Breakfast of Champions Page 0,17

Par-Three Golf Course, and seventeen hundred shares of common stock in Barrytron, Limited, a local electronics firm. He owned dozens of vacant lots. He was on the Board of Directors of the Midland County National Bank.

But now Midland City looked unfamiliar and frightening to Dwayne. “Where am I?” he said.

He even forgot that his wife Celia had committed suicide, for instance, by eating Drāno—a mixture of sodium hydroxide and aluminum flakes, which was meant to clear drains. Celia became a small volcano, since she was composed of the same sorts of substances which commonly clogged drains.

Dwayne even forgot that his only child, a son, had grown up to be a notorious homosexual. His name was George, but everybody called him “Bunny.” He played piano in the cocktail lounge of the new Holiday Inn.

“Where am I?” said Dwayne.

7

KILGORE TROUT took a leak in the men’s room of the New York City movie house. There was a sign on the wall next to the roller towel. It advertised a massage parlor called The Sultan’s Harem. Massage parlors were something new and exciting in New York. Men could go in there and photograph naked women, or they could paint the women’s naked bodies with water-soluble paints. Men could be rubbed all over by a woman until their penises squirted jism into Turkish towels.

“It’s a full life and a merry one,” said Kilgore Trout.

There was a message written in pencil on the tiles by the roller towel. This was it:

Trout plundered his pockets for a pen or pencil. He had an answer to the question. But he had nothing to write with, not even a burnt match. So he left the question unanswered, but here is what he would have written, if he had found anything to write with:

To be

the eyes

and ears

and conscience

of the Creator of the Universe,

you fool.

When Trout headed back for his seat in the theater, he played at being the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe. He sent messages by telepathy to the Creator, wherever He was. He reported that the men’s room had been clean as a whistle. “The carpeting under my feet,” he signaled from the lobby, “is springy and new. I think it must be some miracle fiber. It’s blue. You know what I mean by blue?” And so on.

When he got to the auditorium itself, the house lights were on. Nobody was there but the manager, who was also the ticket-taker and the bouncer and the janitor. He was sweeping filth from between the seats. He was a middle-aged white man. “No more fun tonight, grandfather,” he said to Trout. “Time to go home.”

Trout didn’t protest. Neither did he leave immediately. He examined a green enameled steel box in the back of the auditorium. It contained the projector and the sound system and the films. There was a wire that led from the box to a plug in the wall. There was a hole in the front of the box. That was how the pictures got out. On the side of the box was a simple switch. It looked like this:

It intrigued Trout to know that he had only to flick the switch, and the people would start fucking and sucking again.

“Good night, Grandfather,” said the manager pointedly.

Trout took his leave of the machine reluctantly. He said this about it to the manager: “It fills such a need, this machine, and it’s so easy to operate.”

• • •

As Trout departed, he sent this telepathic message to the Creator of the Universe, serving as His eyes and ears and conscience: “Am headed for Forty-second Street now. How much do you already know about Forty-second Street?”

8

TROUT WANDERED out onto the sidewalk of Forty-second Street. It was a dangerous place to be. The whole city was dangerous—because of chemicals and the uneven distribution of wealth and so on. A lot of people were like Dwayne: they created chemicals in their own bodies which were bad for their heads. But there were thousands upon thousands of other people in the city who bought bad chemicals and ate them or sniffed them—or injected them into their veins with devices which looked like this:

Sometimes they even stuffed bad chemicals up their assholes. Their assholes looked like this:

• • •

People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn’t own doodley-squat, so they couldn’t