Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions

“You a veteran?” said the driver.

“No,” said Trout. “Are you?”

“No,” said the driver.

Neither one of them was a veteran.

The driver got onto the subject of friends. He said it was hard for him to maintain friendships that meant anything because he was on the road most of the time. He joked about the time when he used to talk about his “best friends.” He guessed people stopped talking about best friends after they got out of junior high school.

He suggested that Trout, since Trout was in the combination aluminum storm window and screen business, had opportunities to build many lasting friendships in the course of his work. “I mean,” he said, “you get men working together day after day, putting up those windows, they get to know each other pretty well.”

“I work alone,” said Trout.

The driver was disappointed. “I assumed it would take two men to do the job.”

“Just one,” said Trout. “A weak little kid could do it without any help.”

The driver wanted Trout to have a rich social life so that he could enjoy it vicariously. “All the same,” he insisted, “you’ve got buddies you see after work. You have a few beers. You play some cards. You have some laughs.”

Trout shrugged.

“You walk down the same streets every day,” the driver told him. “You know a lot of people, and they know you, because it’s the same streets for you, day after day. You say, ‘Hello,’ and they say ‘Hello,’ back. You call them by name. They call you by name. If you’re in a real jam, they’ll help you, because you’re one of ‘em. You belong. They see you every day.”

Trout didn’t want to argue about it.

Trout had forgotten the driver’s name.

Trout had a mental defect which I, too, used to suffer from. He couldn’t remember what different people in his life looked like—unless their bodies or faces were strikingly unusual.

When he lived on Cape Cod, for instance, the only person he could greet warmly and by name was Alfy Bearse, who was a one-armed albino.

“Hot enough for you, Alfy?” he would say. “Where you been keeping yourself, Alfy?” he’d say. “You’re a sight for sore eyes, Alfy,” he’d say.

And so on.

Now that Trout lived in Cohoes, the only person he called by name was a red-headed Cockney midget, Durling Heath. He worked in a shoe repair shop. Heath had an executive-type nameplate on his workbench, in case anybody wished to address him by name. The nameplate looked like this:

Trout would drop into the shop from time to time, and say such things as, “Who’s gonna win the World Series this year, Durling?” and “You have any idea what all the sirens were blowing about last night, Durling?” and, “You’re looking good today, Durling—where’d you get that shirt?” And so on.

Trout wondered now if his friendship with Heath was over. The last time Trout had been in the shoe repair place, saying this and that to Durling, the midget had unexpectedly screamed at him.

This is what he had screamed in his Cockney accent: “Stop bloody hounding me!”

The Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, shook Trout’s hand in a Cohoes grocery story one time. Trout had no idea who he was.

As a science-fiction writer, he should have been flabbergasted to come so close to such a man. Rockefeller wasn’t merely Governor. Because of the peculiar laws in that part of the planet, Rockefeller was allowed to own vast areas of Earth’s surface, and the petroleum and other valuable minerals underneath the surface, as well. He owned or controlled more of the planet than many nations. This had been his destiny since infancy. He had been born into that cockamamie proprietorship.

“How’s it going, fella?” Governor Rockefeller asked him.

“About the same,” said Kilgore Trout.

After insisting that Trout had a rich social life, the driver pretended, again for his own gratification, that Trout had begged to know what the sex life of a transcontinental truck driver was like. Trout had begged no such thing.

“You want to know how truck drivers make out with women, right?” the driver said. “You have this idea that every driver you see is fucking up a storm from coast to coast, right?”

Trout shrugged.

The truck driver became embittered by Trout, scolded him for being so salaciously misinformed. “Let me tell you, Kilgore—” he hesitated. “That’s your name, right?”

“Yes,” said Trout. He had forgotten the driver’s name a hundred times. Every time Trout looked away from him, Trout forgot not only his name but his face, too.

“Kilgore, God damn it—” the driver said, “if I was to have my rig break down in Cohoes, for instance, and I was to have to stay there for two days while it was worked on, how easy you think it would be for me to get laid while I was there—a stranger, looking the way I do?”

“It would depend on how determined you were,” said Trout.

The driver sighed. “Yeah, God—” he said, and he despaired for himself, “that’s probably the story of my life: not enough determination.”

They talked about aluminum siding as a technique for making old houses look new again. From a distance, these sheets, which never needed painting, looked like freshly painted wood.

The driver wanted to talk about Perma-Stone, too, which was a competitive scheme. It involved plastering the sides of old houses with colored cement, so that, from a distance, they looked as though they were made of stone.

“If you’re in aluminum storm windows,” the driver said to Trout, “you must be in aluminum siding, too.” All over the country, the two businesses went hand-in-hand.

“My company sells it,” said Trout, “and I’ve seen a lot of it. I’ve never actually worked on an installation.”

The driver was thinking seriously of buying aluminum siding for his home in Little Rock, and he begged Trout to give him an honest answer to this question: “From what you’ve seen and heard—the people who get aluminum siding, are they happy with what they get?”

“Around Cohoes,” said Trout. “I think those were about the only really happy people I ever saw.”

“I know what you mean,” said the driver. “One time I saw a whole family standing outside their house. They couldn’t believe how nice their house looked after the aluminum siding went on. My question to you, and you can give me an honest answer, on account of we’ll never have to do business, you and me: Kilgore, how long will that happiness last?”

“About fifteen years,” said Trout. “Our salesmen say you can easily afford to have the job redone with all the money you’ve saved on paint and heat.”

“ Perma-Stone looks a lot richer, and I suppose it lasts a lot longer, too,” said the driver. “On the other hand, it costs a lot more.”

“You get what you pay for,” said Kilgore Trout.

The truck driver told Trout about a gas hot-water heater he had bought thirty years ago, and it hadn’t given him a speck of trouble in all that time.

“I’ll be damned,” said Kilgore Trout.

Trout asked about the truck, and the driver said it was the greatest truck in the world. The tractor alone cost twenty-eight thousand dollars.

It was powered by a three hundred and twenty-four horsepower Cummins Diesel engine, which was turbo-charged, so it would function well at high altitudes. It had hydraulic steering, air brakes, a thirteen- speed transmission, and was owned by his brother-inlaw.

His brother-in-law, he said, owned twenty-eight trucks, and was President of the Pyramid Trucking Company.