDERED out onto the sidewalk of Forty-second Street. It was a dangerous place to be. The whole city was dangerous—because of chemicals and the uneven distribution of wealth and so on. A lot of people were like Dwayne: they created chemicals in their own bodies which were bad for their heads. But there were thousands upon thousands of other people in the city who bought bad chemicals and ate them or sniffed them—or injected them into their veins with devices which looked like this:


Sometimes they even stuffed bad chemicals up their a*sholes. Their a*sholes looked like this:




People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn’t own doodley-squat, so they couldn’t improve their surroundings. So they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.
The results had been catastrophic so far—suicide, theft, murder, and insanity and so on. But new chemicals were coming onto the market all the time. Twenty feet away from Trout there on Forty-second Street, a fourteen-year-old white boy lay unconscious in the doorway of a pornography store. He had swallowed a half pint of a new type of paint remover which had gone on sale for the first time only the day before. He had also swallowed two pills which were intended to prevent contagious abortion in cattle, which was called Bang’s disease.


Trout was petrified there on Forty-second Street. It had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth.
The theater manager came out and locked the door behind him.
And two young black prostitutes materialized from nowhere. They asked Trout and the manager if they would like to have some fun. They were cheerful and unafraid—because of a tube of Norwegian hemorrhoid remedy which they had eaten about half an hour before. The manufacturer had never intended the stuff to be eaten. People were supposed to squirt it up their a*sholes.
These were country girls. They had grown up in the rural south of the nation, where their ancestors had been used as agricultural machinery. The white farmers down there weren’t using machines made out of meat anymore, though, because machines made out of metal were cheaper and more reliable, and required simpler homes.
So the black machines had to get out of there, or starve to death. They came to cities because everyplace else had signs like this on the fences and trees:




Kilgore Trout once wrote a story called “This Means You.” It was set in the Hawaiian Islands, the place where the lucky winners of Dwayne Hoover’s contest in Midland City were supposed to go. Every bit of land on the islands was owned by only about forty people, and, in the story, Trout had those people decide to exercise their property rights to the full. They put up no trespassing signs on everything.
This created terrible problems for the million other people on the islands. The law of gravity required that they stick somewhere on the surface. Either that, or they could go out into the water and bob offshore.
But then the Federal Government came through with an emergency program. It gave a big balloon full of helium to every man, woman and child who didn’t own property.


There was a cable with a harness on it dangling from each balloon. With the help of the balloons, Hawaiians could go on inhabiting the islands without always sticking to things other people owned.


The prostitutes worked for a pimp now. He was splendid and cruel. He was a god to them. He took their free will away from them, which was perfectly all right. They didn’t want it anyway. It was as though they had surrendered themselves to Jesus, for instance, so they could live unselfishly and trustingly—except that they had surrendered to a pimp instead.
Their childhoods were over. They were dying now. Earth was a tinhorn planet as far as they were concerned.
When Trout and the theater manager, two tinhorns, said they didn’t want any tinhorn fun, the dying children sauntered off, their feet sticking to the planet, coming unstuck, then sticking again. They disappeared around a corner. Trout, the eyes and ears of the Creator of the Universe, sneezed.


“God bless you,” said the manager. This was a fully automatic response many Americans had to hearing a person sneeze.
“Thank you,” said Trout. Thus a temporary friendship was formed.
Trout said he hoped to get safely to a cheap hotel. The manager said he hoped, to get to the subway station on Times Square. So they walked together, encouraged by the echoes of their footsteps from the building fa?ades.
The manager told Trout a little about what the planet looked like to him. It was a place where he had a wife and two kids, he said. They didn’t know he ran a theater which showed blue movies. They thought he was doing consulting work as an engineer so late at night. He said that the planet didn’t have much use for engineers his age anymore. It had adored them once.
“Hard times,” said Trout.
The manager told of being in on the development of a miraculous insulating material, which had been used on rocket ships to the Moon. This was, in fact, the same material which gave the aluminum siding of Dwayne Hoover’s dream house in Midland City its miraculous insulating qualities.
The manager reminded Trout of what the first man to set foot on the Moon had said: “One small step for man, one great leap for mankind.”
“Thrilling words,” said Trout. He looked over his shoulder, perceived that they were being followed by a white Oldsmobile Toronado with a black vinyl roof. This four hundred horsepower, front-wheel drive vehicle was burbling along at about three miles an hour, ten feet behind them and close to the curb.
That was the last thing Trout remembered—seeing the Oldsmobile back there.


The next thing he knew, he was on his hands and knees on a handball court underneath the Queensboro Bridge at Fifty-ninth Street, with the East River nearby. His trousers and underpants were around his ankles. His money was gone. His parcels were scattered around him—the tuxedo, the new shirt, the books. Blood seeped from one ear.
The police caught him in the act of pulling up his trousers. They dazzled him with a spotlight as he leaned against the backboard of the handball court and fumbled foolishly with his belt and the buttons on his fly. The police supposed that they had caught him committing some public nuisance, had caught him working with an old man’s limited palette of excrement and alcohol.
He wasn’t quite penniless. There was a ten-dollar bill in the watch pocket of his pants.


It was determined at a hospital that Trout was not seriously hurt. He was taken to a police station, where he was questioned. All he could say was that he had been kidnapped by pure evil in a white Oldsmobile. The police wanted to know how many people were in the car, their ages, their sexes, the colors of their skins, their manners of speech.
“For all I know, they may not even have been Earthlings,” said Trout. “For all I know, that car may have been occupied by an intelligent gas from Pluto.”


Trout said this so innocently, but his comment turned out to be the first germ in an epidemic of mind-poisoning. Here is how the disease was spread: a reporter wrote a story for the New York Post the next day, and he led off with the quotation from Trout.
The story appeared under this headline:
PLUTO BANDITS
KIDNAP PAIR

Trout’s name was given as Kilmer Trotter, incidentally, address unknown. His age was given as eighty-two.
Other papers copied the story, rewrote it some. They all hung on to the joke about Pluto, spoke knowingly of The Pluto Gang. And reporters asked police for any new information on The Pluto Gang, so police went looking for information on The Pluto Gang.


So New Yorkers, who had so many nameless terrors, were easily taught to fear something seemingly specific—The Pluto Gang. They bought new locks for their doors and gratings for their windows, to keep out The Pluto Gang. They stopped going to theaters at night, for fear of The Pluto Gang.
Foreign newspapers spread the terror, ran articles on how persons thinking of visiting New York might keep to a certain few streets in Manhattan and stand a fair chance of avoiding The Pluto Gang.


In one of New York City’s many ghettos for dark-skinned people, a group of Puerto Rican boys gathered together in the basement of an abandoned building. They were small, but they were numerous and volatile. They wished to become frightening, in order to defend themselves and their friends and families, something the police wouldn’t do. They also wanted to drive the drug peddlers out of the neighborhood, and to get enough publicity, which was very important, to catch the attention of the Government, so that the Government would do a better job of picking up the garbage and so on.
One of them, José Mendoza, was a fairly good painter. So he painted the emblem of their new gang on the backs of the members’ jackets. This was it: