Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions

It was an amazing coincidence that the truck driver had read a book by Kilgore Trout. Trout had never met a reader before, and his response now was interesting: He did not admit that he was the father of the book.

The driver pointed out that all the mailboxes in the area had the same last name painted on them.

“There’s another one,” he said, indicating a mailbox which looked like this:

The truck was passing through the area where Dwayne Hoover’s stepparents had come from. They had trekked from West Virginia to Midland City during the First World War, to make big money at the Keedsler Automobile Company, which was manufacturing airplanes and trucks. When they got to Midland City, they had their name changed legally from Hoobler to Hoover, because there were so many black people in Midland City named Hoobler.

As Dwayne Hoover’s stepfather explained to him one time, “It was embarrassing. Everybody up here naturally assumed Hoobler was a Nigger name.”

Dwayne Hoover got through lunch all right that day. He remembered now about Hawaiian Week. The ukuleles and so on were no longer mysterious. The pavement between his automobile agency and the new Holiday Inn was no longer a trampoline.

He drove to lunch alone in an air-conditioned demonstrator, a blue Pontiac Le Mans with a cream interior, with his radio on. He heard several of his own radio commercials, which drove home the point: “You can always trust Dwayne.”

Though his mental health had improved remarkably since breakfast, a new symptom of illness made itself known. It was incipient echolalia. Dwayne found himself wanting to repeat out loud whatever had just been said.

So when the radio told him, “You can always trust Dwayne,” he echoed the last word. “Dwayne,” he said.

When the radio said there had been a tornado in Texas, Dwayne said this out loud: “Texas.”

Then he heard that husbands of women who had been raped during the war between India and Pakistan wouldn’t have anything to do with their wives anymore. The women, in the eyes of their husbands, had become unclean, said the radio.

“Unclean,” said Dwayne.

As for Wayne Hoobler, the black ex-convict whose only dream was to work for Dwayne Hoover: he had learned to play hide-and-seek with Dwayne’s employees. He did not wish to be ordered off the property for hanging around the used cars. So, when an employee came near,

Wayne would wander off to the garbage and trash area behind the Holiday Inn, and gravely study the remains of club sandwiches and empty packs of Salem cigarettes and so on in the cans back there, as though he were a health inspector or some such thing.

When the employee went away, Wayne would drift back to the used cars, keeping the boiled eggs of his eyes peeled for the real Dwayne Hoover.

The real Dwayne Hoover, of course, had in effect denied that he was Dwayne. So, when the real Dwayne came out at lunch time, Wayne, who had nobody to talk to but himself, said this to himself: “That ain’t Mr. Hoover. Sure look like Mr. Hoover, though. Maybe Mr. Hoover sick today.” And so on.

Dwayne had a hamburger and French fries and a Coke at his newest Burger Chef, which was out on Crestview Avenue, across the street from where the new John F. Kennedy High School was going up. John F. Kennedy had never been in Midland City, but he was a President of the United States who was shot to death. Presidents of the country were often shot to death. The assassins were confused by some of the same bad chemicals which troubled Dwayne.

Dwayne certainly wasn’t alone, as far as having bad chemicals inside of him was concerned. He had plenty of company throughout all history. In his own lifetime, for instance, the people in a country called Germany were so full of bad chemicals for a while that they actually built factories whose only purpose was to kill people by the millions. The people were delivered by railroad trains.

When the Germans were full of bad chemicals, their flag looked like this:

Here is what their flag looked like after they got well again:

After they got well again, they manufactured a cheap and durable automobile which became popular all over the world, especially among young people. It looked like this:

People called it “the beetle.” A real beetle looked like this:

The mechanical beetle was made by Germans. The real beetle was made by the Creator of the Universe.

Dwayne’s waitress at the Burger Chef was a seventeen-year-old white girl named’ Patty Keene. Her hair was yellow. Her eyes were blue.

She was very old for a mammal. Most mammals were senile or dead by the time they were seventeen. But Patty was a sort of mammal which developed very slowly, so the body she rode around in was only now mature.

She was a brand-new adult, who was working in order to pay off the tremendous doctors’ and hospital bills her father had run up in the process of dying of cancer of the colon and then cancer of the everything.

This was in a country where everybody was expected to pay his own bills for everything, and one of the most expensive things a person could do was get sick. Patty Keene’s father’s sickness cost ten times as much as all the trips to Hawaii which Dwayne was going to give away at the end of Hawaiian Week.

Dwayne appreciated Patty Keene’s brand-newness, even though he was not sexually attracted to women that young. She was like a new automobile, which hadn’t even had its radio turned on yet, and Dwayne was reminded of a ditty his father would sing sometimes when his father was drunk. It went like this:

Patty Keene was stupid on purpose, which was the case with most women in Midland City. The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they did not use them much for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies, and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get.

So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.

Patty knew who Dwayne was. Dwayne didn’t know who Patty was. Patty’s heart beat faster when she waited on him—because Dwayne could solve so many of her problems with the money and power he had. He could give her a fine house and new automobiles and nice clothes and a life of leisure, and he could pay all the medical bills—as easily as she had given him his hamburger and his French fries and his Coke.

Dwayne could do for her what the Fairy Godmother did for Cinderella, if he wanted to, and Patty had never been so close to such a magical person before. She was in the presence of the supernatural. And she knew enough about Midland City and herself to understand that she might never be this close to the supernatural ever again.