Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions

The purpose of it was to kill people by jazzing them with more electricity than their bodies could stand. Dwayne Hoover had seen it twice—once during a tour of the prison by members of the Chamber of Commerce years ago, and then again when it was actually used on a black human being he knew.

Dwayne tried to remember when the last execution took place at Shepherdstown. Executions had become unpopular. There were signs that they might become popular again. Dwayne and Francine tried to remember the most recent electrocution anywhere in the country which had stuck in their minds.

They remembered the double execution of a man and wife for treason. The couple had supposedly given secrets about how to make a hydrogen bomb to another country.

They remembered the double execution of a man and woman who were lovers. The man was good-looking and sexy, and he used to seduce ugly old women who had money, and then he and the woman he really loved would kill the women for their money. The woman he really loved was young, but she certainly wasn’t pretty in the conventional sense. She weighed two hundred and forty pounds.

Francine wondered out loud why a thin, good-looking young man would love a woman that heavy.

“It takes all kinds,” said Dwayne.

“You know what I keep thinking?” said Francine.

Dwayne snuffled.

“This would be a very good location for a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise.”

Dwayne’s relaxed body contracted as though each muscle in it had been stung by a drop of lemon juice.

Here was the problem: Dwayne wanted Francine to love him for his body and soul, not for what his money could buy. He thought Francine was hinting that he should buy her a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, which was a scheme for selling fried chicken.

A chicken was a flightless bird which looked like this:

The idea was to kill it and pull out all its feathers, and cut off its head and feet and scoop out its internal organs—and then chop it into pieces and fry the pieces, and put the pieces in a waxed paper bucket with a lid on it, so it looked like this:

Francine, who had been so proud of her capacity to make Dwayne relax, was now ashamed to have made him tighten up again. He was as rigid as an ironing board. “Oh my God—” she said, “what’s the matter now?”

“If you’re going to ask me for presents,” said Dwayne, “just do me a favor—and don’t hint around right after we’ve made love. Let’s keep love-making and presents separate. O.K.?”

“I don’t even know what you think I asked for,” said Francine.

Dwayne mimicked her cruelly in a falsetto voice: “‘I don’t even know what you think I asked you for,’ “ he said. He looked about as pleasant and relaxed as a coiled rattlesnake now. It was his bad chemicals, of course, which were compelling him to look like that. A real rattlesnake looked like this:

The Creator of the Universe had put a rattle on its tail. The Creator had also given it front teeth which were hypodermic syringes filled with deadly poison.

Sometimes I wonder about the Creator of the Universe.

Another animal invented by the Creator of the Universe was a Mexican beetle which could make a blank-cartridge gun out of its rear end. It could detonate its own farts and knock over other bugs with shock waves.

Word of Honor—I read about it in an article on strange animals in Diners’ Club Magazine.

So Francine got off the bed in order not to share it with the seeming rattlesnake. She was aghast. All she could say over and over again was, “You’re my man. You’re my man .” This meant that she was willing to agree about anything with Dwayne, to do anything for him, no matter how difficult or disgusting, to think up nice things to do for him that he didn’t even notice, to die for him, if necessary, and so on.

She honestly tried to live that way. She couldn’t imagine anything better to do. So she fell apart when Dwayne persisted in his nastiness. He told her that every woman was a whore, and every whore had her price, and Francine’s price was what a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise would cost, which would be well over one hundred thousand dollars by the time adequate parking and exterior lighting and all that was taken into consideration, and so on.

Francine replied in blubbering gibberish that she had never wanted the franchise for herself, that she had wanted it for Dwayne, that everything she wanted was for Dwayne. Some of the words came through. “I thought of all the people who come out here to visit their relatives in prison, and I realized how most of them were black, and I thought how much black people liked fried chicken,” she said.

“So you want me to open a Nigger joint?” said Dwayne. And so on. So Francine now had the distinction of being the second close associate of Dwayne’s who discovered how vile he could be.

“Harry LeSabre was right,” said Francine. She was backed up against the cement block wall of the motel room now, with her fingers spread over her mouth. Harry LeSabre, of course, was Dwayne’s transvestite sales manager. “He said you’d changed,” said Francine. She made a cage of fingers around her mouth. “Oh, God, Dwayne—” she said, “you’ve changed, you’ve changed.”

“Maybe it was time!” said Dwayne. “I never felt better in my life!” And so on.

Harry LeSabre was at that moment crying, too. He was at home—in bed. He had a purple velvet sheet over his head. He was well-to-do. He had invested in the stock market very intelligently and luckily over the years. He had bought one hundred shares of Xerox, for instance, for eight dollars a share. With the passage of time, his shares had become one hundred times as valuable, simply lying in the total darkness and silence of a safe-deposit box.

There was a lot of money magic like that going on. It was almost as though some blue fairy were flitting about that part of the dying planet, waving her magic wand over certain deeds and bonds and stock certificates.

Harry’s wife, Grace, was stretched out on a chaise longue at some distance from the bed. She was smoking a small cigar in a long holder made from the legbone of a stork. A stork was a large European bird, about half the size of a Bermuda Ern. Children who wanted to know where babies came from were sometimes told that they were brought by storks. People who told their children such a thing felt that their children were too young to think intelligently about wide-open beavers and all that.

And there were actually pictures of storks delivering babies on birth announcements and in cartoons and so on, for children to see. A typical one might look like this:

Dwayne Hoover and Harry LeSabre saw pictures like that when they were very little boys. They believed them, too.

Grace LeSabre expressed her contempt for the good opinion of Dwayne Hoover, which her husband felt he had lost. “Fuck Dwayne Hoover,” she said. “Fuck Midland City. Let’s sell the God damn Xerox stock and buy a condominium on Maui.” Maui was one of the Hawaiian Islands. It was widely believed to be a paradise.