Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions

There was a mildly amazing coincidence here: the father of the destroyed fetus was Don Breedlove, the white gas-conversion unit installer who had raped Patty Keene in the parking lot of the Bannister Memorial Fieldhouse.

This was a man with a wife and three kids.

Francine had a sign on the wall over her desk, which had been given to her as a joke at the automobile agency’s Christmas party at the new Holiday Inn the year before.

It spelled out the truth of her situation. This was it:

Gloria said she didn’t want to man the nerve center. “I don’t want to man anything,” she said.

But Gloria took over Francine’s desk anyway. “I don’t have nerve enough to commit suicide,” she said, “so I might as well do anything anybody says—in the service of mankind.”

Dwayne and Francine headed for Shepherdstown in separate cars, so as not to call attention to their love affair. Dwayne was in a demonstrator again. Francine was in her own red GTO. GTO stood for Gran Turismo Omologato. She had a sticker on her bumper which said this:

It was certainly loyal of her to put that sticker on her car. She was always doing loyal things like that, always rooting for her man, always rooting for Dwayne.

And Dwayne tried to reciprocate in little ways. For instance, he had been reading articles and books on sexual intercourse recently. There was a sexual revolution going on in the country, and women were demanding that men pay more attention to women’s pleasure during sexual intercourse, and not just think of themselves. The key to their pleasure, they said, and scientists backed them up, was the clitoris, a tiny meat cylinder which was right above the hole in women where men were supposed to stick their much larger cylinders.

Men were supposed to pay more attention to the clitoris, and Dwayne had been paying a lot more attention to Francine’s, to the point where she said he was paying too much attention to it. This did not surprise him. The things he had read about the clitoris had said that this was a danger—that a man could pay too much attention to it.

So, driving out to the Quality Motor Court that day, Dwayne was hoping that he would pay exactly the right amount of attention to Francine’s clitoris.

Kilgore Trout once wrote a short novel about the importance of the clitoris in love-making. This was in response to a suggestion by his second wife, Darlene, that he could make a fortune with a dirty book. She told him that the hero should understand women so well that he could seduce anyone he wanted. So Trout wrote The Son of Jimmy Valentine.

Jimmy Valentine was a famous made-up person in another writer’s books, just as Kilgore Trout was a famous made-up person in my books. Jimmy Valentine in the other writer’s books sandpapered his fingertips, so they were extrasensitive. He was a safe-cracker. His sense of feel was so delicate that he could open any safe in the world by feeling the tumblers fall.

Kilgore Trout invented a son for Jimmy Valentine, named Ralston Valentine. Ralston Valentine also sandpapered his fingertips. But he wasn’t a safe-cracker. Ralston was so good at touching women the way they wanted to be touched, that tens of thousands of them became his willing slaves. They abandoned their husbands or lovers for him, in Trout’s story, and Ralston Valentine became President of the United States, thanks to the votes of women.

Dwayne and Francine made love in the Quality Motor Court. Then they stayed in bed for a while. It was a water bed. Francine had a beautiful body. So did Dwayne. “We never made love in the afternoon before,” said Francine.

“I felt so tense," said Wayne.

“I know,” said Francine. “Are you better now?”

“Yes.” He was lying on his back. His ankles were crossed. His hands were folded behind his head. His great wang lay across his thigh like a salami. It slumbered now.

“I love you so much,” said Francine. She corrected herself. “I know I promised not to say that, but that’s a promise I can’t help breaking all the time.” The thing was: Dwayne had made a pact with her that neither one of them was ever to mention love. Since Dwayne’s wife had eaten Dr,no, Dwayne never wanted to hear about love ever again. The subject was too painful.

Dwayne snuffled. It was customary for him to communicate by means of snuffles after sexual intercourse. The snuffles all had meanings which were bland: “That’s all right . . . forget it . . . who could blame you?” And so on.

“On Judgment Day,” said Francine, “when they ask me what bad things I did down here, I’m going to have to tell them, ‘Well—there was a promise I made to a man I loved, and I broke it all the time. I promised him never to say I loved him.’”

This generous, voluptuous woman, who had only ninety-six dollars and eleven cents a week in take-home pay, had lost her husband, Robert Pefko, in a war in Viet Nam. He was a career officer in the Army. He had a penis six and one-half inches long and one and seven-eighths inches in diameter.

He was a graduate of West Point, a military academy which turned young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war.

Francine followed Robert from West Point to Parachute School at Fort Bragg, and then to South Korea, where Robert managed a Post Exchange, which was a department store for soldiers, and then to the University of Pennsylvania, where Robert took a Master’s Degree in Anthropology, at Army expense, and then back to West Point, where Robert was an Assistant Professor of Social Sciences for three years.

After that, Francine followed Robert to Midland City, where Robert oversaw the manufacture of a new sort of booby trap. A booby trap was an easily hidden explosive device, which blew up when it was accidentally twiddled in some way. One of the virtues of the new type of booby trap was that it could not be smelled by dogs. Various armies at that time were training dogs to sniff out booby traps.

When Robert and Francine were in Midland City, there weren’t any other military people around, so they made their first civilian friends. And Francine took a job with Dwayne Hoover, in order to augment her husband’s salary and fill her days.

But then Robert was sent to Viet Nam.

Shortly after that, Dwayne’s wife ate Dr,no and Robert was shipped home in a plastic body bag.

“I pity men,” said Francine, there in the Quality Motor Court. She was sincere. “I wouldn’t want to be a man—they take such chances, they work so hard.” They were on the second floor of the motel. Their sliding glass doors gave them a view of an iron railing and a concrete terrace outside—and then Route 103, and then the wall and the rooftops of the Adult Correctional Institution beyond that.

“I don’t wonder you’re tired and nervous,” Francine went on. “If I was a man, I’d be tired and nervous, too. I guess God made women so men could relax and be treated like little babies from time to time.” She was more than satisfied with this arrangement.

Dwayne snuffled. The air was rich with the smell of raspberries, which was the perfume in the disinfectant and roach-killer the motel used.

Francine mused about the prison, where the guards were all white and most of the prisoners were black. “Is it true,” she said, “that nobody ever escaped from there?”

“It’s true,” said Dwayne.

“When was the last time they used the electric chair?” said Francine. She was asking about a device in the basement of the prison, which looked like this: