Breakfast of Champions Page 0,36

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.