Breakfast of Champions: Chapter 15 Summary & Analysis

Back at his Pontiac dealership, Dwayne finally remembers that it is Hawaiian Week. His mind is clearing, and the parking lot is “no longer a trampoline,” but he has developed “incipient echolalia,” which compels him to repeat every last word he hears. Dwayne leaves his office and drives (in a brand-new Pontiac) to one of his Burger Chef restaurants for lunch. 

Dwayne’s waitress at Burger Chef, Patty Keene, is a seventeen-year-old girl working to pay off her father’s hospital bills. He father is dying of colon cancer, and in America, “where everybody is expected to pay his own bills for everything,” getting sick is “one of the most expensive things a person can do.”

Dwayne isn’t sexually attracted to Patty, although he does appreciate that she is pretty. Patty is “stupid on purpose.” She had programmed herself, “in the interest of survival,” to be an “agreeing machine instead of a thinking machine.” Patty rarely thinks for herself—all she does is “discover what other people are thinking, and then [she] thinks that, too.”

Patty eyes Dwayne. He “can solve so many of her problems with the money and power he has,” and she envisions a “magic wand” that Dwayne passes over her life, magically making everything better. Being in the presence of Dwayne makes Patty feel as if she is in the presence of a “supernatural” power. “When you came in,” Patty says to Dwayne, “[everybody] just buzzed and buzzed.” Dwayne looks at her blankly. “Buzzed,” he says.

“I guess that’s not the right word,” Patty says. Like most people in Midland City, Patty is “used to apologizing for her use of language.” English teachers fail those who don’t “speak like English aristocrats,” and if students can’t “love or understand incomprehensible novels and poems and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe,” they are deemed “unworthy” to speak or write English. Black people in Midland City do not follow this rule. They speak English how ever they want, and “they refuse to read books they can’t understand—on the grounds that they can’t understand them.”

Patty herself failed English in high school when she failed to appreciate Ivanhoe, and she was put into a “remedial” course where she was forced to The Good Earth, a book “about Chinamen.” Around this time, she “lost her virginity” when she was raped by Don Breedlove, a white gas-conversion unit installer, behind the Bannister Memorial Fieldhouse after a basketball game. Patty never told a soul because her father was busy dying and “there was enough trouble already.”

The Bannister Memorial Fieldhouse is named for George Hickman Bannister, a local high school kid who was killed playing football on Thanksgiving Day. George’s tombstone, the largest in Midland City’s cemetery, is a tall marble obelisk with a football on top. For many years, the obelisk was the tallest structure in town, and The George Hickman Bannister law prohibited any taller structures from being built. The law had to be “junked” years later to allow for radio towers. No one thinks about George Hickman Bannister anymore and his family has long since left the area.

Dwayne continues to repeat the last word of each of Patty’s sentences, but she doesn’t seem to notice or mind. It matters very little what Dwayne says. Everyone in Midland City “has a clearly defined part to play,” and each person lives up to those expectations. If a person stops living up to expectation, “because of bad chemicals” or any other thing, the town just goes “on imagining that the person is living up to expectation anyway.”

On the way back to the dealership, Dwayne passes a construction site where a crew of men are digging massive holes in Midland City. Dwayne approaches the biggest piece of equipment he sees and asks the “white workman how many horsepower drives the machine.” The workman isn’t sure. “I don’t know how many horsepower, but I know what we call it,” the workman says. “We call in The Hundred-Nigger Machine.” The workman’s reference is “to a time when black men had done most of the heavy digging in Midland City.”

At the dealership, Francine is hard at work. Dwayne goes into his office and calls her, even though she is sitting just outside the door. “Francine?” says Dwayne. “I am going to ask you to do something I have never asked you to do before. Promise me you’ll say yes.” Francine promises, and Dwayne asks her to go with him to the hotel in Shepherdstown. 

Francine doesn’t mind going—she thinks it is “her duty” to do so—but she must first convince Gloria Browning, the Service Department cashier, to man her desk, which is known as the “Nerve Center” of the dealership. Gloria isn’t up to doing Francine’s job, as she has just had a hysterectomy at the age of twenty-five after a “botched abortion.” Ironically, the father of her “destroyed fetus” was Don Breedlove, the married father of three who raped Patty Keene behind the George Bannister Memorial Fieldhouse.

Gloria finally agrees to sit at Francine’s desk. “I don’t have nerve enough to commit suicide,” she says, “so I might as well do anything anybody says—in the service of mankind.” Dwayne and Francine take separate cars to the Shepherdstown, where they meet at the Quality Motor Court and have sex in the middle of the afternoon. Francine’s husband had been killed in Vietnam not long before Dwayne’s wife, Celia, committed suicide.

Francine and Dwayne talk about the local prison in Shepherdstown, and Francine marvels at how most of the guards are white and most of the prisoners are black. “You know what I keep thinking?” Francine says. “This would be a very good location for a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise.” Immediately, Dwayne thinks that Francine is asking him to buy her a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, and he grows angry. “Let’s keep love-making and presents separate, O.K.?” he tells her.

Francine is shocked. She doesn’t know what Dwayne is talking about. “Every woman is a whore,” Dwayne tells her, “and every whore has her price.” Francine’s “price” is the cost of a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, “which would be well over one hundred thousand dollars by the time adequate parking and exterior lighting and all that is taken into consideration.” Francine begins to cry. She only suggested the restaurant because most of the prisoners are black, and she is thinking of their relatives when they come to visit. “I thought how much black people like fried chicken,” Francine says. “So you want me to open a Nigger joint?” Dwayne asks.

In the meantime, Harry is at home crying as well. He is sure that Dwayne knows he is a “transvestite,” and he has gone home to cry in his bed. Harry and his wife, Grace, are rich, having made a pile of money in Xerox stocks, which sit in their safety deposit box at the bank and continue to make money. “There is a lot of money magic like that going on.”

“Fuck Dwayne Hoover,” Grace tells Harry, “and fuck Midland City. Let’s sell the God damn Xerox stock and buy a condominium on Maui.” Harry continues to cry. “Can the reindeer hear you?” Harry asks. “Fuck the reindeer,” Grace says. “Reindeer” is Harry and Grace’s “code word” for their black maid. In fact, they called all the black people in Midland City “reindeer.” The Midland City Police Department and the Midland County Sheriff’s Department, which are composed mainly of white men, have “racks and racks of sub-machine guns and twelve-gauge automatic shotguns for an open season on reindeer, which is bound to come.”

As Francine cries, Dwayne begins to regret his outburst. “I’m so confused,” he says and asks Francine to hold him. She agrees, and he tells her about the time he visited the headquarters of the Pontiac Division of General Motors. Dwayne was given a tour of the facility, and the tour stopped at the department of “Destructive Testing.” In that department, the workers did “everything you’re not supposed to do to a car,” including breaking windshields and mirrors and staging “head-on collisions.” They tried to destroy cars to see how much destruction they could take before failing. “I couldn’t help wondering,” Dwayne says to Francine, “if that was what God put me on Earth for—to find out how much a man could take without breaking.”

“I’ve lost my way,” Dwayne says to Francine. He wants to talk to someone about his feelings, but he has already talked to everyone in Midland City. Francine suggests a doctor, but Dwayne refuses. “What about all these painters and writers and composers coming to town?” she says in reference to the Arts Festival. “You’re right!” Dwayne cries. “The Festival could give me a brand new viewpoint on life!”