Kurt Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions

He became energetic after that. “Bill, Bill—” he said, “listen, I’m leaving the cage, but I’m coming back. I’m going out there to show them what nobody has ever seen at an arts festival before: a representative of all the thousands of artists who devoted their entire lives to a search for truth and beauty—and didn’t find doodley-squat!”

Trout accepted the invitation after all. Two days before the Festival was to begin, he delivered Bill into the care of his landlady upstairs, and he hitchhiked to New York City—with five hundred dollars pinned to the inside of his underpants. The rest of the money he had put in a bank.

He went to New York first—because he hoped to find some of his books in pornography stores there. He had no copies at home. He despised them, but now he wanted to read out loud from them in Midland City—as a demonstration of a tragedy which was ludicrous as well.

He planned to tell the people out there what he hoped to have in the way of a tombstone.

This was it:

Dwayne was meanwhile getting crazier all the time. He saw eleven moons in the sky over the new Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts one night. The next morning, he saw a huge duck directing traffic at the intersection of Arsenal Avenue and Old County Road. He didn’t tell anybody what he saw. He maintained secrecy.

And the bad chemicals in his head were fed up with secrecy. They were no longer content with making him feel and see queer things. They wanted him to do queer things, also, and make a lot of noise.

They wanted Dwayne Hoover to be proud of his disease.

People said later that they were furious with themselves for not noticing the danger signals in Dwayne’s behavior, for ignoring his obvious cries for help. After Dwayne ran amok, the local paper ran a deeply sympathetic editorial about it, begging people to watch each other for danger signals. Here was its title:

A CRY FOR HELP

But Dwayne wasn’t all that weird before he met Kilgore Trout. His behavior in public kept him well within the limits of acceptable acts and beliefs and conversations in Midland City. The person closest to him, Francine Pefko, his white secretary and mistress, said that Dwayne seemed to be getting happier and happier all the time during the month before Dwayne went public as a maniac.

“I kept thinking,” she told a newspaper reporter from her hospital bed, “‘He is finally getting over his wife’s suicide.’”

Francine worked at Dwayne’s principal place of business, which was Dwayne Hoover’s Exit Eleven Pontiac Village, just off the Interstate, next door to the new Holiday Inn.

Here is what made Francine think he was becoming happier: Dwayne began to sing songs which had been popular in his youth, such as “The Old Lamp Lighter,” and “Tippy-Tippy-Tin,” and “Hold Tight,” and “Blue Moon,” and so on. Dwayne had never sung before. Now he did it loudly as he sat at his desk, when he took a customer for a ride in a demonstrator, when he watched a mechanic service a car. One day he sang loudly as he crossed the lobby of the new Holiday Inn, smiling and gesturing at people as though he had been hired to sing for their pleasure. But nobody thought that was necessarily a hint of derangement, either—especially since Dwayne owned a piece of the Inn.

A black bus boy and a black waiter discussed this singing. “Listen at him sing,” said the bus boy.

“If I owned what he owns, I’d sing, too,” the waiter replied.

The only person who said out loud that Dwayne was going crazy was Dwayne’s white sales manager at the Pontiac agency, who was Harry LeSabre. A full week before Dwayne went off his rocker, Harry said to Francine Pefko, “Something has come over Dwayne. He used to be so charming. I don’t find him so charming anymore.”

Harry knew Dwayne better than did any other man. He had been with Dwayne for twenty years. He came to work for him when the agency was right on the edge of the Nigger part of town. A Nigger was a human being who was black.

“I know him the way a combat soldier knows his buddy,” said Harry. “We used to put our lives on the line every day, when the agency was down on Jefferson Street. We got held up on the average of fourteen times a year. And I tell you that the Dwayne of today is a Dwayne I never saw before.”

It was true about the holdups. That was how Dwayne bought a Pontiac agency so cheaply. White people were the only people with money enough to buy new automobiles, except for a few black criminals, who always wanted Cadillacs. And white people were scared to go anywhere on Jefferson Street anymore.

Here is where Dwayne got the money to buy the agency: He borrowed it from the Midland County National Bank. For collateral, he put up stock he owned in a company which was then called The Midland City Ordnance Company. It later became Barrytron, Limited. When Dwayne first got the stock, in the depths of the Great Depression, the company was called The Robo-Magic Corporation of America.

The name of the company kept changing through the years because the nature of its business changed so much. But its management hung on to the company’s original motto—for old time’s sake. The motto was this:

GOODBYE, BLUE MONDAY.

Listen:

Harry LeSabre said to Francine, “When a man has been in combat with another man, he gets so he can sense the slightest change in his buddy’s personality, and Dwayne has changed. You ask Vernon Garr.”

Vernon Garr was a white mechanic who was the only other employee who had been with Dwayne before Dwayne moved the agency out to the Interstate. As it happened, Vernon was having trouble at home.

His wife, Mary, was a schizophrenic, so Vernon hadn’t noticed whether Dwayne had changed or not. Vernon’s wife believed that Vernon was trying to turn her brains into plutonium.

Harry LeSabre was entitled to talk about combat. He had been in actual combat in a war. Dwayne hadn’t been in combat. He was a civilian employee of the United States Army Air Corps during the Second World War, though. One time he got to paint a message on a five-hundred-pound bomb which was going to be dropped on Hamburg, Germany. This was it:

“Harry,” said Francine, “everybody is entitled to a few bad days. Dwayne has fewer than anybody I know, so when he does have one like today, some people are hurt and surprised. They shouldn’t be. He’s human like anybody else.”

“But why should he single out me?" Harry wanted to know. He was right: Dwayne had singled him out for astonishing insults and abuse that day. Everybody else still found Dwayne nothing but charming.

Later on, of course, Dwayne would assault all sorts of people, even three strangers from Erie, Pennsylvania, who had never been to Midland City before. But Harry was an isolated victim now.

“Why me?" said Harry. This was a common question in Midland City. People were always asking that as they were loaded into ambulances after accidents of various kinds, or arrested for disorderly conduct, or burglarized, or socked in the nose and so on: “Why me?"

“Probably because he felt that you were man enough and friend enough to put up with him on one of his few bad days,” said Francine.

“How would you like it if he insulted your clothes?” said Harry. This is what Dwayne had done to him: insulted his clothes.