Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions

“Listen,” said Grace, “we’re the only white people in Midland City with any kind of sex life, as nearly as I can tell. You’re not a freak. Dwayne Hoover’s the freak! How many orgasms do you think he has a month?”

“I don’t know,” said Harry from his humid tent.

Dwayne’s monthly orgasm rate on the average over the past ten years, which included the last years of his marriage, was two and one- quarter. Grace’s guess was close. “One point five,” she said. Her own monthly average over the same period was eighty-seven. Her husband’s average was thirty-six. He had been slowing up in recent years, which was one of many reasons he had for feeling panicky.

Grace now spoke loudly and scornfully about Dwayne’s marriage. “He was so scared of sex,” she said, “he married a woman who had never heard of the subject, who was guaranteed to destroy herself, if she ever did hear about it.” And so on. “Which she finally did,” she said.

“Can the reindeer hear you?” said Harry.

“Fuck the reindeer,” said Grace. Then she added, “No, the reindeer cannot hear.” Reindeer was their code word for the black maid, who was far away in the kitchen at the time. It was their code word for black people in general. It allowed them to speak of the black problem in the city, which was a big one, without giving offense to any black person who might overhear.

“The reindeer’s asleep—or reading the Black Panther Digest," she said.

The reindeer problem was essentially this: Nobody white had much use for black people anymore—except for the gangsters who sold the black people used cars and dope and furniture. Still, the reindeer went on reproducing. There were these useless, big black animals everywhere, and a lot of them had very bad dispositions. They were given small amounts of money every month, so they wouldn’t have to steal. There was talk of giving them very cheap dope, too—to keep them listless and cheerful, and uninterested in reproduction.

The Midland City Police Department, and the Midland County Sheriff’s Department, were composed mainly of white men. They had racks and racks of sub-machine guns and twelve-gauge automatic shotguns for an open season on reindeer, which was bound to come.

“Listen—I’m serious,” said Grace to Harry. “This is the asshole of the Universe. Let’s split to a condominium on Maui and live for a change.”

So they did.

Dwayne’s bad chemicals meanwhile changed his manner toward Francine from nastiness to pitiful dependency. He apologized to her for ever thinking that she wanted a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. He gave her full credit for unflagging unselfishness. He begged her to just hold him for a while, which she did.

“I’m so confused,” he said.

“We all are,” she said. She cradled his head against her breasts.

“I’ve got to talk to somebody,” said Dwayne.

“You can talk to Mommy, if you want,” said Francine. She meant that she was Mommy.

“Tell me what life is all about,” Dwayne begged her fragrant bosom. “Only God knows that,” said Francine.

Dwayne was silent for a while. And then he told her haltingly about a trip he had made to the headquarters of the Pontiac Division of General Motors at Pontiac, Michigan, only three months after his wife ate Dr,no.

“We were given a tour of all the research facilities,” he said. The thing that impressed him most, he said, was a series of laboratories and out-of-doors test areas where various parts of automobiles and even entire automobiles were destroyed. Pontiac scientists set upholstery on fire, threw gravel at windshields, snapped crankshafts and driveshafts, staged head-on collisions, tore gearshift levers out by the roots, ran engines at high speeds with almost no lubrication, opened and closed glove compartment doors a hundred times a minute for days, cooled dashboard clocks to within a few degrees of absolute zero, and so on.

“Everything you’re not supposed to do to a car, they did to a car,” Dwayne said to Francine. “And I’ll never forget the sign on the front door of the building where all that torture went on.” Here was the sign Dwayne described to Francine:

“I saw that sign,” said Dwayne, “and I couldn’t help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for—to find out how much a man could take without breaking.”

“I’ve lost my way,” said Dwayne. “I need somebody to take me by the hand and lead me out of the woods.”

“You’re tired,” she said. “Why wouldn’t you be tired? You work so hard. I feel sorry for men, they work so hard. You want to sleep for a while?”

“I can’t sleep,” said Dwayne, “until I get some answers.”

“You want to go to a doctor?” said Francine.

“I don’t want to hear the kinds of things doctors say,” said Dwayne. “I want to talk to somebody brand new. Francine,” he said, and he dug his fingers into her soft arm, “I want to hear new things from new people. I’ve heard everything anybody in Midland City ever said, ever will say. It’s got to be somebody new.”

“Like who?” said Francine.

“I don’t know,” said Dwayne. “Somebody from Mars, maybe.”

“We could go to some other city,” said Francine.

“They’re all like here. They’re all the same,” said Dwayne.

Francine had an idea. “What about all these painters and writers and composers coming to town?” she said. “You never talked to anybody like that before. Maybe. you should talk to one of them. They don’t think like other people.”

“I’ve tried everything else,” said Dwayne. He brightened. He nodded. “You’re right! The Festival could give me a brand new viewpoint on life!” he said.

“That’s what it’s for,” said Francine. “Use it!”

“I will," said Dwayne. This was a bad mistake.

Kilgore Trout, hitchhiking westward, ever westward, had meanwhile become a passenger in a Ford Galaxie. The man at the controls of the Galaxie was a traveling salesman for a device which engulfed the rear ends of trucks at loading docks. It was a telescoping tunnel of rubberized canvas, and it looked like this in action:

The idea of the gadget was to allow people in a building to load or unload trucks without losing cold air in the summertime or hot air in the wintertime to the out-of-doors.

The man in control of the Galaxie also sold large spools for wire and cable and rope. He also sold fire extinguishers. He was a manufacturer’s representative, he explained. He was his own boss, in that he represented products whose manufacturers couldn’t afford salesmen of their own.

“I make my own hours, and I pick the products I sell. The products don’t sell me,” he said. His name was Andy Lieber. He was thirty-two. He was white. He was a good deal overweight like so many people in the country. He was obviously a happy man. He drove like a maniac. The Galaxie was going ninety-two miles an hour now. “I’m one of the few remaining free men in America,” he said.

He had a penis one inch in diameter and seven and a half inches long. During the past year, he had averaged twenty-two orgasms per month. This was far above the national average. His income and the value of his life insurance policies at maturity were also far above average.

Trout wrote a novel one time which he called How You Doin’? and it was about national averages for this and that. An advertising agency on another planet had a successful campaign for the local equivalent of Earthling peanut butter. The eye-catching part of each ad was the statement of some sort of average—the average number of children, the average size of the male sex organ on that particular planet— which was two inches long, with an inside diameter of three inches and an outside diameter of four and a quarter inches—and so on. The ads invited the readers to discover whether they were superior or inferior to the majority, in this respect or that one—whatever the respect was for that particular ad.