Kurt Vonnegut Jr-Breakfast of Champions, 1973

And I made an invisible duplicate on my Formica tabletop of a painting by Rabo Karabekian, entitled The Temptation of St. Anthony. My duplicate was a miniature of the real thing, and mine was not in color, but I had captured the picture’s form and the spirit, too. This is what I drew.

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 Nigger high school.

It was a scandal what the painting cost. It was the first purchase for the memorial collection of the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts. Fred T…