Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Writing, I Learned from Kurt Vonnegut’s Asshole

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the novel, and the beautifully obscene scribble, that changed everything.

When I was thirteen, my family moved to the south suburbs of Chicago. It was a grim place, the kind of town where culture goes to die. The only distractions were the mall, the dollar cineplex, and a library. Even for people who enjoyed reading, the library was a depressing hellhole. Books were arranged in no particular order, thrown together on the shelves like somebody was in a hurry and couldn’t be bothered.

Personally, I’ve always been a sucker for neglected books. There’s something about the yellowing, frayed pages and the covers tattooed with hard creases, like the wrinkles of an old man whose body has betrayed him but his head is still full of ideas. A library that’s run like a garage sale can be frustrating chaos until you realize it’s really a scavenger hunt.

Without wandering the aisles and searching for nothing in particular, I wouldn’t have discovered pulp books. It was another universe from the required reading at my school. There was nothing exciting about “Huckleberry Finn” or “Moby Dick” or the other bloated epics I was forced to read. But here, in the suburban athenaeum of lost souls, I discovered Doc Savage, Mack Bolan, and the Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu.

During my library excavations, I learned how important it is to judge a book by its cover. You didn’t need to read the first sentence to recognize a genuine action-adventure classic. It was all in the cover art. If it featured a scowling and/or brawny goliath, brandishing a firearm bigger than his forearm, his shirt disintegrating from the sheer force of his pulsating man nipples, you could be fairly confident that the plot was a page-turner. Sometimes it was as simple as an exciting title font. The best titles popped out at you, demanding your attention like a punch to the face.

That’s how I stumbled on Kurt Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions.” The title was in pseudo-3-D, like a Superman comic, practically leaping from the front cover.

I skimmed the description and although it sounded only vaguely promising—“two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast”… from radioactive poisoning? I thought hopefully—it still felt like a safe gamble. I had to believe that Kilgore Trout was a hard-nosed detective who wouldn’t think twice about ripping the arms from the sockets of an attacking gorilla before making sweet, adjective-heavy love to his blonde assistant.

When I took “Breakfast of Champions” home and actually started reading it, I was underwhelmed. Within just the first ten pages, Vonnegut argued that all human beings were robots, our country was founded by mediocre poets, and mirrors are holes between universes. But then I got to the part about “Plague on Wheels,” the book-within-a-book about anthropomorphic alien cars that also apparently featured hardcore pornography. A dystopian tale of extraterrestrial automobiles facing extinction and pictures of naked women? It was like all of my teenage desires rolled up into one paperback edition. I decided to keep reading.

When my parents didn’t raise an eyebrow after catching me with the book, I thought nothing of bringing it to school. I was very, very wrong.

Mr. Spearing, my 9th-grade English teacher, was a humorless windbag. He was short and stocky, like a character from a Tolkien novel, with a mustache that looked like a tuft of rat hair glued to his upper lip.

He didn’t care for his students, and he found most literature to be personally abhorrent. He wouldn’t allow us to read F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway because he thought it’d turn us into alcoholics. Salinger and Steinbeck were just potty-mouths with typewriters, Dickens and Faulkner glamorized poverty, and Orwell would provoke our anti-authoritarian impulses. That pretty much left us with a few Jane Austin novels and Beowulf.

When Mr. Spearing ran out of things to say about the books he didn’t openly despise, he assigned us “quiet time” to read silently until the bell rang. One such afternoon, I pulled out my copy of “Breakfast of Champions” and, as if by divine intervention, opened directly to the page with Vonnegut’s asshole.

Until that day, I hadn’t paid much attention to the book’s dozens of crude drawings. I didn’t really understand them. It was as if Vonnegut assumed his readers were unfamiliar with most of the basic things on this planet. Just explaining cows and chickens and clocks and tombstones wasn’t enough. He had to show us before we’d truly understand. Every few pages, he’d write “Here is what a dinosaur looks like” or “Here is what a ‘No Trespassing’ sign looks like,” and then include an illustration of that object.

The asshole, a hastily drawn asterisk, was funny to me mostly because it was so surprising. I wasn’t offended by it, I just wasn’t expecting it, especially not from an author who repeatedly reminded his readers that he was 50 years old. It’d be like hearing a priest say, “My balls are itchy.” It’s not the substance, it’s the context.

I must’ve laughed a little too loud because Mr. Spearing came charging over to my desk and ripped the book from my hands. He glowered at it with revulsion, unable to comprehend how such vulgarity had slithered into his classroom.

He held open the offending page and thrust it at me. “That is not funny at all,” he spat. “This is just childish and immature and disgusting!”

Through clenched teeth, he explained that he had no choice but to call my parents. I could see a glimmer of joy in his eyes. This was the bust he’d been waiting for. I was a one-kid black market for literary contraband and he’d caught me red-handed.

My parents had a sit-down with Mr. Spearing the same evening. From what they told me later, he was livid, pounding a fist against his desk with Mussolini fervor, his face red with rage and moral certitude. He called “Breakfast of Champions” dangerous. That was the adjective he kept repeating: dangerous. Like the book was hiding a shiv up its sleeve and was prepared to stab any child it suspected of being a prison snitch.

“It’s just a bunghole,” my father said, rolling his eyes.

Mr. Spearing declined to return the book, even though it didn’t belong to me. I’m sure he called the library and lectured them about the smut they were peddling to innocent minds. In a matter of days, my sanctuary of pulp disappeared. Nothing remained. It was haunting to return to the library, with its now eerily empty shelves.

I could live without the spy novels or the jungle expeditions into deepest, darkest Africa. But I couldn’t stop thinking about “Breakfast of Champions.” Did Mr. Spearing seriously think it was dangerous? How could a book be dangerous just because one of the pages had an asterisk that vaguely resembled an anus? That was all it took? I wished I had taken a closer look when I had the chance. It clearly had some power I hadn’t appreciated. And to a teenage boy who felt anything but powerful, it made it all the more mysterious and mythical.

It’s the same reason boys are attracted to comic books featuring superheroes with rippling muscles and absurd physical abilities. Because we feel so small and insignificant in our own lives, we need the fantasy to feel strong and untouchable. That’s what Vonnegut’s asshole was to me. A superhero without the cape… or arms or legs… and more anusy.

For my 16th birthday, my father bought me a new copy of “Breakfast of Champions.” I held onto it like it was made of gold and the suburbs were overrun with pirates. I finally got around to reading the rest, and took my time with every sentence, studying it for secrets.

It changed my brain chemistry—in a good way, not in a Dwayne Hoover shooting spree sort of way. I started having unpopular opinions, which I’d share with my peers whether they wanted to hear them or not. I’d say things like “The National Anthem is just balderdash” and “Communism encourages sharing with people who have doodley-squat” and “Our country is just a bully with rockets.”

Most of them couldn’t have cared less, but I was drunk on Vonnegut freedom.

Once, when a snarling senior, smelling like Marlboro Reds and shop class, cornered me in the cafeteria and announced that he intended to kick my ass after school, I calmly told him, “It’s okay, I understand. It’s not you, it’s the bad chemicals in your brain.” He never talked to me again.

I eventually discovered the rest of Vonnegut’s canon. I had affairs with “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Bluebeard,” “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” and “Cat’s Cradle.” But my true love would always be “Breakfast of Champions.” I came back to it every few weeks, re-reading my favorite passages like a Christian reading psalms.

I’ve heard the arguments that it’s not Vonnegut’s best book, or even belongs in his top five. But I never cared. You never forget your first love. And you never lose affection for the one who showed you how perfectly weird and weirdly perfect the world can be.

When Vonnegut died in 2007, I found my battered copy of “Breakfast of Champions” and read it again. I actually waited until my wife was asleep and then hid under a blanket and read it with a flashlight. It was like I expected the Gestapo to kick down my door. Even after all these years, the book still had that kind of power for me. Just holding it in my hands again made me feel like I was getting away with something.

When I opened to page six, with the asshole sketch, I was transfixed. I just stared at it. It was partly nostalgia, sure. I’ll never be able to look at an asterisk again without remembering Mr. Spearing’s face, vibrating with fury, the veins popping on his neck like tiny exclamation points. But it was more significant than just tormenting a teacher who deserved the abuse.

I realize how ridiculous that sounds. There’s so much brilliant satire in “Breakfast of Champions,” and I insist on focusing on the scatological. But I still believe that Vonnegut’s asshole means something. It’s not the content so much as the symbolism. Vonnegut’s asshole is to me what a cross is to a Christian. There’s more to Jesus than just two pieces of wood. And there’s certainly more to Vonnegut than just a few lines drawn with a felt-tip pen. But symbols have power. And they represent something more profound and complex than nonbelievers could begin to grasp.

I assumed I’d outgrow it eventually, that I’d stop finding the humor and the wisdom in Vonnegut’s asshole. But I evidently haven’t. For my 50th birthday, I got my very first tattoo, a frustrated monkey typist (from a 2002 New Yorker cover) and Vonnegut’s asshole.

I only wish Mr. Spearing was still around. I’d love to share it with him.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of “Breakfast of Champions”—during the summer of 1973, it shared the top spot on bestseller lists with “The Joy of Sex”—so Vonnegut has come up a lot recently in conversations with my writer friends. Somebody (usually me) will mention his asshole, and we’ll talk about why such an innocent little drawing still makes people so upset. What, if anything, does it mean? Maybe it has something to do with why any of us became authors. The best writing shares everything, even the stuff that makes you uncomfortable and feels too vulnerable. Maybe it has to do with mocking literary pretension and remembering that even authors—sometimes especially authors—shouldn’t take themselves so goddamn seriously.

Or maybe we just think assholes are funny. That could be true, too.