Breakfast of Champions

Chapter 22

And I sat there in the cocktail lounge of the new Holiday Inn, watching Dwayne Hoover stare into the bosom of the shirt of Kilgore Trout. I was wearing a bracelet which looked like this:

WO1 stood for Warrant Officer First Class, which was the rank of Jon Sparks.

The bracelet had cost me two dollars and a half. It was a way of expressing my pity for the hundreds of Americans who had been taken prisoner during the war in Viet Nam. Such bracelets were becoming popular. Each one bore the name of an actual prisoner of war, his rank, and the date of his capture.

Wearers of the bracelets weren’t supposed to take them off until the prisoners came home or were reported dead or missing.

I wondered how I might fit my bracelet into my story, and hit on the good idea of dropping it somewhere for Wayne Hoobler to find.

Wayne would assume that it belonged to a woman who loved somebody named WO1 Jon Sparks, and that the woman and WO1 had become engaged or married or something important on March 19th, 1971.

Wayne would mouth the unusual first name tentatively. “Woo-ee?” he would say. “Woe-ee? Woe-eye? Woy?”

There in the cocktail lounge, I gave Dwayne Hoover credit for having taken a course in speed-reading at night at the Young Men’s Christian Association. This would enable him to read Kilgore Trout’s novel in minutes instead of hours.

There in the cocktail lounge, I took a white pill which a doctor said I could take in moderation, two a day, in order not to feel blue.

There in the cocktail lounge, the pill and the alcohol gave me a terrific sense of urgency about explaining all the things I hadn’t explained yet, and then hurtling on with my tale.

Let’s see: I have already explained Dwayne’s uncharacteristic ability to read so fast. Kilgore Trout probably couldn’t have made his trip from New York City in the time I allotted, but it’s too late to bugger around with that. Let it stand, let it stand!

Let’s see, let’s see. Oh, yes—I have to explain a jacket Trout will see at the hospital. It will look like this from the back:

Here is the explanation: There used to be only one Nigger high school in Midland City, and it was an all-Nigger high school still. It was named after Crispus Attucks, a black man who was shot by British troops in Boston in 1770. There was an oil painting of this event in the main corridor of the school. Several white people were stopping bullets, too. Crispus Attucks himself had a hole in his forehead which looked like the front door of a birdhouse.

But the black people didn’t call the school Crispus Attucks High School anymore. They called it Innocent Bystander High.

And when another Nigger high school was built after the Second World War, it was named after George Washington Carver, a black man who was born into slavery, but who became a famous chemist anyway. He discovered many remarkable new uses for peanuts.

But the black people wouldn’t call that school by its proper name, either. On the day it opened, there were already young black people wearing jackets which looked like this from the back:

I have to explain, too, see, why so many black people in Midland City were able to imitate birds from various parts of what used to be the British Empire. The thing was, see, that Fred T. Barry and his mother and father were almost the only people in Midland City who could afford to hire Niggers to do the Nigger work during the Great Depression. They took over the old Keedsler Mansion, where Beatrice Keedsler, the novelist, had been born. They had as many as twenty servants working there, all at one time.

Fred’s father got so much money during the prosperity of the twenties as a bootlegger and as a swindler in stocks and bonds. He kept all his money in cash, which turned out to be a bright thing to do, since so many banks failed during the Great Depression. Also: Fred’s father was an agent for Chicago gangsters who wanted to buy legitimate businesses for their children and grandchildren. Through Fred’s father, those gangsters bought almost every desirable property in Midland City for anything from a tenth to a hundredth of what it was really worth.

And before Fred’s mother and father came to the United States after the First World War, they were music hall entertainers in England. Fred’s father played the musical saw. His mother imitated birds from various parts of what was still the British Empire.

She went on imitating them for her own amusement, well into the Great Depression. “The Bulbul of Malaysia,” she would say, for instance, and then she would imitate that bird.

“The Morepark Owl of New Zealand,” she would say, and then she would imitate that bird.

And all the black people who worked for her thought her act was the funniest thing they had ever seen, though they never laughed out loud when she did it. And, in order to double up their friends and relatives with laughter, they, too, learned how to imitate the birds.

The craze spread. Black people who had never been near the Keedsler mansion could imitate the Lyre Bird and the Willy Wagtail of Australia, the Golden Oriole of India, the Nightingale and the Chaffinch and the Wren and the Chiffchaff of England itself.

They could even imitate the happy screech of the extinct companion of Kilgore Trout’s island childhood, which was the Bermuda Ern.

When Kilgore Trout hit town, the black people could still imitate those birds, and say word for word what Fred’s mother had said before each imitation. If one of them imitated a Nightingale, for instance, he or she would say this first: “What adds peculiar beauty to the call of the Nightingale, much beloved by poets, is the fact that it will only sing by moonlight.”

And so on.

There in the cocktail lounge, Dwayne Hoover’s bad chemicals suddenly decided that it was time for Dwayne to demand from Kilgore Trout the secrets of life.

“Give me the message,” cried Dwayne. He tottered up from his own banquette, crashed down again next to Trout, throwing off heat like a steam radiator. “The message, please.”

And here Dwayne did something extraordinarily unnatural. He did it because I wanted him to. It was something I had ached to have a character do for years and years. Dwayne did to Trout what the Duchess did to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He rested his chin on poor Trout’s shoulder, dug in with his chin.

“The message?” he said, digging in his chin, digging in his chin.

Trout made no reply. He had hoped to get through what little remained of his life without ever having to touch another human being again. Dwayne’s chin on his shoulder was as shattering as buggery to Trout.

“Is this it? Is this it?” said Dwayne, snatching up Trout’s novel, Now It Can Be Told.

“Yes—that’s it,” croaked Trout. To his tremendous relief, Dwayne removed his chin from his shoulder.

Dwayne now began to read hungrily, as though starved for print. And the speed-reading course he had taken at the Young Men’s Christian Association allowed him to make a perfect pig of himself with pages and words.

“Dear Sir, poor sir, brave sir:” he read, “You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe. You are the only creature in the entire Universe who has free will. You are the only one who has to figure out what to do next—and why. Everybody else is a robot, a machine.

“Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines.

“You are pooped and demoralized,” read Dwayne. “Why wouldn’t you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn’t meant to be reasonable.”