Breakfast of Champions: Chapters 12–17

The driver wanted Trout to have a rich social life so that he could enjoy it vicariously.

The driver’s answer was prompt.

It was peevish, too, as though he thought Trout was stupid to have to ask a question like that.

So leaders in government and commerce, in order to function, had to invent new and much uglier vocabularies and sentence structures all the time, which would resist being transmuted to music.

Francine wore a button on her bosom which showed a creature in a healthier, more enviable frame of mind.

Their descendants continued to run the farm until the Great Depression, when the Midland County Merchants Bank foreclosed on the mortgage.

The surface of West Virginia, with its coal and trees and topsoil gone, was rearranging what was left of itself in conformity with the laws of gravity.

An angel-faced white child, with flaxen hair, stood by the brook.

Steam from water boiled by burning coal was sent raging through the whistles, which made harshly beautiful laments, as though they were the voice boxes of mating or dying dinosaurs...

The painting by Gooz had an unprecedented gush of luck on the wheel. It became worth eighteen thousand lambos, the equivalent of one billion dollars on Earth.

It was incipient echolalia. Dwayne found himself wanting to repeat out loud whatever had just been said.

They refused to read books they couldn’t understand—on the grounds they couldn’t understand them. They would ask such impudent questions as, “Whuffo I want to read no Tale of Two Cities? Whuffo?”

George Hickman Bannister had the largest tombstone in Calvary Cemetery, a sixty-two-foot obelisk with a marble football on top.

It was for many years the tallest structure in Midland City. A city ordinance was passed which made it illegal to erect anything taller than that, and it was called The George Hickman Bannister Law.

The money was appropriated for the fieldhouse two years before George Hickman Bannister was cut down in his prime. It didn’t cost anything extra to name it after him.

Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth.

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

This generous, voluptuous woman, who had only ninety-six dollars and eleven cents a week in take-home pay, had lost her husband, Robert Pefko, in a war in Viet Nam.

And Francine took a job with Dwayne Hoover, in order to augment her husband’s salary and fill her days.

Francine mused about the prison, where the guards were all white and most of the prisoners were black.

The woman he really loved was young, but she certainly wasn’t pretty in the conventional sense. She weighed two hundred and forty pounds.

Dwayne mimicked her cruelly in a falsetto voice: “‘I don’t even know what you think I asked you for,’” he said.

Francine replied in blubbering gibberish that she had never wanted the franchise for herself, that she had wanted it for Dwayne, that everything she wanted was for Dwayne.

Harry’s wife, Grace, was stretched out on a chaise longue at some distance from the bed.

Grace LeSabre expressed her contempt for the good opinion of Dwayne Hoover, which her husband felt he had lost.

Still, the reindeer went on reproducing. There were these useless, big black animals everywhere, and a lot of them had very bad dispositions.

Pontiac scientists set upholstery on fire, threw gravel at windshields, snapped crankshafts and drive-shafts, staged head-on collisions, tore gearshift levers out by the roots, ran engines at high speeds with almost no lubrication, opened and closed glove compartment doors a hundred times a minute for days, cooled dashboard clocks to within a few degrees of absolute zero, and so on.

The premise of the book was this: Life was an experiment by the Creator of the Universe, Who wanted to test a new sort of creature He was thinking of introducing into the Universe.

When he was at Prairie Military Academy, for instance, the student body was unanimous in electing him Cadet Colonel, the highest rank possible, in his senior year.

He was able to absent himself from the cocktail lounge, and from the planet itself, for that matter, by means of Transcendental Meditation. He learned this technique from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who once stopped off in Midland City during a world-wide lecture tour.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, in exchange for a new handkerchief, a piece of fruit, a bunch of flowers, and thirty-five dollars, taught Bunny to close his eyes, and to say this euphonious nonsense word to himself over and over again: “Aye-eeeeem, aye-eeeeem, aye-eeeeem.”

Fascism was a fairly popular political philosophy which made sacred whatever nation and race the philosopher happened to belong to.

It called for an autocratic, centralized government, headed up by a dictator.

So it wasn’t a theater anymore, even though there were still busts of Shakespeare and Mozart and so on gazing down from niches in the walls inside.

Kilgore Trout wrote a story one time about a town which decided to tell derelicts where they were and what was about to happen to them by putting up actual street signs...