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Christopher

Noxon

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Pure, unwavering band of light

My mom gave me a paperback of “Breakfast of Champions” when I was fourteen. I devoured it, then “Cat’s Cradle” and “Sirens of Titan” and “Mother Night” and eventually all of Vonnegut - he was my first literary love, the first writer who seemed to speak TO me. He was deep, strange, sad and playful - and he drew pictures! Like the doodly star shape in “BoC” which he included with this note: “To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is a picture of my asshole:”

When Charlie was fourteen I found that old paperback and passed it on to him. He loved it too. He read a few more Vonneguts but moved on to Neil Gaiman, Haruki Murakami and Don DeLillo (plus a ton of genre fantasy writers like VE Schwab and Brandon Sanderson). During our week in Park City we went to a bookstore in town and got Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and Ben Lerner’s “The Topeka School.” He gobbled up the Carver the day before the accident. He loved it and we had a good talk about how Carver managed to create whole worlds with so few words.

This week I re-read “Breakfast of Champions.” Happy to report it holds up - it’s just as deep and gonzo as it was when I was sixteen (it’s also, happily, smart about sex and race - the 1973 version of woke). I’d forgotten that Vonnegut wrote it as a 50th birthday present to himself - this felt especially meaningful now as I creak past 51. The ending is rough - there’s a burst of violence and hopelessness that was not at all the inspirational message I was hoping for.

But there’s one passage I love and that has something to say about this moment and Charlie and how it feels to grieve him. It comes during a scene in a hotel cocktail lounge, where the townsfolk of Midland confront an abstract painter about a work recently purchased by the town for $50,000:

The original was twenty feet wide and sixteen feet high. The field was Hawaiian Avocado, a green wall paint manufactured by the O’Hare Paint and Varnish Company in Hellertown, Pennsylvania. The vertical stripe was day-glo orange reflecting tape. This was the most expensive piece of art, not counting buildings and tombstones, and not counting the statue of Abraham Lincoln in front of the old (black) high school.

The painter is named Rabo Karabekian (Vonnegut is up there with Pynchon in his love of names - the heroes of the book are Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover). A cocktail waitress tells him that his painting is stupid and bad and that she’s “seen better pictures by a five-year old.” Here’s what happens next:

Karabekian slid off his bar stool so he could face all those enemies standing up… “Listen—” he said so calmly, “I have read the editorials against my painting in your wonderful newspaper. I have read every word of the hate mail you have been thoughtful enough to send to New York.”

“The painting did not exist until I made it.” Karabekian went on. “Now that it does exist, nothing would make me happier than to have it reproduced again and again, and vastly improved upon, by all the five-year-olds in town. I would love for your children to find pleasantly and playfully what it took me many angry years to find.

“I now give you my work of honor,” he went on, “that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal–the ‘I am’ to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us–in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.”

That’s it - the unwavering and pure band of light. I’m holding on to Charlie’s, summoning it as best I can and hoping that even though he’s gone, we can keep it here on earth.