BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS

KURT VONNEGUT

eForeword

“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane” — so reads the epitaph for Kilgore Trout, who is one of several alter egos of the author Kurt Vonnegut in his explosively funny and ironic 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions. The world Vonnegut explores is not a healthy one — as the title suggests, it is the United States of America in the age of Vietnam, Nixon and the Silent Majority — but it is desperately trying to seem so. An obscure science fiction writer takes a wild road trip to the middle of the Midwest, where his fate becomes intertwined with that of a successful car dealer who is slowly going mad. Vonnegut takes this opportunity to question a number of assumptions, including the very nature of the novel he is writing. A tour de force of imagination and scathing insight, Breakfast of Champions is one of the most discussed and widely read American novels of the late 20th century.
The American novelist Kurt Vonnegut (b. 1922) occupies an unusual but enduring place in modern American fiction, that of the prolific, critically acclaimed writer whose work has also enjoyed enormous popularity and inspired a virtual cult following. Vonnegut’s first work appeared in the early 1950s, and few writers have captured the modern age as consistently and as imaginatively as he has. Often blending satire with science fiction, Vonnegut’s writing reflects an acute sense of the ironies in modern American life. Nowhere is his richly ambivalent feeling about the contemporary American scene more brilliantly realized than in Breakfast of Champions , published just after Vonnegut’s 50th birthday, ending a four-year hiatus that followed appearance of Slaughterhouse Five.
RosettaBooks is the leading publisher dedicated exclusively to electronic editions of great works of fiction and non-fiction that reflect our world. RosettaBooks is a committed e-publisher, maximizing the resources of the World Wide Web in opening a fresh dimension in the reading experience. In this electronic environment for reading, each RosettaBook will enhance the experience through The RosettaBooks Connection. This gateway instantly delivers to the reader the opportunity to learn more about the title, the author, the content and the context of each work, using the full resources of the Web.
Other Vonnegut titles available from RosettaBooks include Slaughterhouse Five, Cat’s Cradle, The Sirens of Titan and Player Piano.


In Memory of Phoebe Hurty, who comforted me in
Indianapolis—during the Great Depression.



When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.
–Job

Preface

The expression “Breakfast of Champions” is a registered trademark of General Mills, Inc., for use on a breakfast cereal product. The use of the identical expression as the title for this book is not intended to indicate an association with or sponsorship by General Mills, nor is it intended to disparage their fine products.
The person to whom this book is dedicated, Phoebe Hurty, is no longer among the living, as they say. She was an Indianapolis widow when I met her late in the Great Depression. I was sixteen or so. She was about forty.
She was rich, but she had gone to work every weekday of her adult life, so she went on doing that. She wrote a sane and funny advice-tothe-lovelorn column for the Indianapolis Times, a good paper which is now defunct.
Defunct.
She wrote ads for the William H. Block Company, a department store which still flourishes in a building my father designed. She wrote this ad for an end-of-the-summer sale on straw hats: “For prices like this, you can run them through your horse and put them on your roses.”
Phoebe Hurty hired me to write copy for ads about teenage clothes. I had to wear the clothes I praised. That was part of the job. And I became friends with her two sons, who were my age. I was over at their house all the time.
She would talk bawdily to me and her sons, and to our girlfriends when we brought them around. She was funny. She was liberating.
She taught us to be impolite in conversation not only about sexual matters, but about American history and famous heroes, about the distribution of wealth, about school, about everything.
I now make my living by being impolite. I am clumsy at it. I keep trying to imitate the impoliteness which was so graceful in Phoebe Hurty. I think now that grace was easier for her than it is for me because of the mood of the Great Depression. She believed what so many Americans believed then: that the nation would be happy and just and rational when prosperity came.
I never hear that word anymore: Prosperity. It used to be a synonym for Paradise. And Phoebe Hurty was able to believe that the impoliteness she recommended would give shape to an American paradise.
Now her sort of impoliteness is fashionable. But nobody believes anymore in a new American paradise. I sure miss Phoebe Hurty.
As for the suspicion I express in this book, that human beings are robots, are machines: It should be noted that people, mostly men, suffering from the last stages of syphilis, from locomotor ataxia, were common spectacles in downtown Indianapolis and in circus crowds when I was a boy.
Those people were infested with carnivorous little corkscrews which could be seen only with a microscope. The victims’ vertebrae were welded together after the corkscrews got through with the meat between. The syphilitics seemed tremendously dignified—erect, eyes straight ahead.
I saw one stand on a curb at the corner of Meridian and Washington streets one time, underneath an overhanging clock which my father designed. The intersection was known locally as “The Crossroads of America.”
This syphilitic man was thinking hard there, at the Crossroads of America, about how to get his legs to step off the curb and carry him across Washington Street. He shuddered gently, as though he had a small motor which was idling inside. Here was his problem: his brains, where the instructions to his legs originated, were being eaten alive by corkscrews. The wires which had to carry the instructions weren’t insulated anymore, or were eaten clear through. Switches along the way were welded open or shut.
This man looked like an old, old man, although he might have been only thirty years old. He thought and thought. And then he kicked two times like a chorus girl.
He certainly looked like a machine to me when I was a boy.
I tend to think of human beings as huge, rubbery test tubes, too, with chemical reactions seething inside. When I was a boy, I saw a lot of people with goiters. So did Dwayne Hoover, the Pontiac dealer who is the hero of this book. Those unhappy Earthlings had such swollen thyroid glands that they seemed to have zucchini squash growing from their throats.
All they had to do in order to have ordinary lives, it turned out, was to consume less than one-millionth of an ounce of iodine every day.
My own mother wrecked her brains with chemicals, which were supposed to make her sleep.
When I get depressed, I take a little pill, and I cheer up again.
And so on.
So it is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.
What do I myself think of this particular book? I feel lousy about it, but I always feel lousy about my books. My friend Knox Burger said one time that a certain cumbersome novel “. . . read as though it had been written by Philboyd Studge.” That’s who I think I am when I write what I am seemingly programmed to write.
This book is my fiftieth-birthday present to myself. I feel as though I am crossing the spine of a roof—having ascended one slope.
I am programmed at fifty to perform childishly—to insult “The Star-Spangled Banner,” to scrawl pictures of a Nazi flag and an asshole and a lot of other things with a felt-tipped pen. To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is my picture of an asshole: I think I am trying to clear my head of all the junk in there—the assholes, the flags, the underpants. Yes—there is a picture in this book of underpants. I’m throwing out characters from my other books, too. I’m not going to put on any more puppet shows.
I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago.
I suspect that this is something most white Americans, and nonwhite Americans who imitate white Americans, should do. The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.
I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can’t live without a culture anymore.
So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden
silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men
who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred.

Veterans’ Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will
keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
And all music is.

—PHILBOYD STUDGE

Chapter 1

This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.
One of them was a science-fiction writer named Kilgore Trout. He was a nobody at the time, and he supposed his life was over. He was mistaken. As a consequence of the meeting, he became one of the most beloved and respected human beings in history.
The man he met was an automobile dealer, a Pontiac dealer named Dwayne Hoover. Dwayne Hoover was on the brink of going insane.
Listen:
Trout and Hoover were citizens of the United States of America, a country which was called America for short. This was their national anthem, which was pure balderdash, like so much they were expected to take seriously:
O, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thru the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

There were one quadrillion nations in the Universe, but the nation Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout belonged to was the only one with a national anthem which was gibberish sprinkled with question marks.
Here is what their flag looked like:
It was the law of their nation, a law no other nation on the planet had about its flag, which said this: “The flag shall not be dipped to any person or thing.”
Flag-dipping was a form of friendly and respectful salute, which consisted of bringing the flag on a stick closer to the ground, then raising it up again.
The motto of Dwayne Hoover’s and Kilgore Trout’s nation was this, which meant in a language nobody spoke anymore, Out of Many, One: “E pluribus unum.”
The undippable flag was a beauty, and the anthem and the vacant motto might not have mattered much, if it weren’t for this: a lot of citizens were so ignored and cheated and insulted that they thought they might be in the wrong country, or even on the wrong planet, that some terrible mistake had been made. It might have comforted them some if their anthem and their motto had mentioned fairness or brotherhood or hope or happiness, had somehow welcomed them to the society and its real estate.
A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless education, which consisted of the study of hocuspocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well.
But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crimes. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy:
The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.
Here was another piece of evil nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom to human beings everywhere else. There were pictures and statues of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to see. It was sort of an ice-cream cone on fire. It looked like this:
Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines.
The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black.
Color was everything.
Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which was a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched this seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily; so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away.
The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.
When Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout met each other, their country was by far the richest and most powerful country on the planet. It had most of the food and minerals and machinery, and it disciplined other countries by threatening to shoot big rockets at them or to drop things on them from airplanes.
Most other countries didn’t have doodley-squat. Many of them weren’t even inhabitable anymore. They had too many people and not enough space. They had sold everything that was any good, and there wasn’t anything to eat anymore, and still the people went on fucking all the time.
Fucking was how babies were made.
A lot of the people on the wrecked planet were Communists. They had a theory that what was left of the planet should be shared more or less equally among all the people, who hadn’t asked to come to a wrecked planet in the first place. Meanwhile, more babies were arriving all the time—kicking and screaming, yelling for milk.
In some places people would actually try to eat mud or such on gravel while babies were being born just a few feet away.
And so on.
Dwayne Hoover’s and Kilgore Trout’s country, where there was still plenty of everything, was opposed to Communism. It didn’t think that Earthlings who had a lot should share it with others unless they really wanted to, and most of them didn’t want to.
So they didn’t have to.
Everybody in America was supposed to grab whatever he could and hold on to it. Some Americans were very good at grabbing and holding, were fabulously well-to-do. Others couldn’t get their hands on doodley-squat.
Dwayne Hoover was fabulously well-to-do when he met Kilgore Trout. A man whispered those exact words to a friend one morning as Dwayne walked by: “Fabulously well-to-do.”
And here’s how much of the planet Kilgore Trout owned in those days: doodley-squat.
And Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover met in Midland City, which was Dwayne’s home town, during an Arts Festival there in autumn of 1972.
As has already been said: Dwayne was a Pontiac dealer who was going insane.
Dwayne’s incipient insanity was mainly a matter of chemicals, of course. Dwayne Hoover’s body was manufacturing certain chemicals which unbalanced his mind. But Dwayne, like all novice lunatics, needed some bad ideas, too, so that his craziness could have shape and direction.
Bad chemicals and bad ideas were the Yin and Yang of madness. Yin and Yang were Chinese symbols of harmony. They looked like this:
The bad ideas were delivered to Dwayne by Kilgore Trout. Trout considered himself not only harmless but invisible. The world had paid so little attention to him that he supposed he was dead.
He hoped he was dead.
But he learned from his encounter with Dwayne that he was alive enough to give a fellow human being ideas which would turn him into a monster.
Here was the core of the bad ideas which Trout gave to Dwayne: Everybody on Earth was a robot, with one exception—Dwayne Hoover.
Of all the creatures in the Universe, only Dwayne was thinking and feeling and worrying and planning and so on. Nobody else knew what pain was. Nobody else had any choices to make. Everybody else was a fully automatic machine, whose purpose was to stimulate Dwayne. Dwayne was a new type of creature being tested by the Creator of the Universe.
Only Dwayne Hoover had free will.
Trout did not expect to be believed. He put the bad ideas into a science-fiction novel, and that was where Dwayne found them. The book wasn’t addressed to Dwayne alone. Trout had never heard of Dwayne when he wrote it. It was addressed to anybody who happened to open it up. It said to simply anybody, in effect, “Hey— guess what: You’re the only creature with free will. How does that make you feel?” And so on.
It was a tour de force. It was a jeu d’esprit.
But it was mind poison to Dwayne.
It shook up Trout to realize that even he could bring evil into the world—in the form of bad ideas. And, after Dwayne was carted off to a lunatic asylum in a canvas camisole, Trout became a fanatic on the importance of ideas as causes and cures for diseases.
But nobody would listen to him. He was a dirty old man in the wilderness, crying out among the trees and underbrush, “Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease!”
Kilgore Trout became a pioneer in the field of mental health. He advanced his theories disguised as science-fiction. He died in 1981, almost twenty years after he made Dwayne Hoover so sick.
He was by then recognized as a great artist and scientist. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences caused a monument to be erected over his ashes. Carved in its face was a quotation from his last novel, his two-hundred-and-ninth novel, which was unfinished when he died. The monument looked like this:

Chapter 2

Dwayne was a widower. He lived alone at night in a dream house in Fairchild Heights, which was the most desirable residential area in the city. Every house there cost at least one hundred thousand dollars to build. Every house was on at least four acres of land.
Dwayne’s only companion at night was a Labrador retriever named Sparky. Sparky could not wag his tail—because of an automobile accident many years ago, so he had no way of telling other dogs how friendly he was. He had to fight all the time. His ears were in tatters. He was lumpy with scars.
Dwayne had a black servant named Lottie Davis. She cleaned his house every day. Then she cooked his supper for him and served it. Then she went home. She was descended from slaves.
Lottie Davis and Dwayne didn’t talk much, even though they liked each other a lot. Dwayne reserved most of his conversation for the dog. He would get down on the floor and roll around with Sparky, and he would say things like, “You and me, Spark,” and “How’s my old buddy?” and so on.
And that routine went on unrevised, even after Dwayne started to go crazy, so Lottie had nothing unusual to notice.
Kilgore Trout owned a parakeet named Bill. Like Dwayne Hoover, Trout was all alone at night, except for his pet. Trout, too, talked to his pet.
But while Dwayne babbled to his Labrador retriever about love, Trout sneered and muttered to his parakeet about the end of the world.
“Any time now,” he would say. “And high time, too.”
It was Trout’s theory that the atmosphere would become unbreathable soon.
Trout supposed that when the atmosphere became poisonous, Bill would keel over a few minutes before Trout did. He would kid Bill about that. “How’s the old respiration, Bill?” he’d say, or, “Seems like you’ve got a touch of the old emphysema, Bill,” or, “We never discussed what kind of a funeral you want, Bill. You never even told me what your religion is.” And so on.
He told Bill that humanity deserved to die horribly, since it had behaved so cruelly and wastefully on a planet so sweet. “We’re all Heliogabalus, Bill,” he would say. This was the name of a Roman emperor who had a sculptor make a hollow, life-size iron bull with a door on it. The door could be locked from the outside. The bull’s mouth was open. That was the only other opening to the outside.
Heliogabalus would have a human being put into the bull through the door, and the door would be locked. Any sounds the human being made in there would come out of the mouth of the bull. Heliogabalus would have guests in for a nice party, with plenty of food and wine and beautiful women and pretty boys—and Heliogabalus would have a servant light kindling. The kindling was under dry firewood—which was under the bull.
Trout did another thing which some people might have considered eccentric: he called mirrors leaks. It amused him to pretend that mirrors were holes between two universes.
If he saw a child near a mirror, he might wag his finger at a child warningly, and say with great solemnity, “Don’t get too near that leak. You wouldn’t want to wind up in the other universe, would you?”
Sometimes somebody would say in his presence, “Excuse me, I have to take a leak.” This was a way of saying that the speaker intended to drain liquid wastes from his body through a valve in his lower abdomen.
And Trout would reply waggishly, “Where I come from, that means you’re about to steal a mirror.”
And so on.
By the time of Trout’s death, of course, everybody called mirrors leaks. That was how respectable even his jokes had become.
In 1972, Trout lived in a basement apartment in Cohoes, New York. He made his living as an installer of aluminum combination storm windows and screens. He had nothing to do with the sales end of the business—because he had no charm. Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.
Dwayne Hoover had oodles of charm.
I can have oodles of charm when I want to.
A lot of people have oodles of charm.
Trout’s employer and co-workers had no idea that he was a writer. No reputable publisher had ever heard of him, for that matter, even though he had written one hundred and seventeen novels and two thousand short stories by the time he met Dwayne.
He made carbon copies of nothing he wrote. He mailed off manuscripts without enclosing stamped, self-addressed envelopes for their safe return. Sometimes he didn’t even include a return address. He got names and addresses of publishers from magazines devoted to the writing business, which he read avidly in the periodical rooms of public libraries. He thus got in touch with a firm called World Classics Library, which published hard-core pornography in Los Angeles, California. They used his stories, which usually didn’t even have women in them, to give bulk to books and magazines of salacious pictures.
They never told him where or when he might expect to find himself in print. Here is what they paid him: doodley-squat.
They didn’t even send him complimentary copies of the books and magazines in which he appeared, so he had to search them out in pornography stores. And the titles he gave to his stories were often changed. “Pan Galactic Straw-boss,” for instance, became “Mouth Crazy.”
Most distracting to Trout, however, were the illustrations his publishers selected, which had nothing to do with his tales. He wrote a novel, for instance, about an Earthling named Delmore Skag, a bachelor in a neighborhood where everybody else had enormous families. And Skag was a scientist, and he found a way to reproduce himself in chicken soup. He would shave living cells from the palm of his right hand, mix them with the soup, and expose the soup to cosmic rays. The cells turned into babies which looked exactly like Delmore Skag.
Pretty soon, Delmore was having several babies a day, and inviting his neighbors to share his pride and happiness. He had mass baptisms of as many as a hundred babies at a time. He became famous as a family man.
And so on.
Skag hoped to force his country into making laws against excessively large families, but the legislatures and the courts declined to meet the problem head-on. They passed stern laws instead against the possession by unmarried persons of chicken soup.
And so on.
The illustrations for this book were murky photographs of several white women giving blow jobs to the same black man, who, for some reason, wore a Mexican sombrero.
At the time he met Dwayne Hoover, Trout’s most widely-distributed book was Plague on Wheels. The publisher didn’t change the title, but he obliterated most of it and all of Trout’s name with a lurid banner which made this promise:
A wide-open beaver was a photograph of a woman not wearing underpants, and with her legs far apart, so that the mouth of her
vagina could be seen. The expression was first used by news photographers, who often got to see up women’s skirts at accidents and sporting events and from underneath fire escapes and so on. They needed a code word to yell to other newsmen and friendly policemen and firemen and so on, to let them know what could be seen, in case they wanted to see it. The word was this: “Beaver!”
A beaver was actually a large rodent. It loved water, so it built dams. It looked like this:
The sort of beaver which excited news photographers so much looked like this:
This was where babies came from.
When Dwayne was a boy, when Kilgore Trout was a boy, when I was a boy, and even when we became middle-aged men and older, it was
the duty of the police and the courts to keep representations of such ordinary apertures from being examined and discussed by persons not engaged in the practice of medicine. It was somehow decided that wide-open beavers, which were ten thousand times as common as real beavers, should be the most massively defended secret under law.
So there was a madness about wide-open beavers. There was also a madness about a soft, weak metal, an element, which had somehow been declared the most desirable of all elements, which was gold.
And the madness about wide-open beavers was extended to underpants when Dwayne and Trout and I were boys. Girls concealed their underpants at all costs, and boys tried to see their underpants at all costs.
Female underpants looked like this:
One of the first things Dwayne learned in school as a little boy, in fact, was a poem he was supposed to scream in case he saw a girl’s underpants by accident in the playground. Other students taught it to him. This was it:
I see England,
I see France;
I see a little girl’s
Underpants!
When Kilgore Trout accepted the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1979, he declared: “Some people say there is no such thing as progress. The fact that human beings are now the only animals left on Earth, I confess, seems a confusing sort of victory. Those of you familiar with the nature of my earlier published works will understand why I mourned especially when the last beaver died.
“There were two monsters sharing this planet with us when I was a boy, however, and I celebrate their extinction today. They were determined to kill us, or at least to make our lives meaningless. They came close to success. They were cruel adversaries, which my little friends the beavers were not. Lions? No. Tigers? No. Lions and tigers snoozed most of the time. The monsters I will name never snoozed. They inhabited our heads. They were the arbitrary lusts for gold, and, God help us, for a glimpse of a little girl’s underpants.
“I thank those lusts for being so ridiculous, for they taught us that it was possible for a human being to believe anything, and to behave passionately in keeping with that belief—any belief.
“So now we can build an unselfish society by devoting to unselfishness the frenzy we once devoted to gold and to underpants.”
He paused, and then he recited with wry mournfulness the beginning of a poem he had learned to scream in Bermuda, when he was a little boy. The poem was all the more poignant, since it mentioned two nations which no longer existed as such. “I see England,” he said, “I see France—”
Actually, women’s underpants had been drastically devalued by the time of the historic meeting between Dwayne Hoover and Trout. The price of gold was still on the rise.
Photographs of women’s underpants weren’t worth the paper they were printed on, and even high quality color motion pictures of wide-open beavers were going begging in the marketplace.
There had been a time when a copy of Trout’s most popular book to date, Plague on Wheels, had brought as much as twelve dollars, because of the illustrations. It was now being offered for a dollar, and people who paid even that much did so not because of the pictures. They paid for the words.
The words in the book, incidentally, were about life on a dying planet named Lingo-Three, whose inhabitants resembled American automobiles. They had wheels. They were powered by internal combustion engines. They ate fossil fuels. They weren’t manufactured, though. They reproduced. They laid eggs containing baby automobiles, and the babies matured in pools of oil drained from adult crankcases.
Lingo-Three was visited by space travelers, who learned that the creatures were becoming extinct for this reason: they had destroyed their planet’s resources, including its atmosphere.
The space travelers weren’t able to offer much in the way of material assistance. The automobile creatures hoped to borrow some oxygen, and to have the visitors carry at least one of their eggs to another planet, where it might hatch, where an automobile civilization could begin again. But the smallest egg they had was a forty-eight pounder, and the space travelers themselves were only an inch high, and their space ship wasn’t even as big as an Earthling shoebox. They were from Zeltoldimar.
The spokesman for the Zeltoldimarians was Kago. Kago said that all he could do was to tell others in the Universe about how wonderful the automobile creatures had been. Here is what he said to all those rusting junkers who were out of gas: “You will be gone, but not forgotten.”
The illustration for the story at this point showed two Chinese girls, seemingly identical twins, seated on a couch with their legs wide open.
So Kago and his brave little Zeltoldimarian crew, which was all homosexual, roamed the Universe, keeping the memory of the automobile creatures alive. They came at last to the planet Earth. In all innocence, Kago told the Earthlings about the automobiles. Kago did not know that human beings could be as easily felled by a single idea as by cholera or the bubonic plague. There was no immunity to cuckoo ideas on Earth.
And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: “Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.
“The ideas Earthlings held didn’t matter for hundreds of thousands of years, since they couldn’t do much about them anyway. Ideas might as well be badges as anything.
“They even had a saying about the futility of ideas: ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’
“And then Earthlings discovered tools. Suddenly agreeing with friends could be a form of suicide or worse. But agreements went on, not for the sake of common sense or decency or self-preservation, but for friendliness.
“Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead. And even when they built computers to do some thinking for them, they designed them not so much for wisdom as for friendliness. So they were doomed. Homicidal beggars could ride.”

Chapter 3

Within a century of little Kago’s arrival on Earth, according to Trout’s novel, every form of life on that once peaceful and moist and nourishing blue-green ball was dying or dead. Everywhere were the shells of the great beetles which men had made and worshipped. They were automobiles. They had killed everything.
Little Kago himself died long before the planet did. He was attempting to lecture on the evils of the automobile in a bar in Detroit. But he was so tiny that nobody paid any attention to him. He lay down to rest for a moment, and a drunk automobile worker mistook him for a kitchen match. He killed Kago by trying to strike him repeatedly on the underside of the bar.
Trout received only one fan letter before 1972. It was from an eccentric millionaire, who hired a private detective agency to discover who and where he was. Trout was so invisible that the search cost eighteen thousand dollars.
The fan letter reached him in his basement in Cohoes. It was handwritten, and Trout concluded that the writer might be fourteen years old or so. The letter said that Plague on Wheels was the greatest novel in the English language, and that Trout should be President of the United States.
Trout read the letter out loud to his parakeet. “Things are looking up, Bill,” he said. “Always knew they would. Get a load of this.” And then he read the letter. There was no indication in the letter that the writer, whose name was Eliot Rosewater, was a grownup, was fabulously well-to-do.
Kilgore Trout, incidentally, could never be President of the United States without a Constitutional amendment. He hadn’t been born inside the country. His birthplace was Bermuda. His father, Leo Trout, while remaining an American citizen, worked there for many years for the Royal Ornithological Society—guarding the only nesting place in the world for Bermuda Erns. These great green sea eagles eventually became extinct, despite anything anyone could do.
As a child, Trout had seen those Erns die, one by one. His father had assigned him the melancholy task of measuring wingspreads of the corpses. These were the largest creatures ever to fly under their own power on the planet. And the last corpse had the greatest wingspread of all, which was nineteen feet, two and three-quarters inches.
After all the Erns were dead, it was discovered what had killed them. It was a fungus, which attacked their eyes and brains. Men had brought the fungus to their rookery in the innocent form of athlete’s foot.
Here is what the flag of Kilgore Trout’s native island looked like:
So Kilgore Trout had a depressing childhood, despite all of the sunshine and fresh air. The pessimism that overwhelmed him in later life, which destroyed his three marriages, which drove his only son, Leo, from home at the age of fourteen, very likely had its roots in the bittersweet mulch of rotting Erns.
The fan letter came much too late. It wasn’t good news. It was perceived as an invasion of privacy by Kilgore Trout. The letter from Rosewater promised that he would make Trout famous. This is what Trout had to say about that, with only his parakeet listening: “Keep the hell out of my body bag.”
A body bag was a large plastic envelope for a freshly killed American soldier. It was a new invention.
I do not know who invented the body bag. I do know who invented Kilgore Trout. I did.
I made him snaggle-toothed. I gave him hair, but I turned it white. I wouldn’t let him comb it or go to a barber. I made him grow it long and tangled.
I gave him the same legs the Creator of the Universe gave to my father when my father was a pitiful old man. They were pale white broomsticks. They were hairless. They were embossed fantastically with varicose veins.
And, two months after Trout received his first fan letter, I had him find in his mailbox an invitation to be a speaker at an arts festival in the American Middle West.
The letter was from the Festival’s chairman, Fred T. Barry. He was respectful, almost reverent about Kilgore Trout. He beseeched him to be one of several distinguished out-of-town participants in the Festival, which would last for five days. It would celebrate the opening of the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts in Midland City.
The letter did not say so, but Mildred Barry was the late mother of the Chairman, the wealthiest man in Midland City. Fred T. Barry had paid for the new Center of the Arts, which was a translucent sphere on stilts. It had no windows. When illuminated inside at night, it resembled a rising harvest moon.
Fred T. Barry, incidentally, was exactly the same age as Trout. They had the same birthday. But they certainly didn’t look anything alike. Fred T. Barry didn’t even look like a white man anymore, even though he was of pure English stock. As he grew older and older and happier and happier, and all his hair fell out everywhere, he came to look like an ecstatic old Chinaman.
He looked so much like a Chinaman that he had taken to dressing like a Chinaman. Real Chinamen often mistook him for a real Chinaman.
Fred T. Barry confessed in his letter that he had not read the works of Kilgore Trout, but that he would joyfully do so before the Festival began. “You come highly recommended by Eliot Rosewater,” he said, “who assures me that you are perhaps the greatest living American novelist. There can be no higher praise than that.”
Clipped to the letter was a check for one thousand dollars. Fred T. Barry explained that this was for travel expenses and an honorarium.
It was a lot of money. Trout was suddenly fabulously well-to-do.
Here is how Trout happened to be invited: Fred T. Barry wanted to have a fabulously valuable oil painting as a focal point for the Midland City Festival of the Arts. As rich as he was, he couldn’t afford to buy one, so he looked for one to borrow.
The first person he went to was Eliot Rosewater, who owned an El Greco worth three million dollars or more. Rosewater said the Festival could have the picture on one condition: that it hire as a speaker the greatest living writer in the English language, who was Kilgore Trout.
Trout laughed at the flattering invitation, but he felt fear after that. Once again, a stranger was tampering with the privacy of his body bag. He put this question to his parakeet haggardly, and he rolled his eyes: “Why all this sudden interest in Kilgore Trout?”
He read the letter again. “They not only want Kilgore Trout,” he said, “they want him in a tuxedo, Bill. Some mistake has been made.”
He shrugged. “Maybe they invited me because they know I have a tuxedo,” he said. He really did own a tuxedo. It was in a steamer trunk which he had lugged from place to place for more than forty years. It contained toys from childhood, the bones of a Bermuda Ern, and many other curiosities including the tuxedo he had worn to a senior dance just prior to his graduation from Thomas Jefferson High School in Dayton, Ohio, in 1924. Trout was born in Bermuda, and attended grammar school there. But then his family moved to Dayton.
His high school was named after a slave owner who was also one of the world’s greatest theoreticians on the subject of human liberty.
Trout got his tuxedo out of the trunk and he put it on. It was a lot like a tuxedo I’d seen my father put on when he was an old, old man. It had a greenish patina of mold. Some of the growths it supported resembled patches of fine rabbit fur. “This will do nicely for the evenings,” said Trout. “But tell me, Bill—what does one wear in Midland City in October before the sun goes down?” He hauled up his pants legs so that his grotesquely ornamental shins were exposed. “Bermuda shorts and bobby socks, eh, Bill? After all—I am from Bermuda.”
He dabbed at his tuxedo with a damp rag, and the fungi came away easily. “Hate to do this, Bill,” he said of the fungi he was murdering. “Fungi have as much right to life as I do. They know what they want, Bill. Damned if I do anymore.”
Then he thought about what Bill himself might want. It was easy to guess. “Bill,” he said, “I like you so much, and I am such a big shot in the Universe, that I will make your three biggest wishes come true.” He opened the door of the cage, something Bill couldn’t have done in a thousand years.
Bill flew over to a windowsill. He put his little shoulder against the glass. There was just one layer of glass between Bill and the great out-of-doors. Although Trout was in the storm window business, he had no storm windows on his own abode.
“Your second wish is about to come true,” said Trout, and he again did something which Bill could never have done. He opened the window. But the opening of the window was such an alarming business to the parakeet that he flew back to his cage and hopped inside.
Trout closed the door of the cage and latched it. “That’s the most intelligent use of three wishes I ever heard of,” he told the bird. “You made sure you’d still have something worth wishing for—to get out of the cage.”
Trout made the connection between his lone fan letter and the invitation, but he couldn’t believe that Eliot Rosewater was a grownup. Rosewater’s handwriting looked like this: “Bill,” said Trout tentatively, “some teen-ager named Rosewater got me this job. His parents must be friends of the Chairman of the Arts Festival, and they don’t know anything about books out that way. So when he said I was good, they believed him.”
Trout shook his head. “I’m not going, Bill. I don’t want out of my cage. I’m too smart for that. Even if I did want out, though, I wouldn’t go to Midland City to make a laughing stock of myself—and my only fan.”
He left it at that. But he reread the invitation from time to time, got to know it by heart. And then one of the subtler messages on the paper got through to him. It was in the letterhead, which displayed two masks intended to represent comedy and tragedy:
One mask looked like this:
The other one looked like this:
“They don’t want anything but smilers out there,” Trout said to his parakeet. “Unhappy failures need not apply.” But his mind wouldn’t leave it alone at that. He got an idea which he found very tangy: “But maybe an unhappy failure is exactly what they need to see.”
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:

Chapter 4

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.
“I would remember that he was the best employer in town,” said Francine. This was true. Dwayne paid high wages. He had profit-sharing and Christmas bonuses at the end of every year. He was the first automobile dealer in his part of the State to offer his employees Blue Cross-Blue Shield, which was health insurance. He had a retirement plan which was superior to every retirement plan in the city with the exception of the one at Barrytron. His office door was always open to any employee who had troubles to discuss, whether they had to do with the automobile business or not.
For instance, on the day he insulted Harry’s clothing, he also spent two hours with Vernon Garr, discussing the hallucinations Vernon’s wife was having. “She sees things that aren’t there,” said Vernon.
“She needs rest, Vern,” said Dwayne.
“Maybe I’m going crazy, too,” said Vernon. “Christ, I go home and I talk for hours to my fucking dog.”
“That makes two of us,” said Dwayne.
Here is the scene between Harry and Dwayne which upset Harry so much:
Harry went into Dwayne’s office right after Vernon left. He expected no trouble, because he had never had any serious trouble with Dwayne.
“How’s my old combat buddy today?” he said to Dwayne.
“As good as can be expected,” said Dwayne. “Anything special bothering you?”
“No,” said Harry.
“Vern’s wife thinks Vern is trying to turn her brains into plutonium,” said Dwayne.
“What’s plutonium?” said Harry, and so on. They rambled along, and Harry made up a problem for himself just to keep the conversation lively. He said he was sad sometimes that he had no children. “But I’m glad in a way, too,” he went on. “I mean, why should I contribute to overpopulation?”
Dwayne didn’t say anything.
“Maybe we should have adopted one,” said Harry, “but it’s too late now. And the old lady and me—we have a good time just horsing around with ourselves. What do we need a kid for?”
It was after the mention of adoption that Dwayne blew up. He himself had been adopted—by a couple who had moved to Midland City from West Virginia in order to make big money as factory workers in the First World War. Dwayne’s real mother was a spinster school teacher who wrote sentimental poetry and claimed to be descended from Richard the Lion-Hearted, who was a king. His real father was an itinerant typesetter, who seduced his mother by setting her poems in type. He didn’t sneak them into a newspaper or anything. It was enough for her that they were set in type.
She was a defective child-bearing machine. She destroyed herself automatically while giving birth to Dwayne. The printer disappeared. He was a disappearing machine.
It may be that the subject of adoption caused an unfortunate chemical reaction in Dwayne’s head. At any rate, Dwayne suddenly snarled this at Harry: “Harry, why don’t you get a bunch of cotton waste from Vern Garr, soak it in Blue Sunoco, and burn up your fucking wardrobe? You make me feel like I’m at Watson Brothers.” Watson Brothers was the name of the funeral parlor for white people who were at least moderately well-to-do. Blue Sunoco was a brand of gasoline.
Harry was startled, and then pain set in. Dwayne had never said anything about his clothes in all the years he’d known him. The clothes were conservative and neat, in Harry’s opinion. His shirts were white. His ties were black or navy blue. His suits were gray or dark blue. His shoes and socks were black.
“Listen, Harry,” said Dwayne, and his expression was mean, “Hawaiian Week is coming up, and I’m absolutely serious: burn your clothes and get new ones, or apply for work at Watson Brothers. Have yourself embalmed while you’re at it.”
Harry couldn’t do anything but let his mouth hang open. The Hawaiian Week Dwayne had mentioned was a sales promotion scheme which involved making the agency look as much like the Hawaiian Islands as possible. People who bought new or used cars, or had repairs done in excess of five hundred dollars during the week would be entered automatically in a lottery. Three lucky people would each win a free, all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas and San Francisco and then Hawaii for a party of two.
“I don’t mind that you have the name of a Buick, Harry, when you’re supposed to be selling Pontiacs—” Dwayne went on. He was referring to the fact that the Buick division of General Motors put out a model called the Le Sabre. “You can’t help that.” Dwayne now patted the top of his desk softly. This was somehow more menacing than if he had pounded the desk with his fist. “But there are a hell of a lot of things you can change, Harry. There’s a long weekend coming up. I expect to see some big changes in you when I come to work on Tuesday morning.”
The weekend was extra-long because the coming Monday was a national holiday, Veterans’ Day. It was in honor of people who had served their country in uniform.
“When we started selling Pontiacs, Harry,” said Dwayne, “the car was sensible transportation for school teachers and grandmothers and maiden aunts.” This was true. “Perhaps you haven’t noticed, Harry, but the Pontiac has now become a glamorous, youthful adventure for people who want a kick out of life! And you dress and act like this was a mortuary! Look at yourself in a mirror, Harry, and ask yourself, ‘Who could ever associate a man like this with a Pontiac?’”
Harry LeSabre was too choked up to point out to Dwayne that, no matter what he looked like, he was generally acknowledged to be one of the most effective sales managers for Pontiac not only in the State, but in the entire Middle West. Pontiac was the best-selling automobile in the Midland City area, despite the fact that it was not a low-price car. It was a medium-price car.
Dwayne Hoover told poor Harry LeSabre that the Hawaiian Festival, only a long weekend away, was Harry’s golden opportunity to loosen up, to have some fun, to encourage other people to have some fun, too.
“Harry,” said Dwayne. “I have some news for you: modern science has given us a whole lot of wonderful new colors, with strange, exciting names like red!, orange!, green!, and pink!, Harry. We’re not stuck any more with just black, gray and white! Isn’t that good news, Harry? And the State Legislature has just announced that it is no longer a crime to smile during working hours, Harry, and I have the personal promise of the Governor that never again will anybody be sent to the Sexual Offenders’ Wing of the Adult Correctional Institution for telling a joke!”
Harry LeSabre might have weathered all this with only minor damage, if only Harry hadn’t been a secret transvestite. On weekends he liked to dress up in women’s clothing, and not drab clothing, either. Harry and his wife would pull down the window blinds, and Harry would turn into a bird of paradise.
Nobody but Harry’s wife knew his secret.
When Dwayne razzed him about the clothes he wore to work, and then mentioned the Sexual Offenders’ Wing of the Adult Correctional Institution at Shepherdstown, Harry had to suspect that his secret was out. And it wasn’t merely a comical secret, either. Harry could be arrested for what he did on weekends. He could be fined up to three thousand dollars and sentenced to as much as five years at hard labor in the Sexual Offenders’ Wing of the Adult Correctional Institution at Shepherdstown.
So poor Harry spent a wretched Veterans’ Day weekend after that. But Dwayne spent a worse one.
Here is what the last night of that weekend was like for Dwayne: his bad chemicals rolled him out of bed. They made him dress as though there were some sort of emergency with which he had to deal. This was in the wee hours. Veterans’ Day had ended at the stroke of twelve.
Dwayne’s bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to make holes in human beings. It looked like this:
right In Dwayne’s part of the planet, anybody who wanted one could get one down at his local hardware store. Policemen all had them. So did the criminals. So did the people caught in between.
Criminals would point guns at people and say, “Give me all your money,” and the people usually would. And policemen would point their guns at criminals and say, “Stop” or whatever the situation called for, and the criminals usually would. Sometimes they wouldn’t. Sometimes a wife would get so mad at her husband that she would put a hole in him with a gun. Sometimes a husband would get so mad at his wife that he would put a hole in her. And so on.
In the same week Dwayne Hoover ran amok, a fourteen-year-old Midland City boy put holes in his mother and father because he didn’t want to show them the bad report card he had brought home. His lawyer planned to enter a plea of temporary insanity, which meant that at the time of the shooting the boy was unable to distinguish the difference between right and wrong.
Sometimes people would put holes in famous people so they could be at least fairly famous, too. Sometimes people would get on airplanes which were supposed to fly to someplace, and they would offer to put holes in the pilot and co-pilot unless they flew the airplane to someplace else.
Dwayne held the muzzle of his gun in his mouth for a while. He tasted oil. The gun was loaded and cocked. There were neat little metal packages containing charcoal, potassium nitrate and sulphur only inches from his brains. He had only to trip a lever, and the powder would turn to gas. The gas would blow a chunk of lead down a tube and through Dwayne’s brains.
But Dwayne elected to shoot up one of his tiled bathrooms instead. He put chunks of lead through his toilet and a washbasin and a bathtub enclosure. There was a picture of a flamingo sandblasted on the glass of the bathtub enclosure. It looked like this: Dwayne shot the flamingo.
He snarled at his recollection of it afterwards. Here is what he snarled: “Dumb fucking bird.”
Nobody heard the shots. All the houses in the neighborhood were too well insulated for sound ever to get in or out. A sound wanting in or out of Dwayne’s dreamhouse, for instance, had to go through an inch and a half of plasterboard, a polystyrene vapor barrier, a sheet of aluminum foil, a three-inch airspace, another sheet of aluminum foil, a three-inch blanket of glass wool, another sheet of aluminum foil, one inch of insulating board made of pressed sawdust, tarpaper, one inch of wood sheathing, more tarpaper, and then aluminum siding which was hollow. The space in the siding was filled with a miracle insulating material developed for use on rockets to the Moon.
Dwayne turned on the floodlights around his house, and he played basketball on the blacktop apron outside his five-car garage.
Dwayne’s dog Sparky hid in the basement when Dwayne shot up the bathroom. But he came out now. Sparky watched Dwayne play basketball.
“You and me, Sparky,” said Dwayne. And so on. He sure loved that dog.
Nobody saw him playing basketball. He was screened from his neighbors by trees and shrubs and a high cedar fence.
He put the basketball away, and he climbed into a black Plymouth Fury he had taken in trade the day before. The Plymouth was a Chrysler product, and Dwayne himself sold General Motors products. He had decided to drive the Plymouth for a day or two in order to keep abreast of the competition.
As he backed out of his driveway, he thought it important to explain to his neighbors why he was in a Plymouth Fury, so he yelled out the window: “Keeping abreast of the competition!” He blew his horn.
Dwayne zoomed down Old County Road and onto the Interstate, which he had all to himself. He swerved into Exit Ten at a high rate of speed, slammed into a guardrail, spun around and around. He came out onto Union Avenue going backwards, jumped a curb, and came to a stop in a vacant lot. Dwayne owned the lot.
Nobody saw or heard anything. Nobody lived in the area. A policeman was supposed to cruise by about once every hour or so, but he was cooping in an alley behind a Western Electric warehouse about two miles away. Cooping was police slang for sleeping on the job.
Dwayne stayed in his vacant lot for a while. He played the radio. All the Midland City stations were asleep for the night, but Dwayne picked up a country music station in West Virginia, which offered him ten different kinds of flowering shrubs and five fruit trees for six dollars, C.O.D.
“Sounds good to me,” said Dwayne. He meant it. Almost all the messages which were sent and received in his country, even the telepathic ones, had to do with buying or selling some damn thing. They were like lullabies to Dwayne.

Chapter 5

While Dwayne Hoover listened to West Virginia, Kilgore Trout tried to fall asleep in a movie theater in New York City. It was much cheaper than a night in a hotel. Trout had never done it before, but he knew sleeping in movie houses was the sort of thing really dirty old men did. He wished to arrive in Midland City as the dirtiest of all old men. He was supposed to take part in a symposium out there entitled “The Future of the American Novel in the Age of McLuhan.” He wished to say at that symposium, “I don’t know who McLuhan is, but I know what it’s like to spend the night with a lot of other dirty old men in a movie theater in New York City. Could we talk about that?”
He wished to say, too, “Does this McLuhan, whoever he is, have anything to say about the relationship between wide-open beavers and the sales of books?”
Trout had come down from Cohoes late that afternoon. He had since visited many pornography shops and a shirt store. He had bought two of his own books, Plague on Wheels and Now It Can Be Told, a magazine containing a short story of his, and a tuxedo shirt. The name of the magazine was Black Garterbelt. The tuxedo shirt had a cascade of ruffles down its bosom. On the shirt salesman’s advice, Trout had also bought a packaged ensemble consisting of a cumberbund, a boutonnière, and a bow tie. They were all the color of tangerines.
These goodies were all in his lap, along with a crackling brown paper parcel containing his tuxedo, six new pairs of jockey shorts, six new pairs of socks, his razor and a new toothbrush. Trout hadn’t owned a toothbrush for years.
The jackets of Plague on Wheels and Now It Can Be Told both promised plenty of wide-open beavers inside. The picture on the cover of Now It Can Be Told, which was the book which would turn Dwayne Hoover into a homicidal maniac, showed a college professor being undressed by a group of naked sorority girls. A library tower could be seen through a window in the sorority house. It was daytime outside, and there was a clock in the tower. The clock looked like this:
The professor was stripped down to his candy-striped underwear shorts and his socks and garters and his mortar-board, which was a hat which looked like this:
There was absolutely nothing about a professor or a sorority or a university anywhere in the body of the book. The book was in the form of a long letter from the Creator of the Universe to the only creature in the Universe who had free will.
As for the story in Black Garterbelt magazine: Trout had no idea that it had been accepted for publication. It had been accepted years ago, apparently, for the date on the magazine was April, 1962. Trout found it by chance in a bin of tame old magazines near the front of the store. They were underpants magazines.
When he bought the magazine, the cashier supposed Trout was drunk or feeble-minded. All he was getting, the cashier thought, was pictures of women in their underpants. Their legs were apart, all right, but they had on underpants, so they were certainly no competition for the wide-open beavers on sale in the back of the store.
“I hope you enjoy it,” said the cashier to Trout. He meant that he hoped Trout would find some pictures he could masturbate to, since that was the only point of all the books and magazines.
“It’s for an arts festival,” said Trout.
As for the story itself, it was entitled “The Dancing Fool.” Like so many Trout stories, it was about a tragic failure to communicate.
Here was the plot: A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing.
Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golfclub.
The movie theater where Trout sat with all his parcels in his lap showed nothing but dirty movies. The music was soothing. Phantasms of a young man and a young woman sucked harmlessly on one another’s soft apertures on the silver screen.
And Trout made up a new novel while he sat there. It was about an Earthling astronaut who arrived on a planet where all the animal and plant life had been killed by pollution, except for humanoids. The humanoids ate food made from petroleum and coal.
They gave a feast for the astronaut, whose name was Don. The food was terrible. The big topic of conversation was censorship. The cities were blighted with motion picture theaters which showed nothing but dirty movies. The humanoids wished they could put them out of business somehow, but without interfering with free speech.
They asked Don if dirty movies were a problem on Earth, too, and Don said, “Yes.” They asked him if the movies were really dirty, and Don replied, “As dirty as movies could get.”
This was a challenge to the humanoids, who were sure their dirty movies could beat anything on Earth. So everybody piled into air-cushion vehicles, and they floated to a dirty movie house downtown.
It was intermission time when they got there, so Don had some time to think about what could possibly be dirtier than what he had already seen on Earth. He became sexually excited even before the house lights went down. The women in his party were all twittery and squirmy.
So the theater went dark and the curtains opened. At first there wasn’t any picture. There were slurps and moans from loudspeakers. Then the picture itself appeared. It was a high quality film of a male humanoid eating what looked like a pear. The camera zoomed in on his lips and tongue and teeth, which glistened with saliva. He took his time about eating the pear. When the last of it had disappeared into his slurpy mouth, the camera focussed on his Adam’s apple. His Adam’s apple bobbed obscenely. He belched contentedly, and then these words appeared on the screen, but in the language of the planet:
THE END
It was all faked, of course. There weren’t any pears anymore. And the eating of a pear wasn’t the main event of the evening anyway. It was a short subject, which gave the members of the audience time to settle down.
Then the main feature began. It was about a male and a female and their two children, and their dog and their cat. They ate steadily for an hour and a half—soup, meat, biscuits, butter, vegetables, mashed potatoes and gravy, fruit, candy, cake, pie. The camera rarely strayed more than a foot from their glistening lips and their bobbing Adam’s apples. And then the father put the cat and dog on the table, so they could take part in the orgy, too.
After a while, the actors couldn’t eat any more. They were so stuffed that they were goggle-eyed. They could hardly move. They said they didn’t think they could eat again for a week, and so on. They cleared the table slowly. They went waddling out into the kitchen, and they dumped about thirty pounds of leftovers into a garbage can.
The audience went wild.
When Don and his friends left the theater, they were accosted by humanoid whores, who offered them eggs and oranges and milk and butter and peanuts and so on. The whores couldn’t actually deliver these goodies, of course.
The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices.
And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake.

Chapter 6

Dwayne Hoover sat in the used Plymouth Fury in his own vacant lot for an hour, listening to West Virginia. He was told about health insurance for pennies a day, about how to get better performance from his car. He was told what to do about constipation. He was offered a Bible which had everything that God or Jesus had actually said out loud printed in red capital letters. He was offered a plant which would attract and eat disease-carrying insects in his home.
All this was stored away in Dwayne’s memory, in case he should need it later on. He had all kinds of stuff in there.
While Dwayne sat there so alone, the oldest inhabitant of Midland City was dying in the County Hospital, at the foot of Fairchild Boulevard, which was nine miles away. She was Mary Young. She was one hundred and eight years old. She was black. Mary Young’s parents had been human slaves in Kentucky.
There was a tiny connection between Mary Young and Dwayne Hoover. She did the laundry for Dwayne’s family for a few months, back when Dwayne was a little boy. She told Bible stories and stories about slavery to little Dwayne. She told him about a public hanging of a white man she had seen in Cincinnati, when she was a little girl.
A black intern at the County Hospital now watched Mary Young die of pneumonia.
The intern did not know her. He had been in Midland City for only a week. He wasn’t even a fellow-American, although he had taken his medical degree at Harvard. He was an Indaro. He was a Nigerian. His name was Cyprian Ukwende. He felt no kinship with Mary or with any American blacks. He felt kinship only with Indaros.
As she died, Mary was as alone on the planet as were Dwayne Hoover or Kilgore Trout. She had never reproduced. There were no friends or relatives to watch her die. So she spoke her very last words on the planet to Cyprian Ukwende. She did not have enough breath left to make her vocal cords buzz. She could only move her lips noiselessly.
Here is all she had to say about death: “Oh my, oh my.”
Like all Earthlings at the point of death, Mary Young sent faint reminders of herself to those who had known her. She released a small cloud of telepathic butterflies, and one of these brushed the cheek of Dwayne Hoover, nine miles away.
Dwayne heard a tired voice from somewhere behind his head, even though no one was back there. It said this to Dwayne: “Oh my, oh my.”
Dwayne’s bad chemicals now made him put his car in gear. He drove out of the vacant lot, proceeded sedately down Union Avenue, which paralleled the Interstate.
He went past his principal place of business, which was Dwayne Hoover’s Exit Eleven Pontiac Village, and he turned into the parking lot of the new Holiday Inn next door. Dwayne owned a third of the Inn—in partnership with Midland City’s leading orthodontist, Dr. Alfred Maritimo, and Bill Miller, who was Chairman of the Parole Board at the Adult Correctional Institution at Shepherdstown, among other things.
Dwayne went up the Inn’s back steps to the roof without meeting anybody. There was a full moon. There were two full moons. The new Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts was a translucent sphere on stilts, and it was illuminated from the inside now—and it looked like a moon.
Dwayne gazed over the sleeping city. He had been born there. He had spent the first three years of his life in an orphanage only two miles from where he stood. He had been adopted and educated there.
He owned not only the Pontiac agency and a piece of the new Holiday Inn. He owned three Burger Chefs, too, and five coin-operated car washes, and pieces of the Sugar Creek Drive-In Theatre, Radio Station WMCY, the Three Maples 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 Dráno—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.

Chapter 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?”

Chapter 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 improve their surroundings. So they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.
The results had been catastrophic so far—suicide, theft, murder, and insanity and so on. But new chemicals were coming onto the market all the time. Twenty feet away from Trout there on Forty-second Street, a fourteen-year-old white boy lay unconscious in the doorway of a pornography store. He had swallowed a half pint of a new type of paint remover which had gone on sale for the first time only the day before. He had also swallowed two pills which were intended to prevent contagious abortion in cattle, which was called Bang’s disease.
Trout was petrified there on Forty-second Street. It had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth.
The theater manager came out and locked the door behind him.
And two young black prostitutes materialized from nowhere. They asked Trout and the manager if they would like to have some fun. They were cheerful and unafraid—because of a tube of Norwegian hemorrhoid remedy which they had eaten about half an hour before. The manufacturer had never intended the stuff to be eaten. People were supposed to squirt it up their assholes.
These were country girls. They had grown up in the rural south of the nation, where their ancestors had been used as agricultural machinery. The white farmers down there weren’t using machines made out of meat anymore, though, because machines made out of metal were cheaper and more reliable, and required simpler homes.
So the black machines had to get out of there, or starve to death. They came to cities because everyplace else had signs like this on the fences and trees: Kilgore Trout once wrote a story called “This Means You.” It was set in the Hawaiian Islands, the place where the lucky winners of Dwayne Hoover’s contest in Midland City were supposed to go. Every bit of land on the islands was owned by only about forty people, and, in the story, Trout had those people decide to exercise their property rights to the full. They put up no trespassing signs on everything.
This created terrible problems for the million other people on the islands. The law of gravity required that they stick somewhere on the surface. Either that, or they could go out into the water and bob offshore.
But then the Federal Government came through with an emergency program. It gave a big balloon full of helium to every man, woman and child who didn’t own property.
There was a cable with a harness on it dangling from each balloon. With the help of the balloons, Hawaiians could go on inhabiting the islands without always sticking to things other people owned.
The prostitutes worked for a pimp now. He was splendid and cruel. He was a god to them. He took their free will away from them, which was perfectly all right. They didn’t want it anyway. It was as though they had surrendered themselves to Jesus, for instance, so they could live unselfishly and trustingly—except that they had surrendered to a pimp instead.
Their childhoods were over. They were dying now. Earth was a tinhorn planet as far as they were concerned.
When Trout and the theater manager, two tinhorns, said they didn’t want any tinhorn fun, the dying children sauntered off, their feet sticking to the planet, coming unstuck, then sticking again. They disappeared around a corner. Trout, the eyes and ears of the Creator of the Universe, sneezed.
“God bless you,” said the manager. This was a fully automatic response many Americans had to hearing a person sneeze.
“Thank you,” said Trout. Thus a temporary friendship was formed.
Trout said he hoped to get safely to a cheap hotel. The manager said he hoped, to get to the subway station on Times Square. So they walked together, encouraged by the echoes of their footsteps from the building facades.
The manager told Trout a little about what the planet looked like to him. It was a place where he had a wife and two kids, he said. They didn’t know he ran a theater which showed blue movies. They thought he was doing consulting work as an engineer so late at night. He said that the planet didn’t have much use for engineers his age anymore. It had adored them once.
“Hard times,” said Trout.
The manager told of being in on the development of a miraculous insulating material, which had been used on rocket ships to the Moon. This was, in fact, the same material which gave the aluminum siding of Dwayne Hoover’s dream house in Midland City its miraculous insulating qualities.
The manager reminded Trout of what the first man to set foot on the Moon had said: “One small step for man, one great leap for mankind.”
“Thrilling words,” said Trout. He looked over his shoulder, perceived that they were being followed by a white Olds-mobile Toronado with a black vinyl roof. This four hundred horsepower, front-wheel drive vehicle was burbling along at about three miles an hour, ten feet behind them and close to the curb.
That was the last thing Trout remembered—seeing the Oldsmobile orn there. H

BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS

KURT VONNEGUT

eForeword

“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane” — so reads the epitaph for Kilgore Trout, who is one of several alter egos of the author Kurt Vonnegut in his explosively funny and ironic 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions. The world Vonnegut explores is not a healthy one — as the title suggests, it is the United States of America in the age of Vietnam, Nixon and the Silent Majority — but it is desperately trying to seem so. An obscure science fiction writer takes a wild road trip to the middle of the Midwest, where his fate becomes intertwined with that of a successful car dealer who is slowly going mad. Vonnegut takes this opportunity to question a number of assumptions, including the very nature of the novel he is writing. A tour de force of imagination and scathing insight, Breakfast of Champions is one of the most discussed and widely read American novels of the late 20th century.
The American novelist Kurt Vonnegut (b. 1922) occupies an unusual but enduring place in modern American fiction, that of the prolific, critically acclaimed writer whose work has also enjoyed enormous popularity and inspired a virtual cult following. Vonnegut’s first work appeared in the early 1950s, and few writers have captured the modern age as consistently and as imaginatively as he has. Often blending satire with science fiction, Vonnegut’s writing reflects an acute sense of the ironies in modern American life. Nowhere is his richly ambivalent feeling about the contemporary American scene more brilliantly realized than in Breakfast of Champions , published just after Vonnegut’s 50th birthday, ending a four-year hiatus that followed appearance of Slaughterhouse Five.
RosettaBooks is the leading publisher dedicated exclusively to electronic editions of great works of fiction and non-fiction that reflect our world. RosettaBooks is a committed e-publisher, maximizing the resources of the World Wide Web in opening a fresh dimension in the reading experience. In this electronic environment for reading, each RosettaBook will enhance the experience through The RosettaBooks Connection. This gateway instantly delivers to the reader the opportunity to learn more about the title, the author, the content and the context of each work, using the full resources of the Web.
Other Vonnegut titles available from RosettaBooks include Slaughterhouse Five, Cat’s Cradle, The Sirens of Titan and Player Piano.


In Memory of Phoebe Hurty, who comforted me in
Indianapolis—during the Great Depression.



When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.
–Job

Preface

The expression “Breakfast of Champions” is a registered trademark of General Mills, Inc., for use on a breakfast cereal product. The use of the identical expression as the title for this book is not intended to indicate an association with or sponsorship by General Mills, nor is it intended to disparage their fine products.
The person to whom this book is dedicated, Phoebe Hurty, is no longer among the living, as they say. She was an Indianapolis widow when I met her late in the Great Depression. I was sixteen or so. She was about forty.
She was rich, but she had gone to work every weekday of her adult life, so she went on doing that. She wrote a sane and funny advice-tothe-lovelorn column for the Indianapolis Times, a good paper which is now defunct.
Defunct.
She wrote ads for the William H. Block Company, a department store which still flourishes in a building my father designed. She wrote this ad for an end-of-the-summer sale on straw hats: “For prices like this, you can run them through your horse and put them on your roses.”
Phoebe Hurty hired me to write copy for ads about teenage clothes. I had to wear the clothes I praised. That was part of the job. And I became friends with her two sons, who were my age. I was over at their house all the time.
She would talk bawdily to me and her sons, and to our girlfriends when we brought them around. She was funny. She was liberating.
She taught us to be impolite in conversation not only about sexual matters, but about American history and famous heroes, about the distribution of wealth, about school, about everything.
I now make my living by being impolite. I am clumsy at it. I keep trying to imitate the impoliteness which was so graceful in Phoebe Hurty. I think now that grace was easier for her than it is for me because of the mood of the Great Depression. She believed what so many Americans believed then: that the nation would be happy and just and rational when prosperity came.
I never hear that word anymore: Prosperity. It used to be a synonym for Paradise. And Phoebe Hurty was able to believe that the impoliteness she recommended would give shape to an American paradise.
Now her sort of impoliteness is fashionable. But nobody believes anymore in a new American paradise. I sure miss Phoebe Hurty.
As for the suspicion I express in this book, that human beings are robots, are machines: It should be noted that people, mostly men, suffering from the last stages of syphilis, from locomotor ataxia, were common spectacles in downtown Indianapolis and in circus crowds when I was a boy.
Those people were infested with carnivorous little corkscrews which could be seen only with a microscope. The victims’ vertebrae were welded together after the corkscrews got through with the meat between. The syphilitics seemed tremendously dignified—erect, eyes straight ahead.
I saw one stand on a curb at the corner of Meridian and Washington streets one time, underneath an overhanging clock which my father designed. The intersection was known locally as “The Crossroads of America.”
This syphilitic man was thinking hard there, at the Crossroads of America, about how to get his legs to step off the curb and carry him across Washington Street. He shuddered gently, as though he had a small motor which was idling inside. Here was his problem: his brains, where the instructions to his legs originated, were being eaten alive by corkscrews. The wires which had to carry the instructions weren’t insulated anymore, or were eaten clear through. Switches along the way were welded open or shut.
This man looked like an old, old man, although he might have been only thirty years old. He thought and thought. And then he kicked two times like a chorus girl.
He certainly looked like a machine to me when I was a boy.
I tend to think of human beings as huge, rubbery test tubes, too, with chemical reactions seething inside. When I was a boy, I saw a lot of people with goiters. So did Dwayne Hoover, the Pontiac dealer who is the hero of this book. Those unhappy Earthlings had such swollen thyroid glands that they seemed to have zucchini squash growing from their throats.
All they had to do in order to have ordinary lives, it turned out, was to consume less than one-millionth of an ounce of iodine every day.
My own mother wrecked her brains with chemicals, which were supposed to make her sleep.
When I get depressed, I take a little pill, and I cheer up again.
And so on.
So it is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.
What do I myself think of this particular book? I feel lousy about it, but I always feel lousy about my books. My friend Knox Burger said one time that a certain cumbersome novel “. . . read as though it had been written by Philboyd Studge.” That’s who I think I am when I write what I am seemingly programmed to write.
This book is my fiftieth-birthday present to myself. I feel as though I am crossing the spine of a roof—having ascended one slope.
I am programmed at fifty to perform childishly—to insult “The Star-Spangled Banner,” to scrawl pictures of a Nazi flag and an asshole and a lot of other things with a felt-tipped pen. To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is my picture of an asshole: I think I am trying to clear my head of all the junk in there—the assholes, the flags, the underpants. Yes—there is a picture in this book of underpants. I’m throwing out characters from my other books, too. I’m not going to put on any more puppet shows.
I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago.
I suspect that this is something most white Americans, and nonwhite Americans who imitate white Americans, should do. The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.
I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can’t live without a culture anymore.
So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden
silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men
who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred.

Veterans’ Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will
keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
And all music is.

—PHILBOYD STUDGE

Chapter 1

This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.
One of them was a science-fiction writer named Kilgore Trout. He was a nobody at the time, and he supposed his life was over. He was mistaken. As a consequence of the meeting, he became one of the most beloved and respected human beings in history.
The man he met was an automobile dealer, a Pontiac dealer named Dwayne Hoover. Dwayne Hoover was on the brink of going insane.
Listen:
Trout and Hoover were citizens of the United States of America, a country which was called America for short. This was their national anthem, which was pure balderdash, like so much they were expected to take seriously:
O, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thru the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

There were one quadrillion nations in the Universe, but the nation Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout belonged to was the only one with a national anthem which was gibberish sprinkled with question marks.
Here is what their flag looked like:
It was the law of their nation, a law no other nation on the planet had about its flag, which said this: “The flag shall not be dipped to any person or thing.”
Flag-dipping was a form of friendly and respectful salute, which consisted of bringing the flag on a stick closer to the ground, then raising it up again.
The motto of Dwayne Hoover’s and Kilgore Trout’s nation was this, which meant in a language nobody spoke anymore, Out of Many, One: “E pluribus unum.”
The undippable flag was a beauty, and the anthem and the vacant motto might not have mattered much, if it weren’t for this: a lot of citizens were so ignored and cheated and insulted that they thought they might be in the wrong country, or even on the wrong planet, that some terrible mistake had been made. It might have comforted them some if their anthem and their motto had mentioned fairness or brotherhood or hope or happiness, had somehow welcomed them to the society and its real estate.
A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless education, which consisted of the study of hocuspocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well.
But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crimes. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy:
The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.
Here was another piece of evil nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom to human beings everywhere else. There were pictures and statues of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to see. It was sort of an ice-cream cone on fire. It looked like this:
Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines.
The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black.
Color was everything.
Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which was a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched this seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily; so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away.
The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.
When Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout met each other, their country was by far the richest and most powerful country on the planet. It had most of the food and minerals and machinery, and it disciplined other countries by threatening to shoot big rockets at them or to drop things on them from airplanes.
Most other countries didn’t have doodley-squat. Many of them weren’t even inhabitable anymore. They had too many people and not enough space. They had sold everything that was any good, and there wasn’t anything to eat anymore, and still the people went on fucking all the time.
Fucking was how babies were made.
A lot of the people on the wrecked planet were Communists. They had a theory that what was left of the planet should be shared more or less equally among all the people, who hadn’t asked to come to a wrecked planet in the first place. Meanwhile, more babies were arriving all the time—kicking and screaming, yelling for milk.
In some places people would actually try to eat mud or such on gravel while babies were being born just a few feet away.
And so on.
Dwayne Hoover’s and Kilgore Trout’s country, where there was still plenty of everything, was opposed to Communism. It didn’t think that Earthlings who had a lot should share it with others unless they really wanted to, and most of them didn’t want to.
So they didn’t have to.
Everybody in America was supposed to grab whatever he could and hold on to it. Some Americans were very good at grabbing and holding, were fabulously well-to-do. Others couldn’t get their hands on doodley-squat.
Dwayne Hoover was fabulously well-to-do when he met Kilgore Trout. A man whispered those exact words to a friend one morning as Dwayne walked by: “Fabulously well-to-do.”
And here’s how much of the planet Kilgore Trout owned in those days: doodley-squat.
And Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover met in Midland City, which was Dwayne’s home town, during an Arts Festival there in autumn of 1972.
As has already been said: Dwayne was a Pontiac dealer who was going insane.
Dwayne’s incipient insanity was mainly a matter of chemicals, of course. Dwayne Hoover’s body was manufacturing certain chemicals which unbalanced his mind. But Dwayne, like all novice lunatics, needed some bad ideas, too, so that his craziness could have shape and direction.
Bad chemicals and bad ideas were the Yin and Yang of madness. Yin and Yang were Chinese symbols of harmony. They looked like this:
The bad ideas were delivered to Dwayne by Kilgore Trout. Trout considered himself not only harmless but invisible. The world had paid so little attention to him that he supposed he was dead.
He hoped he was dead.
But he learned from his encounter with Dwayne that he was alive enough to give a fellow human being ideas which would turn him into a monster.
Here was the core of the bad ideas which Trout gave to Dwayne: Everybody on Earth was a robot, with one exception—Dwayne Hoover.
Of all the creatures in the Universe, only Dwayne was thinking and feeling and worrying and planning and so on. Nobody else knew what pain was. Nobody else had any choices to make. Everybody else was a fully automatic machine, whose purpose was to stimulate Dwayne. Dwayne was a new type of creature being tested by the Creator of the Universe.
Only Dwayne Hoover had free will.
Trout did not expect to be believed. He put the bad ideas into a science-fiction novel, and that was where Dwayne found them. The book wasn’t addressed to Dwayne alone. Trout had never heard of Dwayne when he wrote it. It was addressed to anybody who happened to open it up. It said to simply anybody, in effect, “Hey— guess what: You’re the only creature with free will. How does that make you feel?” And so on.
It was a tour de force. It was a jeu d’esprit.
But it was mind poison to Dwayne.
It shook up Trout to realize that even he could bring evil into the world—in the form of bad ideas. And, after Dwayne was carted off to a lunatic asylum in a canvas camisole, Trout became a fanatic on the importance of ideas as causes and cures for diseases.
But nobody would listen to him. He was a dirty old man in the wilderness, crying out among the trees and underbrush, “Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease!”
Kilgore Trout became a pioneer in the field of mental health. He advanced his theories disguised as science-fiction. He died in 1981, almost twenty years after he made Dwayne Hoover so sick.
He was by then recognized as a great artist and scientist. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences caused a monument to be erected over his ashes. Carved in its face was a quotation from his last novel, his two-hundred-and-ninth novel, which was unfinished when he died. The monument looked like this:

Chapter 2

Dwayne was a widower. He lived alone at night in a dream house in Fairchild Heights, which was the most desirable residential area in the city. Every house there cost at least one hundred thousand dollars to build. Every house was on at least four acres of land.
Dwayne’s only companion at night was a Labrador retriever named Sparky. Sparky could not wag his tail—because of an automobile accident many years ago, so he had no way of telling other dogs how friendly he was. He had to fight all the time. His ears were in tatters. He was lumpy with scars.
Dwayne had a black servant named Lottie Davis. She cleaned his house every day. Then she cooked his supper for him and served it. Then she went home. She was descended from slaves.
Lottie Davis and Dwayne didn’t talk much, even though they liked each other a lot. Dwayne reserved most of his conversation for the dog. He would get down on the floor and roll around with Sparky, and he would say things like, “You and me, Spark,” and “How’s my old buddy?” and so on.
And that routine went on unrevised, even after Dwayne started to go crazy, so Lottie had nothing unusual to notice.
Kilgore Trout owned a parakeet named Bill. Like Dwayne Hoover, Trout was all alone at night, except for his pet. Trout, too, talked to his pet.
But while Dwayne babbled to his Labrador retriever about love, Trout sneered and muttered to his parakeet about the end of the world.
“Any time now,” he would say. “And high time, too.”
It was Trout’s theory that the atmosphere would become unbreathable soon.
Trout supposed that when the atmosphere became poisonous, Bill would keel over a few minutes before Trout did. He would kid Bill about that. “How’s the old respiration, Bill?” he’d say, or, “Seems like you’ve got a touch of the old emphysema, Bill,” or, “We never discussed what kind of a funeral you want, Bill. You never even told me what your religion is.” And so on.
He told Bill that humanity deserved to die horribly, since it had behaved so cruelly and wastefully on a planet so sweet. “We’re all Heliogabalus, Bill,” he would say. This was the name of a Roman emperor who had a sculptor make a hollow, life-size iron bull with a door on it. The door could be locked from the outside. The bull’s mouth was open. That was the only other opening to the outside.
Heliogabalus would have a human being put into the bull through the door, and the door would be locked. Any sounds the human being made in there would come out of the mouth of the bull. Heliogabalus would have guests in for a nice party, with plenty of food and wine and beautiful women and pretty boys—and Heliogabalus would have a servant light kindling. The kindling was under dry firewood—which was under the bull.
Trout did another thing which some people might have considered eccentric: he called mirrors leaks. It amused him to pretend that mirrors were holes between two universes.
If he saw a child near a mirror, he might wag his finger at a child warningly, and say with great solemnity, “Don’t get too near that leak. You wouldn’t want to wind up in the other universe, would you?”
Sometimes somebody would say in his presence, “Excuse me, I have to take a leak.” This was a way of saying that the speaker intended to drain liquid wastes from his body through a valve in his lower abdomen.
And Trout would reply waggishly, “Where I come from, that means you’re about to steal a mirror.”
And so on.
By the time of Trout’s death, of course, everybody called mirrors leaks. That was how respectable even his jokes had become.
In 1972, Trout lived in a basement apartment in Cohoes, New York. He made his living as an installer of aluminum combination storm windows and screens. He had nothing to do with the sales end of the business—because he had no charm. Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.
Dwayne Hoover had oodles of charm.
I can have oodles of charm when I want to.
A lot of people have oodles of charm.
Trout’s employer and co-workers had no idea that he was a writer. No reputable publisher had ever heard of him, for that matter, even though he had written one hundred and seventeen novels and two thousand short stories by the time he met Dwayne.
He made carbon copies of nothing he wrote. He mailed off manuscripts without enclosing stamped, self-addressed envelopes for their safe return. Sometimes he didn’t even include a return address. He got names and addresses of publishers from magazines devoted to the writing business, which he read avidly in the periodical rooms of public libraries. He thus got in touch with a firm called World Classics Library, which published hard-core pornography in Los Angeles, California. They used his stories, which usually didn’t even have women in them, to give bulk to books and magazines of salacious pictures.
They never told him where or when he might expect to find himself in print. Here is what they paid him: doodley-squat.
They didn’t even send him complimentary copies of the books and magazines in which he appeared, so he had to search them out in pornography stores. And the titles he gave to his stories were often changed. “Pan Galactic Straw-boss,” for instance, became “Mouth Crazy.”
Most distracting to Trout, however, were the illustrations his publishers selected, which had nothing to do with his tales. He wrote a novel, for instance, about an Earthling named Delmore Skag, a bachelor in a neighborhood where everybody else had enormous families. And Skag was a scientist, and he found a way to reproduce himself in chicken soup. He would shave living cells from the palm of his right hand, mix them with the soup, and expose the soup to cosmic rays. The cells turned into babies which looked exactly like Delmore Skag.
Pretty soon, Delmore was having several babies a day, and inviting his neighbors to share his pride and happiness. He had mass baptisms of as many as a hundred babies at a time. He became famous as a family man.
And so on.
Skag hoped to force his country into making laws against excessively large families, but the legislatures and the courts declined to meet the problem head-on. They passed stern laws instead against the possession by unmarried persons of chicken soup.
And so on.
The illustrations for this book were murky photographs of several white women giving blow jobs to the same black man, who, for some reason, wore a Mexican sombrero.
At the time he met Dwayne Hoover, Trout’s most widely-distributed book was Plague on Wheels. The publisher didn’t change the title, but he obliterated most of it and all of Trout’s name with a lurid banner which made this promise:
A wide-open beaver was a photograph of a woman not wearing underpants, and with her legs far apart, so that the mouth of her
vagina could be seen. The expression was first used by news photographers, who often got to see up women’s skirts at accidents and sporting events and from underneath fire escapes and so on. They needed a code word to yell to other newsmen and friendly policemen and firemen and so on, to let them know what could be seen, in case they wanted to see it. The word was this: “Beaver!”
A beaver was actually a large rodent. It loved water, so it built dams. It looked like this:
The sort of beaver which excited news photographers so much looked like this:
This was where babies came from.
When Dwayne was a boy, when Kilgore Trout was a boy, when I was a boy, and even when we became middle-aged men and older, it was
the duty of the police and the courts to keep representations of such ordinary apertures from being examined and discussed by persons not engaged in the practice of medicine. It was somehow decided that wide-open beavers, which were ten thousand times as common as real beavers, should be the most massively defended secret under law.
So there was a madness about wide-open beavers. There was also a madness about a soft, weak metal, an element, which had somehow been declared the most desirable of all elements, which was gold.
And the madness about wide-open beavers was extended to underpants when Dwayne and Trout and I were boys. Girls concealed their underpants at all costs, and boys tried to see their underpants at all costs.
Female underpants looked like this:
One of the first things Dwayne learned in school as a little boy, in fact, was a poem he was supposed to scream in case he saw a girl’s underpants by accident in the playground. Other students taught it to him. This was it:
I see England,
I see France;
I see a little girl’s
Underpants!
When Kilgore Trout accepted the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1979, he declared: “Some people say there is no such thing as progress. The fact that human beings are now the only animals left on Earth, I confess, seems a confusing sort of victory. Those of you familiar with the nature of my earlier published works will understand why I mourned especially when the last beaver died.
“There were two monsters sharing this planet with us when I was a boy, however, and I celebrate their extinction today. They were determined to kill us, or at least to make our lives meaningless. They came close to success. They were cruel adversaries, which my little friends the beavers were not. Lions? No. Tigers? No. Lions and tigers snoozed most of the time. The monsters I will name never snoozed. They inhabited our heads. They were the arbitrary lusts for gold, and, God help us, for a glimpse of a little girl’s underpants.
“I thank those lusts for being so ridiculous, for they taught us that it was possible for a human being to believe anything, and to behave passionately in keeping with that belief—any belief.
“So now we can build an unselfish society by devoting to unselfishness the frenzy we once devoted to gold and to underpants.”
He paused, and then he recited with wry mournfulness the beginning of a poem he had learned to scream in Bermuda, when he was a little boy. The poem was all the more poignant, since it mentioned two nations which no longer existed as such. “I see England,” he said, “I see France—”
Actually, women’s underpants had been drastically devalued by the time of the historic meeting between Dwayne Hoover and Trout. The price of gold was still on the rise.
Photographs of women’s underpants weren’t worth the paper they were printed on, and even high quality color motion pictures of wide-open beavers were going begging in the marketplace.
There had been a time when a copy of Trout’s most popular book to date, Plague on Wheels, had brought as much as twelve dollars, because of the illustrations. It was now being offered for a dollar, and people who paid even that much did so not because of the pictures. They paid for the words.
The words in the book, incidentally, were about life on a dying planet named Lingo-Three, whose inhabitants resembled American automobiles. They had wheels. They were powered by internal combustion engines. They ate fossil fuels. They weren’t manufactured, though. They reproduced. They laid eggs containing baby automobiles, and the babies matured in pools of oil drained from adult crankcases.
Lingo-Three was visited by space travelers, who learned that the creatures were becoming extinct for this reason: they had destroyed their planet’s resources, including its atmosphere.
The space travelers weren’t able to offer much in the way of material assistance. The automobile creatures hoped to borrow some oxygen, and to have the visitors carry at least one of their eggs to another planet, where it might hatch, where an automobile civilization could begin again. But the smallest egg they had was a forty-eight pounder, and the space travelers themselves were only an inch high, and their space ship wasn’t even as big as an Earthling shoebox. They were from Zeltoldimar.
The spokesman for the Zeltoldimarians was Kago. Kago said that all he could do was to tell others in the Universe about how wonderful the automobile creatures had been. Here is what he said to all those rusting junkers who were out of gas: “You will be gone, but not forgotten.”
The illustration for the story at this point showed two Chinese girls, seemingly identical twins, seated on a couch with their legs wide open.
So Kago and his brave little Zeltoldimarian crew, which was all homosexual, roamed the Universe, keeping the memory of the automobile creatures alive. They came at last to the planet Earth. In all innocence, Kago told the Earthlings about the automobiles. Kago did not know that human beings could be as easily felled by a single idea as by cholera or the bubonic plague. There was no immunity to cuckoo ideas on Earth.
And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: “Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.
“The ideas Earthlings held didn’t matter for hundreds of thousands of years, since they couldn’t do much about them anyway. Ideas might as well be badges as anything.
“They even had a saying about the futility of ideas: ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’
“And then Earthlings discovered tools. Suddenly agreeing with friends could be a form of suicide or worse. But agreements went on, not for the sake of common sense or decency or self-preservation, but for friendliness.
“Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead. And even when they built computers to do some thinking for them, they designed them not so much for wisdom as for friendliness. So they were doomed. Homicidal beggars could ride.”

Chapter 3

Within a century of little Kago’s arrival on Earth, according to Trout’s novel, every form of life on that once peaceful and moist and nourishing blue-green ball was dying or dead. Everywhere were the shells of the great beetles which men had made and worshipped. They were automobiles. They had killed everything.
Little Kago himself died long before the planet did. He was attempting to lecture on the evils of the automobile in a bar in Detroit. But he was so tiny that nobody paid any attention to him. He lay down to rest for a moment, and a drunk automobile worker mistook him for a kitchen match. He killed Kago by trying to strike him repeatedly on the underside of the bar.
Trout received only one fan letter before 1972. It was from an eccentric millionaire, who hired a private detective agency to discover who and where he was. Trout was so invisible that the search cost eighteen thousand dollars.
The fan letter reached him in his basement in Cohoes. It was handwritten, and Trout concluded that the writer might be fourteen years old or so. The letter said that Plague on Wheels was the greatest novel in the English language, and that Trout should be President of the United States.
Trout read the letter out loud to his parakeet. “Things are looking up, Bill,” he said. “Always knew they would. Get a load of this.” And then he read the letter. There was no indication in the letter that the writer, whose name was Eliot Rosewater, was a grownup, was fabulously well-to-do.
Kilgore Trout, incidentally, could never be President of the United States without a Constitutional amendment. He hadn’t been born inside the country. His birthplace was Bermuda. His father, Leo Trout, while remaining an American citizen, worked there for many years for the Royal Ornithological Society—guarding the only nesting place in the world for Bermuda Erns. These great green sea eagles eventually became extinct, despite anything anyone could do.
As a child, Trout had seen those Erns die, one by one. His father had assigned him the melancholy task of measuring wingspreads of the corpses. These were the largest creatures ever to fly under their own power on the planet. And the last corpse had the greatest wingspread of all, which was nineteen feet, two and three-quarters inches.
After all the Erns were dead, it was discovered what had killed them. It was a fungus, which attacked their eyes and brains. Men had brought the fungus to their rookery in the innocent form of athlete’s foot.
Here is what the flag of Kilgore Trout’s native island looked like:
So Kilgore Trout had a depressing childhood, despite all of the sunshine and fresh air. The pessimism that overwhelmed him in later life, which destroyed his three marriages, which drove his only son, Leo, from home at the age of fourteen, very likely had its roots in the bittersweet mulch of rotting Erns.
The fan letter came much too late. It wasn’t good news. It was perceived as an invasion of privacy by Kilgore Trout. The letter from Rosewater promised that he would make Trout famous. This is what Trout had to say about that, with only his parakeet listening: “Keep the hell out of my body bag.”
A body bag was a large plastic envelope for a freshly killed American soldier. It was a new invention.
I do not know who invented the body bag. I do know who invented Kilgore Trout. I did.
I made him snaggle-toothed. I gave him hair, but I turned it white. I wouldn’t let him comb it or go to a barber. I made him grow it long and tangled.
I gave him the same legs the Creator of the Universe gave to my father when my father was a pitiful old man. They were pale white broomsticks. They were hairless. They were embossed fantastically with varicose veins.
And, two months after Trout received his first fan letter, I had him find in his mailbox an invitation to be a speaker at an arts festival in the American Middle West.
The letter was from the Festival’s chairman, Fred T. Barry. He was respectful, almost reverent about Kilgore Trout. He beseeched him to be one of several distinguished out-of-town participants in the Festival, which would last for five days. It would celebrate the opening of the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts in Midland City.
The letter did not say so, but Mildred Barry was the late mother of the Chairman, the wealthiest man in Midland City. Fred T. Barry had paid for the new Center of the Arts, which was a translucent sphere on stilts. It had no windows. When illuminated inside at night, it resembled a rising harvest moon.
Fred T. Barry, incidentally, was exactly the same age as Trout. They had the same birthday. But they certainly didn’t look anything alike. Fred T. Barry didn’t even look like a white man anymore, even though he was of pure English stock. As he grew older and older and happier and happier, and all his hair fell out everywhere, he came to look like an ecstatic old Chinaman.
He looked so much like a Chinaman that he had taken to dressing like a Chinaman. Real Chinamen often mistook him for a real Chinaman.
Fred T. Barry confessed in his letter that he had not read the works of Kilgore Trout, but that he would joyfully do so before the Festival began. “You come highly recommended by Eliot Rosewater,” he said, “who assures me that you are perhaps the greatest living American novelist. There can be no higher praise than that.”
Clipped to the letter was a check for one thousand dollars. Fred T. Barry explained that this was for travel expenses and an honorarium.
It was a lot of money. Trout was suddenly fabulously well-to-do.
Here is how Trout happened to be invited: Fred T. Barry wanted to have a fabulously valuable oil painting as a focal point for the Midland City Festival of the Arts. As rich as he was, he couldn’t afford to buy one, so he looked for one to borrow.
The first person he went to was Eliot Rosewater, who owned an El Greco worth three million dollars or more. Rosewater said the Festival could have the picture on one condition: that it hire as a speaker the greatest living writer in the English language, who was Kilgore Trout.
Trout laughed at the flattering invitation, but he felt fear after that. Once again, a stranger was tampering with the privacy of his body bag. He put this question to his parakeet haggardly, and he rolled his eyes: “Why all this sudden interest in Kilgore Trout?”
He read the letter again. “They not only want Kilgore Trout,” he said, “they want him in a tuxedo, Bill. Some mistake has been made.”
He shrugged. “Maybe they invited me because they know I have a tuxedo,” he said. He really did own a tuxedo. It was in a steamer trunk which he had lugged from place to place for more than forty years. It contained toys from childhood, the bones of a Bermuda Ern, and many other curiosities including the tuxedo he had worn to a senior dance just prior to his graduation from Thomas Jefferson High School in Dayton, Ohio, in 1924. Trout was born in Bermuda, and attended grammar school there. But then his family moved to Dayton.
His high school was named after a slave owner who was also one of the world’s greatest theoreticians on the subject of human liberty.
Trout got his tuxedo out of the trunk and he put it on. It was a lot like a tuxedo I’d seen my father put on when he was an old, old man. It had a greenish patina of mold. Some of the growths it supported resembled patches of fine rabbit fur. “This will do nicely for the evenings,” said Trout. “But tell me, Bill—what does one wear in Midland City in October before the sun goes down?” He hauled up his pants legs so that his grotesquely ornamental shins were exposed. “Bermuda shorts and bobby socks, eh, Bill? After all—I am from Bermuda.”
He dabbed at his tuxedo with a damp rag, and the fungi came away easily. “Hate to do this, Bill,” he said of the fungi he was murdering. “Fungi have as much right to life as I do. They know what they want, Bill. Damned if I do anymore.”
Then he thought about what Bill himself might want. It was easy to guess. “Bill,” he said, “I like you so much, and I am such a big shot in the Universe, that I will make your three biggest wishes come true.” He opened the door of the cage, something Bill couldn’t have done in a thousand years.
Bill flew over to a windowsill. He put his little shoulder against the glass. There was just one layer of glass between Bill and the great out-of-doors. Although Trout was in the storm window business, he had no storm windows on his own abode.
“Your second wish is about to come true,” said Trout, and he again did something which Bill could never have done. He opened the window. But the opening of the window was such an alarming business to the parakeet that he flew back to his cage and hopped inside.
Trout closed the door of the cage and latched it. “That’s the most intelligent use of three wishes I ever heard of,” he told the bird. “You made sure you’d still have something worth wishing for—to get out of the cage.”
Trout made the connection between his lone fan letter and the invitation, but he couldn’t believe that Eliot Rosewater was a grownup. Rosewater’s handwriting looked like this: “Bill,” said Trout tentatively, “some teen-ager named Rosewater got me this job. His parents must be friends of the Chairman of the Arts Festival, and they don’t know anything about books out that way. So when he said I was good, they believed him.”
Trout shook his head. “I’m not going, Bill. I don’t want out of my cage. I’m too smart for that. Even if I did want out, though, I wouldn’t go to Midland City to make a laughing stock of myself—and my only fan.”
He left it at that. But he reread the invitation from time to time, got to know it by heart. And then one of the subtler messages on the paper got through to him. It was in the letterhead, which displayed two masks intended to represent comedy and tragedy:
One mask looked like this:
The other one looked like this:
“They don’t want anything but smilers out there,” Trout said to his parakeet. “Unhappy failures need not apply.” But his mind wouldn’t leave it alone at that. He got an idea which he found very tangy: “But maybe an unhappy failure is exactly what they need to see.”
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:

Chapter 4

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.
“I would remember that he was the best employer in town,” said Francine. This was true. Dwayne paid high wages. He had profit-sharing and Christmas bonuses at the end of every year. He was the first automobile dealer in his part of the State to offer his employees Blue Cross-Blue Shield, which was health insurance. He had a retirement plan which was superior to every retirement plan in the city with the exception of the one at Barrytron. His office door was always open to any employee who had troubles to discuss, whether they had to do with the automobile business or not.
For instance, on the day he insulted Harry’s clothing, he also spent two hours with Vernon Garr, discussing the hallucinations Vernon’s wife was having. “She sees things that aren’t there,” said Vernon.
“She needs rest, Vern,” said Dwayne.
“Maybe I’m going crazy, too,” said Vernon. “Christ, I go home and I talk for hours to my fucking dog.”
“That makes two of us,” said Dwayne.
Here is the scene between Harry and Dwayne which upset Harry so much:
Harry went into Dwayne’s office right after Vernon left. He expected no trouble, because he had never had any serious trouble with Dwayne.
“How’s my old combat buddy today?” he said to Dwayne.
“As good as can be expected,” said Dwayne. “Anything special bothering you?”
“No,” said Harry.
“Vern’s wife thinks Vern is trying to turn her brains into plutonium,” said Dwayne.
“What’s plutonium?” said Harry, and so on. They rambled along, and Harry made up a problem for himself just to keep the conversation lively. He said he was sad sometimes that he had no children. “But I’m glad in a way, too,” he went on. “I mean, why should I contribute to overpopulation?”
Dwayne didn’t say anything.
“Maybe we should have adopted one,” said Harry, “but it’s too late now. And the old lady and me—we have a good time just horsing around with ourselves. What do we need a kid for?”
It was after the mention of adoption that Dwayne blew up. He himself had been adopted—by a couple who had moved to Midland City from West Virginia in order to make big money as factory workers in the First World War. Dwayne’s real mother was a spinster school teacher who wrote sentimental poetry and claimed to be descended from Richard the Lion-Hearted, who was a king. His real father was an itinerant typesetter, who seduced his mother by setting her poems in type. He didn’t sneak them into a newspaper or anything. It was enough for her that they were set in type.
She was a defective child-bearing machine. She destroyed herself automatically while giving birth to Dwayne. The printer disappeared. He was a disappearing machine.
It may be that the subject of adoption caused an unfortunate chemical reaction in Dwayne’s head. At any rate, Dwayne suddenly snarled this at Harry: “Harry, why don’t you get a bunch of cotton waste from Vern Garr, soak it in Blue Sunoco, and burn up your fucking wardrobe? You make me feel like I’m at Watson Brothers.” Watson Brothers was the name of the funeral parlor for white people who were at least moderately well-to-do. Blue Sunoco was a brand of gasoline.
Harry was startled, and then pain set in. Dwayne had never said anything about his clothes in all the years he’d known him. The clothes were conservative and neat, in Harry’s opinion. His shirts were white. His ties were black or navy blue. His suits were gray or dark blue. His shoes and socks were black.
“Listen, Harry,” said Dwayne, and his expression was mean, “Hawaiian Week is coming up, and I’m absolutely serious: burn your clothes and get new ones, or apply for work at Watson Brothers. Have yourself embalmed while you’re at it.”
Harry couldn’t do anything but let his mouth hang open. The Hawaiian Week Dwayne had mentioned was a sales promotion scheme which involved making the agency look as much like the Hawaiian Islands as possible. People who bought new or used cars, or had repairs done in excess of five hundred dollars during the week would be entered automatically in a lottery. Three lucky people would each win a free, all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas and San Francisco and then Hawaii for a party of two.
“I don’t mind that you have the name of a Buick, Harry, when you’re supposed to be selling Pontiacs—” Dwayne went on. He was referring to the fact that the Buick division of General Motors put out a model called the Le Sabre. “You can’t help that.” Dwayne now patted the top of his desk softly. This was somehow more menacing than if he had pounded the desk with his fist. “But there are a hell of a lot of things you can change, Harry. There’s a long weekend coming up. I expect to see some big changes in you when I come to work on Tuesday morning.”
The weekend was extra-long because the coming Monday was a national holiday, Veterans’ Day. It was in honor of people who had served their country in uniform.
“When we started selling Pontiacs, Harry,” said Dwayne, “the car was sensible transportation for school teachers and grandmothers and maiden aunts.” This was true. “Perhaps you haven’t noticed, Harry, but the Pontiac has now become a glamorous, youthful adventure for people who want a kick out of life! And you dress and act like this was a mortuary! Look at yourself in a mirror, Harry, and ask yourself, ‘Who could ever associate a man like this with a Pontiac?’”
Harry LeSabre was too choked up to point out to Dwayne that, no matter what he looked like, he was generally acknowledged to be one of the most effective sales managers for Pontiac not only in the State, but in the entire Middle West. Pontiac was the best-selling automobile in the Midland City area, despite the fact that it was not a low-price car. It was a medium-price car.
Dwayne Hoover told poor Harry LeSabre that the Hawaiian Festival, only a long weekend away, was Harry’s golden opportunity to loosen up, to have some fun, to encourage other people to have some fun, too.
“Harry,” said Dwayne. “I have some news for you: modern science has given us a whole lot of wonderful new colors, with strange, exciting names like red!, orange!, green!, and pink!, Harry. We’re not stuck any more with just black, gray and white! Isn’t that good news, Harry? And the State Legislature has just announced that it is no longer a crime to smile during working hours, Harry, and I have the personal promise of the Governor that never again will anybody be sent to the Sexual Offenders’ Wing of the Adult Correctional Institution for telling a joke!”
Harry LeSabre might have weathered all this with only minor damage, if only Harry hadn’t been a secret transvestite. On weekends he liked to dress up in women’s clothing, and not drab clothing, either. Harry and his wife would pull down the window blinds, and Harry would turn into a bird of paradise.
Nobody but Harry’s wife knew his secret.
When Dwayne razzed him about the clothes he wore to work, and then mentioned the Sexual Offenders’ Wing of the Adult Correctional Institution at Shepherdstown, Harry had to suspect that his secret was out. And it wasn’t merely a comical secret, either. Harry could be arrested for what he did on weekends. He could be fined up to three thousand dollars and sentenced to as much as five years at hard labor in the Sexual Offenders’ Wing of the Adult Correctional Institution at Shepherdstown.
So poor Harry spent a wretched Veterans’ Day weekend after that. But Dwayne spent a worse one.
Here is what the last night of that weekend was like for Dwayne: his bad chemicals rolled him out of bed. They made him dress as though there were some sort of emergency with which he had to deal. This was in the wee hours. Veterans’ Day had ended at the stroke of twelve.
Dwayne’s bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to make holes in human beings. It looked like this:
right In Dwayne’s part of the planet, anybody who wanted one could get one down at his local hardware store. Policemen all had them. So did the criminals. So did the people caught in between.
Criminals would point guns at people and say, “Give me all your money,” and the people usually would. And policemen would point their guns at criminals and say, “Stop” or whatever the situation called for, and the criminals usually would. Sometimes they wouldn’t. Sometimes a wife would get so mad at her husband that she would put a hole in him with a gun. Sometimes a husband would get so mad at his wife that he would put a hole in her. And so on.
In the same week Dwayne Hoover ran amok, a fourteen-year-old Midland City boy put holes in his mother and father because he didn’t want to show them the bad report card he had brought home. His lawyer planned to enter a plea of temporary insanity, which meant that at the time of the shooting the boy was unable to distinguish the difference between right and wrong.
Sometimes people would put holes in famous people so they could be at least fairly famous, too. Sometimes people would get on airplanes which were supposed to fly to someplace, and they would offer to put holes in the pilot and co-pilot unless they flew the airplane to someplace else.
Dwayne held the muzzle of his gun in his mouth for a while. He tasted oil. The gun was loaded and cocked. There were neat little metal packages containing charcoal, potassium nitrate and sulphur only inches from his brains. He had only to trip a lever, and the powder would turn to gas. The gas would blow a chunk of lead down a tube and through Dwayne’s brains.
But Dwayne elected to shoot up one of his tiled bathrooms instead. He put chunks of lead through his toilet and a washbasin and a bathtub enclosure. There was a picture of a flamingo sandblasted on the glass of the bathtub enclosure. It looked like this: Dwayne shot the flamingo.
He snarled at his recollection of it afterwards. Here is what he snarled: “Dumb fucking bird.”
Nobody heard the shots. All the houses in the neighborhood were too well insulated for sound ever to get in or out. A sound wanting in or out of Dwayne’s dreamhouse, for instance, had to go through an inch and a half of plasterboard, a polystyrene vapor barrier, a sheet of aluminum foil, a three-inch airspace, another sheet of aluminum foil, a three-inch blanket of glass wool, another sheet of aluminum foil, one inch of insulating board made of pressed sawdust, tarpaper, one inch of wood sheathing, more tarpaper, and then aluminum siding which was hollow. The space in the siding was filled with a miracle insulating material developed for use on rockets to the Moon.
Dwayne turned on the floodlights around his house, and he played basketball on the blacktop apron outside his five-car garage.
Dwayne’s dog Sparky hid in the basement when Dwayne shot up the bathroom. But he came out now. Sparky watched Dwayne play basketball.
“You and me, Sparky,” said Dwayne. And so on. He sure loved that dog.
Nobody saw him playing basketball. He was screened from his neighbors by trees and shrubs and a high cedar fence.
He put the basketball away, and he climbed into a black Plymouth Fury he had taken in trade the day before. The Plymouth was a Chrysler product, and Dwayne himself sold General Motors products. He had decided to drive the Plymouth for a day or two in order to keep abreast of the competition.
As he backed out of his driveway, he thought it important to explain to his neighbors why he was in a Plymouth Fury, so he yelled out the window: “Keeping abreast of the competition!” He blew his horn.
Dwayne zoomed down Old County Road and onto the Interstate, which he had all to himself. He swerved into Exit Ten at a high rate of speed, slammed into a guardrail, spun around and around. He came out onto Union Avenue going backwards, jumped a curb, and came to a stop in a vacant lot. Dwayne owned the lot.
Nobody saw or heard anything. Nobody lived in the area. A policeman was supposed to cruise by about once every hour or so, but he was cooping in an alley behind a Western Electric warehouse about two miles away. Cooping was police slang for sleeping on the job.
Dwayne stayed in his vacant lot for a while. He played the radio. All the Midland City stations were asleep for the night, but Dwayne picked up a country music station in West Virginia, which offered him ten different kinds of flowering shrubs and five fruit trees for six dollars, C.O.D.
“Sounds good to me,” said Dwayne. He meant it. Almost all the messages which were sent and received in his country, even the telepathic ones, had to do with buying or selling some damn thing. They were like lullabies to Dwayne.

Chapter 5

While Dwayne Hoover listened to West Virginia, Kilgore Trout tried to fall asleep in a movie theater in New York City. It was much cheaper than a night in a hotel. Trout had never done it before, but he knew sleeping in movie houses was the sort of thing really dirty old men did. He wished to arrive in Midland City as the dirtiest of all old men. He was supposed to take part in a symposium out there entitled “The Future of the American Novel in the Age of McLuhan.” He wished to say at that symposium, “I don’t know who McLuhan is, but I know what it’s like to spend the night with a lot of other dirty old men in a movie theater in New York City. Could we talk about that?”
He wished to say, too, “Does this McLuhan, whoever he is, have anything to say about the relationship between wide-open beavers and the sales of books?”
Trout had come down from Cohoes late that afternoon. He had since visited many pornography shops and a shirt store. He had bought two of his own books, Plague on Wheels and Now It Can Be Told, a magazine containing a short story of his, and a tuxedo shirt. The name of the magazine was Black Garterbelt. The tuxedo shirt had a cascade of ruffles down its bosom. On the shirt salesman’s advice, Trout had also bought a packaged ensemble consisting of a cumberbund, a boutonnière, and a bow tie. They were all the color of tangerines.
These goodies were all in his lap, along with a crackling brown paper parcel containing his tuxedo, six new pairs of jockey shorts, six new pairs of socks, his razor and a new toothbrush. Trout hadn’t owned a toothbrush for years.
The jackets of Plague on Wheels and Now It Can Be Told both promised plenty of wide-open beavers inside. The picture on the cover of Now It Can Be Told, which was the book which would turn Dwayne Hoover into a homicidal maniac, showed a college professor being undressed by a group of naked sorority girls. A library tower could be seen through a window in the sorority house. It was daytime outside, and there was a clock in the tower. The clock looked like this:
The professor was stripped down to his candy-striped underwear shorts and his socks and garters and his mortar-board, which was a hat which looked like this:
There was absolutely nothing about a professor or a sorority or a university anywhere in the body of the book. The book was in the form of a long letter from the Creator of the Universe to the only creature in the Universe who had free will.
As for the story in Black Garterbelt magazine: Trout had no idea that it had been accepted for publication. It had been accepted years ago, apparently, for the date on the magazine was April, 1962. Trout found it by chance in a bin of tame old magazines near the front of the store. They were underpants magazines.
When he bought the magazine, the cashier supposed Trout was drunk or feeble-minded. All he was getting, the cashier thought, was pictures of women in their underpants. Their legs were apart, all right, but they had on underpants, so they were certainly no competition for the wide-open beavers on sale in the back of the store.
“I hope you enjoy it,” said the cashier to Trout. He meant that he hoped Trout would find some pictures he could masturbate to, since that was the only point of all the books and magazines.
“It’s for an arts festival,” said Trout.
As for the story itself, it was entitled “The Dancing Fool.” Like so many Trout stories, it was about a tragic failure to communicate.
Here was the plot: A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing.
Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golfclub.
The movie theater where Trout sat with all his parcels in his lap showed nothing but dirty movies. The music was soothing. Phantasms of a young man and a young woman sucked harmlessly on one another’s soft apertures on the silver screen.
And Trout made up a new novel while he sat there. It was about an Earthling astronaut who arrived on a planet where all the animal and plant life had been killed by pollution, except for humanoids. The humanoids ate food made from petroleum and coal.
They gave a feast for the astronaut, whose name was Don. The food was terrible. The big topic of conversation was censorship. The cities were blighted with motion picture theaters which showed nothing but dirty movies. The humanoids wished they could put them out of business somehow, but without interfering with free speech.
They asked Don if dirty movies were a problem on Earth, too, and Don said, “Yes.” They asked him if the movies were really dirty, and Don replied, “As dirty as movies could get.”
This was a challenge to the humanoids, who were sure their dirty movies could beat anything on Earth. So everybody piled into air-cushion vehicles, and they floated to a dirty movie house downtown.
It was intermission time when they got there, so Don had some time to think about what could possibly be dirtier than what he had already seen on Earth. He became sexually excited even before the house lights went down. The women in his party were all twittery and squirmy.
So the theater went dark and the curtains opened. At first there wasn’t any picture. There were slurps and moans from loudspeakers. Then the picture itself appeared. It was a high quality film of a male humanoid eating what looked like a pear. The camera zoomed in on his lips and tongue and teeth, which glistened with saliva. He took his time about eating the pear. When the last of it had disappeared into his slurpy mouth, the camera focussed on his Adam’s apple. His Adam’s apple bobbed obscenely. He belched contentedly, and then these words appeared on the screen, but in the language of the planet:
THE END
It was all faked, of course. There weren’t any pears anymore. And the eating of a pear wasn’t the main event of the evening anyway. It was a short subject, which gave the members of the audience time to settle down.
Then the main feature began. It was about a male and a female and their two children, and their dog and their cat. They ate steadily for an hour and a half—soup, meat, biscuits, butter, vegetables, mashed potatoes and gravy, fruit, candy, cake, pie. The camera rarely strayed more than a foot from their glistening lips and their bobbing Adam’s apples. And then the father put the cat and dog on the table, so they could take part in the orgy, too.
After a while, the actors couldn’t eat any more. They were so stuffed that they were goggle-eyed. They could hardly move. They said they didn’t think they could eat again for a week, and so on. They cleared the table slowly. They went waddling out into the kitchen, and they dumped about thirty pounds of leftovers into a garbage can.
The audience went wild.
When Don and his friends left the theater, they were accosted by humanoid whores, who offered them eggs and oranges and milk and butter and peanuts and so on. The whores couldn’t actually deliver these goodies, of course.
The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices.
And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake.

Chapter 6

Dwayne Hoover sat in the used Plymouth Fury in his own vacant lot for an hour, listening to West Virginia. He was told about health insurance for pennies a day, about how to get better performance from his car. He was told what to do about constipation. He was offered a Bible which had everything that God or Jesus had actually said out loud printed in red capital letters. He was offered a plant which would attract and eat disease-carrying insects in his home.
All this was stored away in Dwayne’s memory, in case he should need it later on. He had all kinds of stuff in there.
While Dwayne sat there so alone, the oldest inhabitant of Midland City was dying in the County Hospital, at the foot of Fairchild Boulevard, which was nine miles away. She was Mary Young. She was one hundred and eight years old. She was black. Mary Young’s parents had been human slaves in Kentucky.
There was a tiny connection between Mary Young and Dwayne Hoover. She did the laundry for Dwayne’s family for a few months, back when Dwayne was a little boy. She told Bible stories and stories about slavery to little Dwayne. She told him about a public hanging of a white man she had seen in Cincinnati, when she was a little girl.
A black intern at the County Hospital now watched Mary Young die of pneumonia.
The intern did not know her. He had been in Midland City for only a week. He wasn’t even a fellow-American, although he had taken his medical degree at Harvard. He was an Indaro. He was a Nigerian. His name was Cyprian Ukwende. He felt no kinship with Mary or with any American blacks. He felt kinship only with Indaros.
As she died, Mary was as alone on the planet as were Dwayne Hoover or Kilgore Trout. She had never reproduced. There were no friends or relatives to watch her die. So she spoke her very last words on the planet to Cyprian Ukwende. She did not have enough breath left to make her vocal cords buzz. She could only move her lips noiselessly.
Here is all she had to say about death: “Oh my, oh my.”
Like all Earthlings at the point of death, Mary Young sent faint reminders of herself to those who had known her. She released a small cloud of telepathic butterflies, and one of these brushed the cheek of Dwayne Hoover, nine miles away.
Dwayne heard a tired voice from somewhere behind his head, even though no one was back there. It said this to Dwayne: “Oh my, oh my.”
Dwayne’s bad chemicals now made him put his car in gear. He drove out of the vacant lot, proceeded sedately down Union Avenue, which paralleled the Interstate.
He went past his principal place of business, which was Dwayne Hoover’s Exit Eleven Pontiac Village, and he turned into the parking lot of the new Holiday Inn next door. Dwayne owned a third of the Inn—in partnership with Midland City’s leading orthodontist, Dr. Alfred Maritimo, and Bill Miller, who was Chairman of the Parole Board at the Adult Correctional Institution at Shepherdstown, among other things.
Dwayne went up the Inn’s back steps to the roof without meeting anybody. There was a full moon. There were two full moons. The new Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts was a translucent sphere on stilts, and it was illuminated from the inside now—and it looked like a moon.
Dwayne gazed over the sleeping city. He had been born there. He had spent the first three years of his life in an orphanage only two miles from where he stood. He had been adopted and educated there.
He owned not only the Pontiac agency and a piece of the new Holiday Inn. He owned three Burger Chefs, too, and five coin-operated car washes, and pieces of the Sugar Creek Drive-In Theatre, Radio Station WMCY, the Three Maples 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 Dráno—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.

Chapter 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?”

Chapter 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 improve their surroundings. So they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.
The results had been catastrophic so far—suicide, theft, murder, and insanity and so on. But new chemicals were coming onto the market all the time. Twenty feet away from Trout there on Forty-second Street, a fourteen-year-old white boy lay unconscious in the doorway of a pornography store. He had swallowed a half pint of a new type of paint remover which had gone on sale for the first time only the day before. He had also swallowed two pills which were intended to prevent contagious abortion in cattle, which was called Bang’s disease.
Trout was petrified there on Forty-second Street. It had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth.
The theater manager came out and locked the door behind him.
And two young black prostitutes materialized from nowhere. They asked Trout and the manager if they would like to have some fun. They were cheerful and unafraid—because of a tube of Norwegian hemorrhoid remedy which they had eaten about half an hour before. The manufacturer had never intended the stuff to be eaten. People were supposed to squirt it up their assholes.
These were country girls. They had grown up in the rural south of the nation, where their ancestors had been used as agricultural machinery. The white farmers down there weren’t using machines made out of meat anymore, though, because machines made out of metal were cheaper and more reliable, and required simpler homes.
So the black machines had to get out of there, or starve to death. They came to cities because everyplace else had signs like this on the fences and trees: Kilgore Trout once wrote a story called “This Means You.” It was set in the Hawaiian Islands, the place where the lucky winners of Dwayne Hoover’s contest in Midland City were supposed to go. Every bit of land on the islands was owned by only about forty people, and, in the story, Trout had those people decide to exercise their property rights to the full. They put up no trespassing signs on everything.
This created terrible problems for the million other people on the islands. The law of gravity required that they stick somewhere on the surface. Either that, or they could go out into the water and bob offshore.
But then the Federal Government came through with an emergency program. It gave a big balloon full of helium to every man, woman and child who didn’t own property.
There was a cable with a harness on it dangling from each balloon. With the help of the balloons, Hawaiians could go on inhabiting the islands without always sticking to things other people owned.
The prostitutes worked for a pimp now. He was splendid and cruel. He was a god to them. He took their free will away from them, which was perfectly all right. They didn’t want it anyway. It was as though they had surrendered themselves to Jesus, for instance, so they could live unselfishly and trustingly—except that they had surrendered to a pimp instead.
Their childhoods were over. They were dying now. Earth was a tinhorn planet as far as they were concerned.
When Trout and the theater manager, two tinhorns, said they didn’t want any tinhorn fun, the dying children sauntered off, their feet sticking to the planet, coming unstuck, then sticking again. They disappeared around a corner. Trout, the eyes and ears of the Creator of the Universe, sneezed.
“God bless you,” said the manager. This was a fully automatic response many Americans had to hearing a person sneeze.
“Thank you,” said Trout. Thus a temporary friendship was formed.
Trout said he hoped to get safely to a cheap hotel. The manager said he hoped, to get to the subway station on Times Square. So they walked together, encouraged by the echoes of their footsteps from the building facades.
The manager told Trout a little about what the planet looked like to him. It was a place where he had a wife and two kids, he said. They didn’t know he ran a theater which showed blue movies. They thought he was doing consulting work as an engineer so late at night. He said that the planet didn’t have much use for engineers his age anymore. It had adored them once.
“Hard times,” said Trout.
The manager told of being in on the development of a miraculous insulating material, which had been used on rocket ships to the Moon. This was, in fact, the same material which gave the aluminum siding of Dwayne Hoover’s dream house in Midland City its miraculous insulating qualities.
The manager reminded Trout of what the first man to set foot on the Moon had said: “One small step for man, one great leap for mankind.”
“Thrilling words,” said Trout. He looked over his shoulder, perceived that they were being followed by a white Olds-mobile Toronado with a black vinyl roof. This four hundred horsepower, front-wheel drive vehicle was burbling along at about three miles an hour, ten feet behind them and close to the curb.
That was the last thing Trout remembered—seeing the Oldsmobile orn there. H