Kilgore Trout was a million miles from Midland City. He was standing on the roadside with his thumb stuck out into traffic. A blue car with two young people sped by, nearly knocking Trout over with a blast of wind. As they passed, the woman in the passenger's seat flicked a half smoked cigarette out the window. It landed at the feet of Kilgore Trout.
***
The woman who was now a half mile away had thirty-two inch hips, a twenty-eight inch waist and a thirty-six inch bosom. The man who drove the blue car had a penis six and three fourths inches long and two inches in diameter, give or take a couple of cells. This is what the cigarette looked like:
Trout looked at the cigarette that lay at his feet. The smoke still rose from it, straight up into his nostrils and past him entirely into the atmosphere.
***
Kilgore Trout once wrote a story about tiny creatures who lived in cigarette smoke. They were called Docliads, and they were a peaceful, joyful race from another planet, who had come to Earth looking for some fun and excitement. All day and all night they clung to the rising smoke with thrill ride amusement. Every time a human lit up, they'd jump on for the ride. Sometimes the ride even took them into the lungs of the humans! They thought they were gods, because the humans were so kind to provide them with such amusement, they thought it could only be some form of worship.
Turns out that once the Docliads were inside human lungs, they couldn't escape. Their lack of freedom caused them to grow very ugly and bitter. The humans became allergic to the gruesome creatures in their lungs. They connected their allergies to the creatures living in the smoke of cigarettes, so some humans stopped smoking. The Docliads on the outside iddn't know what happened to them when they entered human lungs. All they could see was that without smoking humans, there would be no more fun for them. So they arranged a meeting with the CEO's of the cigarette companies. They all agreed the companies would convince people that smoking couldn't harm them, and the Docliads would still have their fun.
***
Kilgore Trout, with his left shoe, murdered about three hundred thousand Docliads.
***
There was a group of teenagers walking up the road towards Trout. They were very loud and jocular. A few of them carried half full liquor bottles loosely in their hands. Others had their arms draped over their comrades' shoulders.
As they passed Trout, they made a joke of him, saying look at the old geezer, he's probably a dirty old pervert, and other such things. They laughed at his white hair. They laughed at his dingy clothes. They pointed and laughed. One of them threw up over the guardrail, still laughing. The herd moved on in the same direction the blue car had gone.
Kilgore Trout pondered a story about the Docliads' distant cousins, who lived in liquor bottles...but decided against it. He looked down the road instead for a car, his thumb stuck out into traffic.
***
Dwayne had somehow ended up in a coffee house where I happened to be with a couple of my friends. I found this extremely amusing. He strolled in and sat at a table towards the front. A waitress came over to him and he ordered a mocha cappucchino. What was funny was that it was basically the same thing I was having. Except I had ordered a regular black cup of store-bought coffee, and a glass of chocolate milk, which I then mixed myself there at the table. I always ordered coffee like this. I'd had cappucchino before, and liked it. Then I went home and made my own out of coffee and chocolate milk, and I've been drinking it like that ever since.
The waitress brought Dwayne his drink, and as she left his table he made some barely audible remark about taking the poor dog to the vet. He picked up a spoon and scooped the foam off of the coffee.
***
One of my friends noticed Dwayne and said he must have been a total raving lunatic. I said no, he hasn't had the coffee yet. I stared into my coffee-chocolate milk elixer, hearing my friends talk, but barely. I was thinking about Dwayne, and Kilgore, and Kurt. Kurt was absolutely nowhere around. I don't think he would have cared to help me at all anyways. I felt bad for Kilgore, thinking that if I had passed my driving test I might have gone to pick him up. Ah well, nevermind that. Dwayne was here.
***
One of those tiny, green, nearly invisible bugs fluttered around his coffee, intrigued by the warmth it radiated. It flew closer to the steaming liquid...a little too close. It lost control of its thin wings, now coated with steam, and fell into the coffee, dying instantly.
***
Dwayne took a sip of his coffee.
***
"So they took me to the psychiatrist because they noticed that I go through these dramatic mood swings," one of my friends said to the other. I'd already heard this story, so I kept my attention on messing with Dwayne, only partly listening.
"After about two hours of talking to me, the psychiatrist declares me a manic depressive," she said, rolling her eyes. My other friend laughed.
Some things you can't control, I thought.
Dwayne took another sip, tapping the spoon on the table in time with the music.
My friend continued. "So he tried to prescribe me this wonder drug that's supposed to make you happy all the time, but I wouldn't let them put me on that crap. I told them that even when I'm on the happy side, there's still the sadness. If depression is my only constant, I'd like to keep it thank you very much. At least it's constant!"
This is the wonder drug:
I excused myself and headed for the bathroom. I told them I had to take a mirror, and they looked at me oddly. As I headed away from the table, I peeked over my shoulder and saw one of them dip their pinky finger into my drink and taste it, then look at the other and shrug her shoulders.
On the way I passed Dwayne. I leaned over him and his drink and whispered, "you know, a bug landed in your coffee about five minutes ago."
Dwayne looked at me, then at his drink, then back at me and said, "extra protein."
I laughed and went to the bathroom. Dwayne left some money on the table and walked out of the room.
Yoiu know what I always wondered? In public bathrooms they have signs posted telling employees to wash their hands. They look something like this:
This is what I wondered about: aren't other customers just as infectious as employees? I may bump some guy on the way back to my table and accidentally sneeze on him.
***
I once heard a story that said soap companies, possibly along with the government, told the public that there were these things called germs in order to sell them soap and things.
Do you have any idea what the government does in North Dakota? Have you ever met anyone from there? You know Area 51: well did you ever wonder where the other 50 areas are? A moment of silence for the poor cows...
I'm going to shut up now.
***
Poor Kilgore finally got himself a ride. He wondered why it was always late night truck drivers who picked him up. This one had a variety of religious icons on his dashboard, kind of like this:
Kilgore pointed to a few of them. "Aren't these satanic or something?" he asked.
The truck driver shook his head and said, "I believe evil is only what you make of it. The only way things are evil is if enough people believe they're evil." He went on in this long speech that he'd obviously given many times in the past, about how humans channel their mental energy into things and yada yada. Trout tuned most of it out. One part he did catch was, "...the problem is that most people don't really listen..."
***
Kilgore remembered a story he'd written a long time ago, one that he so far hadn't been able to find in a porno magazine.
It was about these space travelling humans who were going to have a diplomatic dinner with a species known as the Tomatoids. The aliens looked exactly like tomatoes from Earth, but they were very intelligent. The humans were warned by their superiors not to insult the aliens by treating them as food.
The humans and the Tomatoids sat around the dinner table. The humans started to eat, and the Tomatoids took great offense. It was their custom that the hosts pick them up and throw them across the room before beginning the meal. When they explained this to the humans, the humans said that it would be a great offense to have a food fight with their honored guests as the ammunition. The Tomatoids explained in disgust that they were very insulted by that assumption, and the aliens left and went back to their own ship. They opened fire on the human ship, and eventually both ships were destroyed.
This is a Tomatoid:
Aren't they cute?
Kilgore Trout told this story to the truck driver.
The truck driver couldn't eat ketchup for weeks afterwards.
***
Dwayne was incredibly bored. He was wandering the streets aimlessly. He didn't want to go home, and he didn't want to be around anything electric, but since he lived in a city this was a bit of a problem. He wandered until he found a fairly quiet neighborhood street. In the road was a speed bump. That's a pile of cement in the middle of the road. It's supposed to get cars to slow down. Cars just slow long enough to go over them, and then they speed away.
The kids in the neighborhood use it as a skate/bike ramp. They hurl towards it as fast as they can, then they use the angle it creates to do impressive tricks that worry their mothers.
It's there so that maniac drivers don't run over cats. Every back street in the world should have speed bumps for this reason. Perhaps they got tired of watching their bretheren slaughtered by speed demons.
Never underestimate a cat's power.
***
Dwayne lay down in the middle of the street and pretended to be a speed bump. He didn't wonder about what would happen if a car actually came down the street. Instead he looked up at the night sky, at all the constellations of stars. He could see the Big Dipper and Orion's Belt. He figured that only a small number of people remembered why they had been named that. Dwayne rearranged them in his mind, and called one of the new clusters Cadillac. This is what it looked like to Dwayne:
This was the Big Dipper:
The bright star at the end was Polaris, the North Star. It was the one certain thing in the sky that sailors could always count on.
Dwayne couldn't see Polaris from where he lay. There was a telephone pole blocking his view.
Dwayne got up and headed in a different direction than he'd come from. But not North.