Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions

Kilgore Trout had my father’s shins. They were a present from me. I gave him my father’s feet, too, which were long and narrow and sensitive. They were azure. They were artistic feet.

Trout lowered his artistic feet into the concrete trough containing Sugar Creek. They were coated at once with a clear plastic substance from the surface of the creek. When, in some surprise, Trout lifted one coated foot from the water, the plastic substance dried in air instantly, sheathed his foot in a thin, skin-tight bootie resembling mother-of- pearl. He repeated the process with his other foot.

The substance was coming from the Barrytron plant. The company was manufacturing a new anti-personnel bomb for the Air Force. The bomb scattered plastic pellets instead of steel pellets, because the plastic pellets were cheaper. They were also impossible to locate in the bodies of wounded enemies by means of x-ray machines.

Barrytron had no idea it was dumping this waste into Sugar Creek. They had hired the Maritimo Brothers Construction Company, which was gangster-controlled, to build a system which would get rid of the waste. They knew the company was gangster-controlled. Everybody

knew that. But the Maritimo Brothers were usually the best builders in town. They had built Dwayne Hoover’s house, for instance, which was a solid house.

But every so often they would do something amazingly criminal. The Barrytron disposal system was a case in point. It was expensive, and it appeared to be complicated and busy. Actually, though, it was old junk hooked up every which way, concealing a straight run of stolen sewer pipe running directly from Barrytron to Sugar Creek.

Barrytron would be absolutely sick when it learned what a polluter it had become. Throughout its history, it had attempted to be a perfect model of corporate good citizenship, no matter what it cost.

Trout now crossed Sugar Creek on my father’s legs and feet, and those appendages became more nacreous with every wading stride. He carried his parcels and his shoes and socks on his head, although the water scarcely reached his kneecaps.

He knew how ridiculous he looked. He expected to be received abominably, dreamed of embarrassing the Festival to death. He had come all this distance for an orgy of masochism. He wanted to be treated like a cockroach.

His situation, insofar as he was a machine, was complex, tragic, and laughable. But the sacred part of him, his awareness, remained an unwavering band of light.

And this book is being written by a meat machine in cooperation with a machine made of metal and plastic. The plastic, incidentally, is a close relative of the gunk in Sugar Creek. And at the core of the writing meat machine is something sacred, which is an unwavering band of light.

At the core of each person who reads this book is a band of unwavering light.

My doorbell has just rung in my New York apartment. And I know what I will find when I open my front door: an unwavering band of light.

God bless Rabo Karabekian!

Listen: Kilgore Trout climbed out of the trough and onto the asphalt desert which was the parking lot. It was his plan to enter the lobby of the Inn on wet bare feet, to leave footprints on the carpet— like this:

It was Trout’s fantasy that somebody would be outraged by the footprints. This would give him the opportunity to reply grandly, “What is it that offends you so? I am simply using man’s first printing press. You are reading a bold and universal headline which says, ‘I am here, I am here, I am here.’”

But Trout was no walking printing press. His feet left no marks on the carpet, because they were sheathed in plastic and the plastic was dry. Here was the structure of the plastic molecule:

The molecule went on and on and on, repeating itself forever to form a sheet both tough and poreless.

This molecule was the monster Dwayne’s twin stepbrothers, Lyle and Kyle, had attacked with their automatic shotguns. This was the stuff which wasS fucking up Sacred Miracle Cave.

The man who told me how to diagram a segment of a molecule of plastic was Professor Walter H. Stockmayer of Dartmouth College. He is a distinguished physical chemist, and an amusing and useful friend of mine. I did not make him up. I would like to be Professor Walter H. Stockmayer. He is a brilliant pianist. He skis like a dream.

And when he sketched a plausible molecule, he indicated points where it would go on and on just as I have indicated them—with an abbreviation which means sameness without end.

The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be that same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one:

And it is in order to acknowledge the continuity of this polymer that I begin so many sentences with “And” and “So,” and end so many paragraphs with “. . . and so on.”

And so on.

“It’s all like an ocean!” cried Dostoevski. I say it’s all like cellophane.

So Trout entered the lobby as an inkless printing press, but he was still the most grotesque human being who had ever come in there.

All around him were what other people called mirrors, which he called leaks. The entire wall which separated the lobby from the cocktail lounge was a leak ten feet high and thirty-feet long. There was another leak on the cigarette machine and yet another on the candy machine. And when Trout looked through them to see what was going on in the other universe, he saw a red-eyed, filthy old creature who was barefoot, who had his pants rolled up to his knees.

As it happened, the only other person in the lobby at the time was the beautiful young desk clerk, Milo Maritimo. Milo’s clothing and skin and eyes were all the colors that olives can be. He was a graduate of the

Cornell Hotel School. He was the homosexual grandson of Guillermo “Little Willie” Maritimo, a bodyguard of the notorious Chicago gangster, Al Capone.

Trout presented himself to this harmless man, stood before his desk with his bare feet far apart and his arms outspread. “The Abominable Snowman has arrived,” he said to Milo. “If I’m not as clean as most abominable snowmen are, it is because I was kidnapped as a child from the slopes of Mount Everest, and taken as a slave to a bordello in Rio de Janeiro, where I have been cleaning the unspeakably filthy toilets for the past fifty years. A visitor to our whipping room there screamed in a transport of agony and ecstasy that there was to be an arts festival in Midland City. I escaped down a rope of sheets taken from a reeking hamper. I have come to Midland City to have myself acknowledged, before I die, as the great artist I believe myself to be.”

Milo Maritimo greeted Trout with luminous adoration. “Mr. Trout,” he said in rapture, “I’d know you anywhere. Welcome to Midland City. We need you so!”

“How do you know who I am?” said Kilgore Trout. Nobody had ever known who he was before.

“You had to be you,” said Milo.

Trout was deflated— neutralized. He dropped his arms, became child-like now. “Nobody ever knew who I was before,” he said.

“I know,” said Milo. “We have discovered you, and we hope you will discover us. No longer will Midland City be known merely as the home of Mary Alice Miller, the Women’s Two Hundred Meter Breast Stroke Champion of the World. It will also be the city which first acknowledged the greatness of Kilgore Trout.”