Breakfast of Champions

Chapter 15

Dwayne Hoover got through lunch all right that day. He remembered now about Hawaiian Week. The ukuleles and so on were no longer mysterious. The pavement between his automobile agency and the new Holiday Inn was no longer a trampoline.

He drove to lunch alone in an air-conditioned demonstrator, a blue Pontiac Le Mans with a cream interior, with his radio on. He heard several of his own radio commercials, which drove home the point: “You can always trust Dwayne.”

Though his mental health had improved remarkably since breakfast, a new symptom of illness made itself known. It was incipient echolalia. Dwayne found himself wanting to repeat out loud whatever had just been said.

So when the radio told him, “You can always trust Dwayne,” he echoed the last word. “Dwayne,” he said.

When the radio said there had been a tornado in Texas, Dwayne said this out loud: “Texas.”

Then he heard that husbands of women who had been raped during the war between India and Pakistan wouldn’t have anything to do with their wives anymore. The women, in the eyes of their husbands, had become unclean, said the radio.

“Unclean,” said Dwayne.

As for Wayne Hoobler, the black ex-convict whose only dream was to work for Dwayne Hoover: he had learned to play hide-and-seek with Dwayne’s employees. He did not wish to be ordered off the property for hanging around the used cars. So, when an employee came near,

Wayne would wander off to the garbage and trash area behind the Holiday Inn, and gravely study the remains of club sandwiches and empty packs of Salem cigarettes and so on in the cans back there, as though he were a health inspector or some such thing.

When the employee went away, Wayne would drift back to the used cars, keeping the boiled eggs of his eyes peeled for the real Dwayne Hoover.

The real Dwayne Hoover, of course, had in effect denied that he was Dwayne. So, when the real Dwayne came out at lunch time, Wayne, who had nobody to talk to but himself, said this to himself: “That ain’t Mr. Hoover. Sure look like Mr. Hoover, though. Maybe Mr. Hoover sick today.” And so on.

Dwayne had a hamburger and French fries and a Coke at his newest Burger Chef, which was out on Crestview Avenue, across the street from where the new John F. Kennedy High School was going up. John F. Kennedy had never been in Midland City, but he was a President of the United States who was shot to death. Presidents of the country were often shot to death. The assassins were confused by some of the same bad chemicals which troubled Dwayne.

Dwayne certainly wasn’t alone, as far as having bad chemicals inside of him was concerned. He had plenty of company throughout all history. In his own lifetime, for instance, the people in a country called Germany were so full of bad chemicals for a while that they actually built factories whose only purpose was to kill people by the millions. The people were delivered by railroad trains.

When the Germans were full of bad chemicals, their flag looked like this:

Here is what their flag looked like after they got well again:

After they got well again, they manufactured a cheap and durable automobile which became popular all over the world, especially among young people. It looked like this:

People called it “the beetle.” A real beetle looked like this:

The mechanical beetle was made by Germans. The real beetle was made by the Creator of the Universe.

Dwayne’s waitress at the Burger Chef was a seventeen-year-old white girl named’ Patty Keene. Her hair was yellow. Her eyes were blue.

She was very old for a mammal. Most mammals were senile or dead by the time they were seventeen. But Patty was a sort of mammal which developed very slowly, so the body she rode around in was only now mature.

She was a brand-new adult, who was working in order to pay off the tremendous doctors’ and hospital bills her father had run up in the process of dying of cancer of the colon and then cancer of the everything.

This was in a country where everybody was expected to pay his own bills for everything, and one of the most expensive things a person could do was get sick. Patty Keene’s father’s sickness cost ten times as much as all the trips to Hawaii which Dwayne was going to give away at the end of Hawaiian Week.

Dwayne appreciated Patty Keene’s brand-newness, even though he was not sexually attracted to women that young. She was like a new automobile, which hadn’t even had its radio turned on yet, and Dwayne was reminded of a ditty his father would sing sometimes when his father was drunk. It went like this:

Patty Keene was stupid on purpose, which was the case with most women in Midland City. The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they did not use them much for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies, and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get.

So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.

Patty knew who Dwayne was. Dwayne didn’t know who Patty was. Patty’s heart beat faster when she waited on him—because Dwayne could solve so many of her problems with the money and power he had. He could give her a fine house and new automobiles and nice clothes and a life of leisure, and he could pay all the medical bills—as easily as she had given him his hamburger and his French fries and his Coke.

Dwayne could do for her what the Fairy Godmother did for Cinderella, if he wanted to, and Patty had never been so close to such a magical person before. She was in the presence of the supernatural. And she knew enough about Midland City and herself to understand that she might never be this close to the supernatural ever again.

Patty Keene actually imagined Dwayne’s waving a magic wand at her troubles and dreams. It looked like this:

She spoke up bravely, to learn if supernatural assistance was possible in her case. She was willing to do without it, expected to do without it—to work hard all her life, to get not much in return, and to associate with other men and women who were poor and powerless, and in debt. She said this to Dwayne: “Excuse me for calling you by name, Mr. Hoover, but I can’t help knowing who you are, with your picture in all your ads and everything. Besides—everybody else who works here told me who you were. When you came in, they just buzzed and buzzed.”

“Buzzed,” said Dwayne. This was his echolalia again.

“I guess that isn’t the right word,” she said. She was used to apologizing for her use of language. She had been encouraged to do a lot of that in school. Most white people in Midland City were insecure when they spoke, so they kept their sentences short and their words simple, in order to keep embarrassing mistakes to a minimum.

Dwayne certainly did that. Patty certainly did that.

This was because their English teachers would wince and cover their ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: they were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if they couldn’t love or understand incomprehensible novels and poems and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe.

The black people would not put up with this. They went on talking English every which way. They refused to read books they couldn’t understand—on the grounds they couldn’t understand them. They would ask such impudent questions as, “Whuffo I want to read no Tale of Two Cities? Whuffo?”

Patty Keene flunked English during the semester when she had to read and appreciate Ivanhoe, which was about men in iron suits and the women who loved them. And she was put in a remedial reading class, where they made her read The Good Earth, which was about Chinamen.

It was during this same semester that she lost her virginity. She was raped by a white gas-conversion unit installer named Don Breedlove in the parking lot outside the Bannister Memorial Fieldhouse at the County Fairgrounds after the Regional High School Basketball Playoffs. She never reported it to the police. She never reported it to anybody, since her father was dying at the time.

There was enough trouble already.

The Bannister Memorial Fieldhouse was named in honor of George Hickman Bannister, a seventeen-year-old boy who was killed while playing high school football in 1924. George Hickman Bannister had the largest tombstone in Calvary Cemetery, a sixty-two-foot obelisk with a marble football on top.

The marble football looked like this:

Football was a war game. Two opposing teams fought over the ball while wearing armor made out of leather and cloth and plastic.

George Hickman Bannister was killed while trying to get a hold of the ball on Thanksgiving Day. Thanksgiving Day was a holiday when everybody in the country was expected to express gratitude to the Creator of the Universe, mainly for food.

George Hickman Bannister’s obelisk was paid for by public subscription, with the Chamber of Commerce matching every two dollars raised with a dollar of its own. It was for many years the tallest structure in Midland City. A city ordinance was passed which made it illegal to erect anything taller than that, and it was called The George Hickman Bannister Law.

The ordinance was junked later on to allow radio towers to go up.

The two largest monuments in town, until the new Mildred Barry Memorial Arts Center went up in Sugar Creek, were constructed supposedly so that George Hickman Bannister would never be forgotten. But nobody ever thought about him anymore by the time Dwayne Hoover met Kilgore Trout. There wasn’t much to think about him, actually, even at the time of his death, except that he was young.

And he didn’t have any relatives in town anymore. There weren’t any Bannisters in the phone book, except for The Bannister, which was a motion picture theater. Actually, there wouldn’t even be a Bannister Theater in there after the new phonebooks came out. The Bannister had been turned into a cut-rate furniture store.

George Hickman Bannister’s father and mother and sister, Lucy, moved away from town before either the tombstone or the fieldhouse was completed, and they couldn’t be located for the dedication ceremonies.

It was a very restless country, with people tearing around all the time. Every so often, somebody would stop to put up a monument.

There were monuments all over the country. But it was certainly unusual for somebody from the common people to have not one but two monuments in his honor, as was the case with George Hickman Bannister.

Technically, though, only the tombstone had been erected specifically for him. The fieldhouse would have gone up anyway. The money was appropriated for the fieldhouse two years before George Hickman Bannister was cut down in his prime. It didn’t cost anything extra to name it after him.

Calvary Cemetery, where George Hickman Bannister was at rest, was named in honor of a hill in Jerusalem, thousands of miles away. Many people believed that the son of the Creator of the Universe had been killed on that hill thousands of years ago.

Dwayne Hoover didn’t know whether to believe that or not. Neither did Patty Keene.

And they certainly weren’t worrying about it now. They had other fish to fry. Dwayne was wondering how long his attack of echolalia was likely to last, and Patty Keene had to find out if her brand-newness and prettiness and outgoing personality were worth a lot to a sweet, sort of sexy, middle-aged old Pontiac dealer like Dwayne.

“Anyway,” she said, “it certainly is an honor to have you visit us, and those aren’t the right words, either, but I hope you know what I mean.”

“Mean,” said Dwayne.

“Is the food all right?” she said.

“All right,” said Dwayne.

“It’s what everybody else gets,” she said. “We didn’t do anything special for you.”

“You,” said Dwayne.

It didn’t matter much what Dwayne said. It hadn’t mattered much for years. It didn’t matter much what most people in Midland City said out loud, except when they were talking about money or structures or travel or machinery—or other measurable things. Every person had a clearly defined part to play—as a black person, a female high school drop-out, a Pontiac dealer, a gynecologist, a gas-conversion burner installer. If a person stopped living up to expectations, because of bad chemicals or one thing or another, everybody went on imagining that the person was living up to expectations anyway.

That was the main reason the people in Midland City were so slow to detect insanity in their associates. Their imaginations insisted that nobody changed much from day to day. Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth.

When Dwayne left Patty Keene and his Burger Chef, when he got into his demonstrator and drove away, Patty Keene was persuaded that she could make him happy with her young body, with her bravery and cheerfulness. She wanted to cry about the lines in his face, and the fact that his wife had eaten Dr,no, and that his dog had to fight all the time because it couldn’t wag its tail, about the fact that his son was a homosexual. She knew all those things about Dwayne. Everybody knew those things about Dwayne.

She gazed at the tower of radio station WMCY, which Dwayne Hoover owned. It was the tallest structure in Midland City. It was eight times as tall as the tombstone of George Hickman Bannister. It had a red light on top of it—to keep airplanes away.

She thought about all the new and used cars Dwayne owned.

Earth scientists had just discovered something fascinating about the continent Patty Keene was standing on, incidentally. It was riding on a slab about forty miles thick, and the slab was drifting around on molten glurp. And all the other continents had slabs of their own. When one slab crashed into another one, mountains were made.

The mountains of West Virginia, for instance, were heaved up when a huge chunk of Africa crashed into North America. And the coal in the state was formed from forests which were buried by the crash.

Patty Keene hadn’t heard the big news yet. Neither had Dwayne. Neither had Kilgore Trout. I only found out about it day before yesterday. I was reading a magazine, and I also had the television on. A group of scientists was on television, saying that the theory of floating, crashing, grinding slabs was more than a theory. They could prove it was true now, and that Japan and San Francisco, for instance, were in hideous danger, because that was where some of the most violent crashing and grinding was going on.

They said, too, that ice ages would continue to occur. Mile-thick glaciers would, geologically speaking, continue to go down and up like window blinds.

Dwayne Hoover, incidentally, had an unusually large penis, and didn’t even know it. The few women he had had anything to do with weren’t sufficiently experienced to know whether he was average or not. The world average was five and seven-eighths inches long, and one and one-half inches in diameter when engorged with blood. Dwayne’s was seven inches long and two and one-eighth inches in diameter when engorged with blood.

Dwayne’s son Bunny had a penis that was exactly average.

Kilgore Trout had a penis seven inches long, but only one and one- quarter inches in diameter.

This was an inch:

Harry LeSabre, Dwayne’s sales manager, had a penis five inches long and two and one-eighth inches in diameter.

Cyprian Ukwende, the black physician from Nigeria, had a penis six and seven-eighths inches long and one and three-quarters inches in diameter.

Don Breedlove, the gas-conversion unit installer who raped Patty Keene, had a penis five and seven-eighths inches long and one and seven-eighths inches in diameter.

Patty Keene had thirty-four-inch hips, a twenty-six-inch waist, and a thirty-four-inch bosom.

Dwayne’s late wife had thirty-six-inch hips, a twenty-eight-inch waist, and a thirty-eight-inch bosom when he married her. She had thirty- nine-inch hips, a thirty-one-inch waist, and a thirty-eight-inch bosom when she ate Dr,no.

His mistress and secretary, Francine Pefko, had thirty-seven-inch hips, a thirty-inch waist, and a thirty-nine-inch bosom.

His stepmother at the time of her death had thirty-four-inch hips, a twenty-four-inch waist, and a thirty-three-inch bosom.

So Dwayne went from the Burger Chef to the construction site of the new high school. He was in no hurry to get back to his automobile agency, particularly since he had developed echolalia. Francine was perfectly capable of running the place herself, without any advice from Dwayne. He had trained her well.

So he kicked a little dirt down into the cellar hole. He spat down into it. He stepped into mud. It sucked off his right shoe. He dug the shoe out with his hands, and he wiped it. Then he leaned against an old apple tree while he put the shoe back on. This had all been farmland when Dwayne was a boy. There had been an apple orchard here.

Dwayne forgot all about Patty Keene, but she certainly hadn’t forgotten him. She would get up enough nerve that night to call him on the telephone, but Dwayne wouldn’t be home to answer. He would be in a padded cell in the County Hospital by then.

And Dwayne wandered over to admire a tremendous earth-moving machine which had cleared the site and dug the cellar hole. The machine was idle now, caked with mud. Dwayne asked a white workman how many horsepower drove the machine. All the workmen were white.

The workman said this: “I don’t know how many horsepower, but I know what we call it.”

“What do you call it?” said Dwayne, relieved to find his echolalia was subsiding.

“We call it The Hundred-Nigger Machine," said the workman. This had reference to a time when black men had done most of the heavy digging in Midland City.

The largest human penis in the United States was fourteen inches long and two and a half inches in diameter.

The largest human penis in the world was sixteen and seven-eighths inches long and two and one-quarter inches in diameter.

The blue whale, a sea mammal, had a penis ninety-six inches long and fourteen inches in diameter.

One time Dwayne Hoover got an advertisement through the mail for a penis-extender, made out of rubber. He could slip it over the end of his real penis, according to the ad, and thrill his wife or sweetheart with extra inches. They also wanted to sell him a lifelike rubber vagina for when he was lonesome.

Dwayne went back to work at about two in the afternoon, and he avoided everybody—because of his echolalia. He went into his inner office, and he ransacked his desk drawers for something to read or think about. He came across the brochure which offered him the penis-extender and the rubber vagina for lonesomeness. He had received it two months before. He still hadn’t thrown it away.

The brochure also offered him motion pictures such as the ones Kilgore Trout had seen in New York. There were still photographs taken from the movies, and these caused the sex excitation center in Dwayne’s brain to send nerve impulses down to an erection center in his spine.

The erection center caused the dorsal vein in his penis to tighten up, so blood could get in all right, but it couldn’t get out again. It also relaxed the tiny arteries in his penis, so they filled up the spongy tissue of which Dwayne’s penis was mainly composed, so that the penis got hard and stiff—like a plugged-up garden hose.

So Dwayne called Francine Pefko on the telephone, even though she was only eleven feet away. “Francine—?” he said.

“Yes?” she said.

Dwayne fought down his echolalia. “I am going to ask you to do something I have never asked you to do before. Promise me you’ll say yes.”

“I promise,” she said.

“I want you to walk out of here with me this very moment,” he said, “and come with me to the Quality Motor Court at Shepherdstown.”

Francine Pefko was willing to go to the Quality Motor Court with Dwayne. It was her duty to go, she thought—especially since Dwayne seemed so depressed and jangled. But she couldn’t simply walk away from her desk for the afternoon, since her desk was the nerve center of Dwayne Hoover’s Exit Eleven Pontiac Village.

“You ought to have some crazy young teen-ager, who can rush off whenever you want her to,” Francine told Dwayne.

“I don’t want a crazy teen-ager,” said Dwayne. “I want you.”

“Then you’re going to have to be patient,” said Francine. She went back to the Service Department, to beg Gloria Browning, the white cashier back there, to man her desk for a little while.

Gloria didn’t want to do it. She had had a hysterectomy only a month before, at the age of twenty-five—after a botched abortion at the Ramada Inn down in Green County, on Route 53, across from the entrance to Pioneer Village State Park.

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:

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.

“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.

The ad went on to say that superior and inferior people alike ate such and such brand of peanut butter. Except that it wasn’t really peanut butter on that planet. It was Shazzbutter.

And so on.