Favorite Moments in Literature, Re-Encountered Over the Shoulder of a Fellow Passenger on a Crowded Bus

One summer, early in high school, I went on a Vonnegut tear, reading at least ten Kurt Vonnegut novels during the long, dull break.  I can still remember walking across town in the mid-day heat to the library to exchange one grubby hardback edition for another, then leaving the air-conditioned library and walking all the way back, Slapstick or Jailbird or Galapagos collecting the sweat trickling down my arms onto its musty pages.

Most of those novels run together in my memory.  One I still remember, though, is Breakfast of Champions. It was one of those books that, although I haven’t really followed any of its examples, opened things up for me in terms of what writing could be and do.

I’m talking mainly about the drawings. A friend and I once snuck into the film version of Breakfast of Champions (starring Bruce Willis, and I seem to remember Lukas Haas in bunny slippers, playing a pump organ) after seeing some other, respectable movie. We were the only ones in the theater, and left after a few minutes because, dorks that we were, we were afraid some astute manager type would put two and two together and note that a movie for which 0 tickets had been sold was playing to 2 pathetic-looking college students.  But as much as that sad reason, we left because the movie was terrible. Seriously–never see it. It made me realize that the plot of the novel isn’t much: nothing exposes that like an adaptation to film. The real value and novelty of the book was its sort of reckless freedom, Vonnegut’s almost-audible “I’m going to include a drawing of an asterisk now, and say that it’s an asshole–what are you going to do about it?”

This is all a long-winded way of leading up to the news that on a crowded 61A the other day, I stood a few feet from a guy who was reading a paperback copy of Breakfast of Champions, which I recognized right away when he turned to one of my favorite moments in the book. It’s the part that discusses the treatment the writer Kilgore Trout’s publisher has given his books: they’ve written the words “Wide-open Beavers Inside!” over the covers, and shipped them to be sold in porn shops. Vonnegut shows us exactly how these words are written on the book covers: the letters are large, bold, a little sloppy. The narrator then, as if speaking to an audience of simpletons from another planet, explains that a beaver is a mammal with a flat tail specially adapted for dam-making; and Vonnegut supplies an illustration. The narrator then provides a second definition of “beaver,” which I’ll omit here; and Vonnegut supplies an illustration of this second definition.

The guy reading this just stared into the pages with a look that was somewhere between annoyance and befuddlement. He looked like he was in his late twenties, with a neat little mustache-beard combo. I kept waiting for him to laugh; I was laughing myself, seeing those three drawings together on facing pages, remembering how funny they were when I was 15 years old. I couldn’t figure out why this guy was reading the book, because he seemed too old to be in any class where the book would be taught. Maybe somebody recommended it to him, or he’d asked a bookstore employee about Vonnegut and where he should start. Maybe the book was a Valentine’s Day present, a gift from some awesome, soon-to-be ex-girlfriend who mistook his laughter at Family Guy episodes for a genuine sense of humor. The dude never laughed. I wished I could have swept that fact into my appreciation of the moment, and laughed at the whole situation, but it sort of bugged me. I’m all for respecting other literary tastes, but those are two funny pages, wildly unexpected, and hardly difficult to grasp or even, let’s be honest, that offensive. It didn’t seem to me that he was offended, only untouched by the humor of that scene. I wanted to ask him, “What part of ‘Wide-Open Beavers Inside!’ don’t you understand?”

(Of course I’m thankful that I didn’t.)