Iâm listening to a talk show on a new radio that I bought a few weeks ago. Itâs an AM/FM solid state white plastic radio. I very seldom buy anything new, so it was quite a surprise to my economy when I went into an Italian appliance store and bought this radio.
The salesman was very nice and told me that he had sold over four hundred of these radios to Italians who wanted to listen to an Italian language program that was on FM.
I donât know why but somehow that impressed me a great deal. It made me want to buy the radio, so thatâs how I surÂprised my economy.
The radio cost $29.95.
Now Iâm listening to a talk show because itâs raining hard outside and Iâve got nothing better to do with my ears. While Iâm listening to this new radio, Iâm remembering another new radio that lived hi the past.
I think I was about twelve years old up in the Pacific Northwest where winter meant that it was always raining and muddy.
We had an old 1930s kind of radio that was in a huge cabinet that looked like a coffin and it scared me because old furniture can frighten children and make them think about dead people.
The radio was in pretty bad shape soundwise and it had become harder and harder to listen to my favorite programs on it.
The radio was beyond any kind of real repair job. It was holding onto a pathetic sound by the skin of its dial.
We had needed a new radio for a long while but we couldnât afford one because we were too poor. Finally we got enough money for the down payment to buy a radio on time and we walked over through the mud to the local radio store.
This was my mother and me and my sister and we all listened to brand-new radios as if we were in paradise until we had narrowed it down to the radio that we finally bought.
It was breathtakingly beautiful in a fine wooden cabinet that smelled like a lumberyard in heaven. The radio was a table model which was really nice, too.
We walked home with the radio down muddy streets that had no sidewalks. The radio was in a guarding cardboard box and I got to carry it. I felt so proud.
That was one of the happiest nights of my life listening to my favorite programs on a brand-new radio while a winterâs rainstorm shook the house. Each program sounded as if it had been cut from a diamond. The hoof beats of the Cisco Kidâs horse sparkled like a ring.
Iâm sitting here now, baldingfatmiddleagedyearslater, lisÂtening to a talk show on the second brand-new radio of my life while shadows of the same storm shake the house.
The children of Tacoma, Washington, went to war in DeÂcember 1941. It seemed like the thing to do, following in the footsteps of their parents and other grown-ups who acted as if they knew what was happening.
âRemember Pearl Harbor!â they said.
âYou bet!â we said.
I was a child, then, though now I look like somebody else. We were at war in Tacoma. Children can kill imaginary enemies just as well as adults can kill real enemies. It went on for years.
During World War II, I personally killed 352,892 enemy soldiers without wounding one. Children need a lot less hosÂpitals in war than grown-ups do. Children pretty much look at it from the alldeath side.
I sank 987 battleships, 532 aircraft carriers, 799 cruisers, 2,007 destroyers and 161 transport ships. Transports were not too interesting a target: very little sport.
I also sank 5,465 enemy PT boats. I have no idea why I sank so many of them. It was just one of those things. Every time I turned around for four years, I was sinking a PT boat. I still wonder about that. 5,465 are a lot of PT boats.
I only sank three submarines. Submarines were just not up my alley. I sank my first submarine in the spring of 1942. A lot of kids rushed out and sank submarines right and left durÂing December and January. I waited.
I waited until April, and then one morning on my way to school: BANG! my first sub., right in front of a grocery store. I sank my second submarine in 1944. I could afford to wait two years before sinking another one.
I sank my last submarine in February 1945, a few days after my tenth birthday. I was not totally satisfied with the presents I got that year.
And then there was the sky! I ventured forth into the sky, seeking the enemy there, while Mount Rainier towered up like a cold white general in the background.
I was an ace pilot with my P-38 and my Grumman Wildcat, my P-51 Mustang and my Messerschmitt. Thatâs right: Mes-serschmitt. I captured one and had it painted a special color, so my own men wouldnât try to shoot me down by mistake. Everybody recognized my Messerschmitt and the enemy had hell to pay for it.
I shot down 8,942 fighter planes, 6,420 bombers and 51 blimps. I shot down most of the blimps when the war was first in season. Later, sometime in 1943, I stopped shooting down blimps altogether. Too slow.
I also destroyed 1,281 tanks, 777 bridges and 109 oil reÂfineries because I knew we were in the right.
âRemember Pearl Harbor!â they said.
âYou bet!â we said.
I shot the enemy planes down by holding out my arms straight from my body and running like hell, shouting at the top of my lungs: RAT-tattattattattattattattattattattattat!
Children donât do that kind of stuff any more. Children do other things now and because children do other things now, I have whole days when I feel like the ghost of a child, exÂamining the memory of toys played back into the earth again.
There was a thing I used to do that was also a lot of fun when I was a young airplane. I used to hunt up a couple of flashlights and hold them lit in my hands at night, with my arms straight out from my body and be a night pilot zooming down the streets of Tacoma.
I also used to play airplane in the house, too, by taking four chairs from the kitchen and putting them together: two chairs facing the same way for the fuselage and a chair for each wing.
In the house I played mostly at dive-bombing. The chairs seemed to do that best. My sister used to sit in the seat right behind me and radio urgent messages back to base.
âWe only have one bomb left, but we canât let the aircraft carrier escape. Weâll have to drop the bomb down the smokeÂstack. Over. Thank you, Captain, weâll need all the luck we can get. Over and out.â
Then my sister would say to me, âDo you think you can do it?â and Iâd reply, âOf course, hang onto your hat.â
I do what everybody else does: I live in San Francisco. Sometimes I am forced by Mother Nature to take the bus. Yesterday was an example. I wanted to get some place beyond the duty of my legs, far out on Clay Street, so I waited for a bus.
It was not a hardship but a nice warm autumn day and fiercely clear. An old woman waited, too. Nothing unusual about that, as they say. She had a large purse and white gloves that fit her hands like the skins of vegetables.
A Chinese fellow came by on the back of a motorcycle. It startled me. I had just never thought about the Chinese riding motorcycles before. Sometimes reality is an awfully close fit like the vegetable skins on that old womans hands.
I was glad when the bus came. There is certain happiness sighted when your bus comes along. It is of course a small specialized form of happiness and will never be a great thing.
I let the old woman get on first and trailed behind in classic medieval tradition with cantle floors following me onto the bus.
I dropped in my fifteen cents, got my usual transfer, even though I did not need one. I always get a transfer. It gives me something to do with my hands while I am riding the bus. I need activity.
I sat down and looked the bus over to see who was there, and it took me about a minute to realize that there was something very wrong with that bus, and it took the other people about the same period to realize that there was something very wrong with the bus, and the thing that was wrong was me.
I was young. Everybody else, about nineteen of them, were men and women in their sixties, seventies and eighties, and I only in my twenties. They stared at me and I stared at them. We mere all embarrassed and uncomfortable.
How had this happened? Why were we suddenly the players in this cruel fate and could not take our eyes off one another?
A man about seventy-eight began to clutched desperately at the lapel of his coat. A woman maybe sixty-three began to filter her hands, finger by finger through a white handkerchief.
I felt terrible to remind them of their lost youth, their passage through slender years in such a cruel and unusual manner. Why were we tossed this way together as if we were nothing but a weird salad served on the seats of a God-damn bus?
I got off the bus at the next possibility. Everybody was glad to see me go and none of them were more glad than I.
I stood there and watched after the bus, its strange cargo now secure, growing distant in the journey of time until the bus was gone from sight.
When I got there they were burying the lion in the back yard again. As usual, it was a hastily dug grave, not really large enough to hold the lion and dug with a maximum of incompetence and they were trying to stuff the lion into a sloppy little hole.
The lion as usual took it quite stoically. Having been buried at least fifty times during the last two years, the lion had gotten used to being buried in the back yard.
I remember the first time they buried him. He didn't know what was happening. He was a younger lion, then, and was frightened and confused, but now he knew what was happening because he was an older lion and had been buried so many times.
He looked vaguely bored as they folded his front paws across his chest and started throwing dirt in his face.
It was basically hopeless. The lion would never fit the hole. It had never fit a hole in the back yard before and it never would. They just couldn't dig a hone big enough to bury that lion in.
"Hello," I said. "The holes too small."
"Hello," they said, "No, it isn't."
This had been our standard greeting now for two years.
I stood there and watched them for an hour or so struggling desperately to bury the lion, but they were only able to bury of him before they gave up in disgust and stood around trying to blame each other for not making the hole big enough.
"Why don't you put a garden in next year? I said. "This soil looks like it might grow some good carrots."
They didn't think that was very funny.
When first I passed by there, it was just an ordinary office with desks and typewriters and filing cabinets and telephones ringing and people answering the telephones. There were half a dozen women working there, but there was nothing to distinguish them from millions of other office workers across America, and none of them were pretty.
The men who worked in the office were all about middle age and they did not show any sign of ever having been handÂsome in their youth or actually anything in their youth. They all looked like people whose names you forget.
They did what they had to do in the office. There was no sign on the window or above the door telling what the office was about, so I never knew what those people were doing. Perhaps they were a division of a large business that was located someplace else.
The people all seemed to know what they were doing, and so I let it go at that, passing by there twice a day: on my way to work and on my way home from work.
A year or so passed and the office remained constant. The people were the same and a certain amount of activity went on: just another little place in the universe.
Then one day I passed by there on my way to work and all the ordinary women who had worked there were gone, vanished, as if the very air itself had given them new employÂment.
There was not even a trace of them, and in their wake were six very pretty girls: blondes and brunettes and on and on into the various pretty faces and bodies, into the exciting feminine of this and that, into form-fitting smart clothes.
There were large friendly-looking breasts and small pleasÂant breasts and behinds that were all enticing. Every place I looked in that office there was something nice happening in woman form.
What had happened? Where had the other women gone? Where had these women come from? They all looked new to San Francisco. Whose idea was this? Was this the ultimate meaning of Frankenstein? My God, we all guessed wrong!
And now itâs been another year with passing by there five days a week and staring intently in the window, trying to figure it out: all these pretty bodies carrying on whatever they do in there.
I wonder if the bossâs wife, whoever the boss is, which one he is, died and this is his revenge over years of dullness, getting even itâs called, or maybe he just got tired of watching television in the evening.
Or just what happened, I donât know.
There is a girl with long blond hair answering the teleÂphone. There is a cute brunette putting something away in a filing cabinet. There is a cheer leader type with perfect teeth erasing something. There is an exotic brunette carrying a book across the office. There is a mysterious little girl with very large breasts rolling a piece of paper into a typewriter. There is a tall girl with a perfect mouth and a grand behind, putting a stamp on an envelope. Itâs a pretty office.
-Richard Brautigan
Once upon a time in San Francisco there was a man who really liked the finer things in life, especially poetry. Â He liked good verse.
  He could afford to indulge himself in this liking, which meant that he didn't have to work because he was receiving a generous pension that was the result of a 1920s investment that his grandfather had made in a private insane asylum that was operating quite profitably in Southern California.
  In the black, as they say and located in the San Fernando Valley, just outside of Tarzana.  It was one of those places that do not look like an insane asylum.  It looked like something else with flowers all around it, mostly roses
  The checks always arrived on the 1st and 15th of every month, even when there was not a mail delivery on that day.  He had a lovely house in Pacific Heights and he would go out and buy more poetry.  He of course had never met a poet in person.  That would have been a little too much.
  One day he decided that his liking for poetry could not be fully expressed in just reading poetry or listening to poets reading on phonograph records.  He decided to take the plumbing out of his house and completely replace it with poetry, and so he did.
  He turned off the water and took out the pipes and put in John Donne to replace them.  The pipes did not look too happy.  He took out his bathtub and put in William Shakespeare.  The bathtub did not know what was happening.
  He took out his kitchen sink and put in Emily Dickinson.  The kitchen sink could only stare back in wonder.  He took out his bathroom sink and put in Vladimir Mayakovsky.  The bathroom sink, even though the water was turned off, broke out into tears.
  He took out his hot water heater and put in Michael McClure's poetry.  The hot water heater could barely contain its sanity.  Finally he took out his toilet and put in the minor poets.  The toilet planned on leaving the country.
  And now the time had come to see how it all worked, to enjoy the fruit of his amazing labor.  Christopher Columbus' slight venture sailing West was merely the shadow of a dismal event in the comparison.  He turned the water back on again and surveyed the countenance of his vision brought to reality.  He was a happy man.
  "I think I'll take a bath," he said, to celebrate.  He tried to heat up some Michael McClure to take a bath in some William Shakespeare and what happened was not actually what he had planned on happening.
  "Might as well do the dishes then," he said.  He tried to wash some plates in "I taste a liquor never brewed," and found there was quite a difference between that liquid and a kitchen sink.  Despair was on its way.
  He tried to go to the toilet and the minor poets did not do at all.  They began gossiping about their careers as he sat there trying to take a shit.  One of them had written 197 sonnets about a penguin he had once seen in a travelling circus.  He sensed a Pulitzer Prize in this material.
  Suddenly the man realized that poetry could not replace plumbing.  It's what they call seeing the light.  He decided immediately to take the poetry out and put the pipes back in, along with the sinks, the bathtub, the hot water heater and the toilet.
  "This just didn't work out the way I planned it," he said.  "I'll have to put the plumbing back.  Take the poetry out."  It made sense standing there naked in the total light of failure.
  But then he ran into more trouble than there was in the first place.  The poetry did not want to go.  IT liked very much occupying the positions of the former plumbing.
  "I look great as a kitchen sink," Emily Dickinson's poetry said.
  "We look wonderful as a toilet," the minor poets said.
  "I'm grand as pipes," John Donne's poetry said.
  "I'm a perfect hot water heater," Michael McClure's poetry said.
  Vladimir Mayakovsky sang new faucets from the bathroom, there are faucets beyond suffering, and William Shakespeare's poetry was nothing but smiles.
  "That's well and dandy for you," the man said.  "But I have to have plumbing, REAL plumbing in this house.  Did you notice the emphasis I put on REAL?  Real!  Poetry just can't handle it.  Face up to reality," the man said to the poetry.
  But the poetry refused to go.  "We're staying."  The man offered to call the police.  "Go ahead and lock us up, you illiterate," the poetry said in one voice.
  "I'll call the fire department!"
  "Book burner!" the poetry shouted.
  The man began to fight the poetry.  It was the first time he had ever been in a fight.  He kicked the poetry of Emily Dickinson in the nose.
  Of course the poetry of Michael McClure and Vladimir Mayakovsky walked over and said in English and Russian, "That won't do at all," and threw the man down a flight of stairs.  He got the message.
  That was two years ago.  The man is now living in a YMCA in San Francisco and loves it.  He spends more time in the bathroom than everybody else. He goes in there at night and talks to himself with the light out.
-Richard Brautigan
It sounds like religious music. A friend of mine just came back from New York where he had Ernest Hemingway's typist do some typing for him.
He's a successful writer, so he went and got the very best, which happens to be the woman who did Ernest Hemingway's typing. It's enough to take your breath away, to marble your lungs with silence.
Ernest Hemingway's typist!
She's every young writer's dream come true with the appearance of her hands which are like a harpsichord and the perfect intensity of her gaze and all to be followed by the profound sound of her typing.
He paid her fifteen dollars an hour. That's more money than a plumber or an electrician gets.
$120 a day! for a typist!
He said that she does everything for you. You just hand her the copy and like a miracle you have attractive, correct spelling and punctuation that is so beautiful that it brings tears to your eyes and paragraphs that look like Greek temples and she even finishes sentences for you.
She's Ernest Hemingway's
She's Ernest Hemingway's typist.
My credentials? Of course. They are in my pocket. Here: Iâve had friends who have died in California and I mourn them in my own way. Iâve been to Forest Lawn and romped over the place like an eager child. Iâve read The Loved One, The American Way of Death, Wallets in Shrouds and my favorite After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.
I have watched men standing beside hearses in front of mortuaries directing funerals with walky-talkies as if they were officers in a metaphysical war.
Oh, yes: I was once walking with a friend past a skid row hotel in San Francisco and they were carrying a corpse out of the hotel. The corpse was done tastefully in a white sheet with four or five Chinese extras looking on, and there was a very slow-moving ambulance parked out front that was prohibited by law from having a siren or to go any faster than thirty-seven miles an hour and from showing any agÂgressive action in traffic.
My friend looked at the lady or gentleman corpse as it went by and said, âBeing dead is one step up from living in that hotel.â
As you can see, I am an expert on death in California. My credentials stand up to the closest inspection. I am qualified to continue with another story told to-me by my friend who also works as a gardener for a very wealthy old woman in Marin County. She had a nineteen-year-old dog that she loved deeply and the dog responded to this love by dying very slowly from senility.
Every day my friend went to work the dog would be a little more dead. It was long past the proper time for the dog to die, but the dog had been dying for so long that it had lost the way to death.
This happens to a lot of old people in this country. They get so old and live with death so long that they lose the way when it comes time to actually die.
Sometimes they stay lost for years. It is horrible to watch them linger on. Finally the weight of their own blood crushes them.
Anyway, at last the woman could not stand to watch the senile suffering of her dog any longer and called up a veterÂinarian to come and put the dog to sleep.
She instructed my friend to build a coffin for the dog, which he did, figuring it was one of the fringe clauses of gardening in California.
The death doctor drove out to her estate and was soon in the house carrying a little black bag. That was a mistake. It should have been a large pastel bag. When the old woman saw the little black bag, she paled visibly. The unnecessary reality of it scared her, so she sent the veterinarian away with a generous check in his pocket.
Alas, having the veterinarian go away did not solve the dogâs basic problem: He was so senile that death had become a way of life and he was lost from the act of dying.
The next day the dog walked into the corner of a room and couldnât get out of it. The dog stood there for hours until it collapsed from exhaustion, which conveniently hapÂpened to be just when the old woman came into the room, looking for the keys to her Rolls-Royce.
She started crying when she saw the dog lying there like a mutt puddle in the corner. Its face was still pressed against the wall and its eyes were watering in some human kind of way that dogs get when they live with people too long and pick up their worst characteristics.
She had her maid carry the dog to his rug. The dog had a Chinese rug that he had slept on since he was a puppy in China before the fall of Chiang Kai-shek. The rug had been worth a thousand American dollars, then, having survived a dynasty or two.
The rug was worth a lot more now, being in rather exÂcellent shape with actually no more wear and tear than it would get being stored in a castle for a couple of centuries.
The old woman called the veterinarian again and he arrived with his little black bag of tricks and how to find the way back to death after having lost it for years, years that led oneself to being trapped in the corner of a room.
âWhere is your pet?â he said.
âOn his rug,â she said.
The dog lay exhausted and sprawled across beautiful ChiÂnese flowers and things from a different world. âPlease do it on his rug,â she said. âI think he would like that.â
âCertainly,â he said. âDonât worry. He wonât feel a thing. Itâs painless. Just like falling asleep.â
âGood-bye, Charlie,â the old woman said. The dog of course didnât hear her. He had been deaf since 1959.
After bidding the dog farewell, the old woman took to bed. She left the room just as the veterinarian was opening his little black bag. The veterinarian needed PR help desperately.
Afterward my friend took the coffin in the house to pick up the dog. A maid had wrapped the body in the rug. The old woman insisted that the dog be buried with the rug and its head facing West in a grave near the rose garden, pointing toward China. My friend buried the dog with its head pointÂing toward Los Angeles.
As he carried the coffin outside he peeked in at the thouÂsand-dollar rug. Beautiful design, he said to himself. All you would have to do would be to vacuum it a little and it would be as good as new.
My friend is not generally known as a sentimentalist. Stupid dead dog! he said to himself as he neared the grave, Damn dead dog!
âBut I did it,â he told me. âI buried that dog with the rug and I donât know why. Itâs a question that Iâll ask myself forever. Sometimes when it rains at night in the winter, I think of that rug down there in the grave, wrapped around a dog.â
-Richard Brautigan
Thatâs right. The children had been complaining for weeks about the television set. The picture was going out and that death John Donne spoke so fondly about was advancing rapidly down over the edge of whatever was playing that night, and there were also static lines that danced now and then like drunken cemeteries on that picture.
Mr. Henly was a simple American man, but his children were reaching the end of their rope. He worked in an inÂsurance office keeping the dead separated from the living. They were in filing cabinets. Everybody at the office said that he had a great future.
One day he came home from work and his children were waiting for him. They laid it right on the line: either he bought a new television set or they would become juvenile delinquents.
They showed him a photograph of five juvenile delinquents raping an old woman. One of the juvenile delinquents was hitting her on the head with a bicycle chain.
Mr. Henly agreed instantly to the childrenâs demands. Anything, just put away that awful photograph. Then his wife came in and said the kindest thing she had said to him since the children were born, âGet a new television set for the kids. What are you: some kind of human monster?â
The next day Mr. Henly found himself standing in front of the Frederick Crow Department Store, and there was a huge sign plastered over the window. The sign said poetically:
TV SALE.
He went inside and immediately found a video pacifier that had a 42-inch screen with built-in umbilical ducts. A clerk came over and sold the set to him by saying, âHi, there.â
âIâll take it,â Mr. Henly said.
âCash or credit?â
âCredit.â
âDo you have one of our credit cards?â The clerk looked down at Mr. Henlyâs feet. âNo, you donât have one,â he said. âJust give me your name and address and the television set will be home when you get there.â
âWhat about my credit?â Mr. Henly said.
âThat wonât be any problem,â the clerk said. âOur credit department is waiting for you.â
âOh,â Mr. Henly said.
The clerk pointed the way back to the credit department. âTheyâre waiting for you.â
The clerk was right, too. There was a beautiful girl sitting at a desk. She was really lovely. She looked like a composite of all the beautiful girls you see in all the cigarette advertiseÂments and on television.
Wow! Mr. Henly took out his pack and lit up. After all he was no fool.
The girl smiled and said, âMay I help you?â
âYes. I want to buy a television set on credit, and Iâd like to open an account at your store. I have a steady job, three children and Iâm buying a house and a car. My creditâs good,â he said. âIâm already 25,000 dollars in debt.â
Mr. Henly expected the girl to make a telephone call to check on his credit or do something to see if he had been lying about the 25,000 dollars.
She didnât.
âDonât worry about anything,â she said. She certainly did have a nice voice. âThe set is yours. Just step in there.â
She pointed toward a room that had a pleasant door. Actually the door was quite exciting. It was a heavy wooden door with a fantastic grain running through the wood, a grain like the cracks of an earthquake running across the desert sunrise. The grain was filled with light.
The doorknob was pure silver. It was the door that Mr. Henly had always wanted to open. His hand had dreamt its shape while millions of years had passed in the sea.
Above the door was a sign:
BLACKSMITH.
He opened the door and went inside and there was a man waiting for him. The man said, âTake off your shoes, please.â
âI just want to sign the papers,â Mr. Henly said. âIâve got a steady job. Iâll pay on time.â
âDonât worry about it,â the man said. âJust take off your shoes.â
Mr. Henly took off his shoes.
âThe socks, too.â
He did this and then did not think it strange because after all he didnât have any money to buy the television set with. The floor wasnât cold.
âHow tall are you?â the man asked.
â5-11.â
The man walked over to a filing cabinet and pulled out the drawer that had 5-11 printed on it. The man took out a plastic bag and then closed the drawer. Mr. Henly thought of a good joke to tell the man but then immediately forgot it.
The man opened the bag and took out the shadow of an immense bird. He unfolded the shadow as if it were a pair of pants.
âWhatâs that?â
âItâs the shadow of a bird,â the man said and walked over to where Mr. Henly was sitting and laid the shadow on the floor beside his feet.
Then he took a strange-looking hammer and pulled the nails out of Mr. Henlyâs shadow, the nails that fastened it to his body. The man folded up the shadow very carefully. He laid it on a chair beside Mr. Henly.
âWhat are you doing?â Mr. Henly said. He wasnât afraid. Just a little curious.
âPutting the shadow on,â the man said and nailed the birdâs shadow onto his feet. At least it didnât hurt.
âThere you go,â the man said. âYou have 24 months to pay for the television set. When you finish paying for the set, weâll switch shadows. It looks pretty good on you.â
Mr. Henly stared down at the shadow of a bird coming off his human body. It doesnât look bad, Mr. Henly thought.
When he left the room the beautiful girl behind the desk said, âMy, how youâve changed.â
Mr. Henly liked having her talk to him. During many years of married life he had forgotten what sex was really about.
He reached into his pocket for a cigarette and discovered that he had smoked them all up. He felt very embarrassed. The girl stared at him as if he were a small child that had done something wrong.
âItâs very hard to live in a studio apartment in San Jose with a man whoâs learning to play the violin.â Thatâs what she told the police when she handed them the empty revolver.
People cannot figure out why he is with her. They don't understand. He's so good-looking and she's so plain. "What does he see in her?" they ask themselves and each other. They know it's not her cooking because she's not a good cook. About the only thing that she can cook is a halfway decent meat loaf. She makes it every Tuesday night and he has a meat loaf sandwich in his lunch on Wednesday. Years pass. They stay together while their friends break up.
The beginning answer, as in so many of these things, lies in the bed where they make love. She becomes the theater where he shows films of his sexual dreams. Her body is like soft rows of living theater seats leading to a vagina that is the warm screen of his imagination where he makes love to all the women that he sees and wants like passing quicksilver movies, but she doesn't know a thing about it.
All she knows is that she loves him very much and he always pleases her and makes her feel good. She gets excited around four o'clock in the afternoon because she knows that he will be home from work at five.
He has made love to hundreds of different women inside of her. She makes all his dreams come true as she lies there like a simple contented theater in his touching, thinking only of him.
"What does he see in her?" people go on asking themselves and each other. They should know better. The final answer is very simple. It's all in his head.
It's a high building in Singapore that holds the only beauty for this San Francisco day where I am walking down the street, feeling terrible and watching my mind function with the efficiency of a liquid pencil.
A young mother passes by talking to her little girl who is really too small to be able to talk, but she's talking anyway and very excitedly to her mother about something. I can't quite make out what she is saying because she's so little.
I mean, this is a tiny kid.
Then her mother answers her to explode my day with a goofy illumination. "It was a high building in Singapore," she says to the little girl who enthusiastically replies like a bright sound-colored penny, "Yes, it was a high building in Singapore!"
I have a bank account because I grew tired of burying my money in the back yard and something else happened. I was burying some money a few years ago when I came across a human skeleton.
The skeleton had the remains of a shovel in one hand and a half-dissolved coffee can in the other hand. The coffee can was filled with a kind of rustdust material that I think was once money, so now I have a bank account.
But most of the time that doesnât work out very well either. When I wait in line there are almost always people in front of me who have complicated banking problems. I have to stand there and endure the financial cartoon crucifixions of America.
It goes something like this: There are three people in front of me. I have a little check to cash. My banking will only take a minute. The check is already endorsed. I have it in my hand, pointed in the direction of the teller.
The person just being waited on now is a woman fifty years old. She is wearing a long black coat, though it is a hot day. She appears to be very comfortable in the coat and there is a strange smell coming from her. I think about it for a few seconds and realize that this is the first sign of a complicated banking problem.
Then she reaches into the folds of her coat and removes the shadow of a refrigerator filled with sour milk and year-old carrots. She wants to put the shadow in her savings account. Sheâs already made out the slip.
I look up at the ceiling of the bank and pretend that it is the Sistine Chapel.
The old woman puts up quite a struggle before sheâs taken away. Thereâs a lot of blood on the floor. She bit an ear off one of the guards.
I guess you have to admire her spunk.
The check in my hand is for ten dollars.
The next two people in line are actually one person. They are a pair of Siamese twins, but they each have their own bank books.
One of them is putting eighty-two dollars in his savings account and the other one is closing his savings account. The teller counts out 3,574 dollars for him and he puts it away in the pocket on his side of the pants.
All of this takes time. I look up at the ceiling of the bank again but I cannot pretend that it is the Sistine Chapel any more. My check is sweaty as if it had been written in 1929.
The last person between me and the teller is totally anonymous looking. He is so anonymous that heâs barely there.
He puts 237 checks down on the counter that he wants to deposit in his checking account. They are for a total of 489,000 dollars. He also has 611 checks that he wants to deposit in his savings account. They are for a total of 1,754,961 dollars.
His checks completely cover the counter like a success snow storm. The teller starts on his banking as if she were a long distance runner while I stand there thinking that the skeleton in the back yard had made the right decision after all.
It was a cloudy afternoon with an Italian butcher selling a pound of meat to a very old woman, but who knows what such an old woman could possibly use a pound of meat for?
She was too old for that much meat. Perhaps she used it for a bee hive and she had five hundred golden bees at home waiting for the meat, their bodies stuffed with honey.
âWhat kind of meat would you like today?â the butcher said, âWe have some good hamburger. Itâs lean.â
âI donât know,â she said. âHamburger is something else.â
âYeah, itâs lean. I ground it myself. I put a lot of lean meat in it.â
âHamburger doesnât sound right,â she said.
âYeah,â the butcher said. âItâs a good day for hamburger. Look outside. Itâs cloudy. Some of those clouds have rain in them. Iâd get the hamburger,â he said.
âNo,â she said. âI donât want hamburger, and I donât think itâs going to rain. I think the sun is going to come out, and it will be a beautiful day, and I want a pound of liver.â
The butcher was stunned. He did not like to sell liver to old ladies. There was something about it that made him very nervous. He didnât want to talk to her any more.
He reluctantly sliced a pound of liver off a huge red chunk and wrapped it up in white paper and put it into a brown bag. It was a very unpleasant experience for him.
He took her money, gave her the change, and went back to the poultry section to try and get a hold of his nerves.
By using her bones like the sails of a ship, the old woman passed outside into the street. She carried the liver as if it were a victory to the bottom of a very steep hill.
She climbed the hill and being very old, it was hard on her. She grew tired and had to stop and rest many times before she reached the top.
At the top of the hill was the old womanâs house: a tall San Francisco house with bay windows that reflected a cloudy day.
She opened her purse which was like a small autumn field and near the fallen branches of an old apple tree, she found her keys.
Then she opened the door. It was a dear and trusted friend. She nodded at the door and went into the house and walked down a long hall into a room that was filled with bees.
There were bees everywhere in the room. Bees on the chairs. Bees on the photograph of her dead parents. Bees on the curtains. Bees on an ancient radio that once listened to the 1930s. Bees on her comb and brush.
The bees came to her and gathered about her lovingly while she unwrapped the liver and placed it upon a cloudy sliver platter that soon changed into a sunny day.
The Lost Chapters of âTrout Fishing in Americaâ: Carthage Sink
The Carthage River came roaring out of the ground at a fountainhead that was like a wild well. It flowed arrogantly a dozen miles or so through an open canyon and then just disappeared into the ground at a place that was called CarÂthage Sink.
The river loved to tell everybody (everybody being the sky, the wind, the few trees that grew around there, birds, deer and even the stars if you can believe that) what a great river it was.
âI come roaring from the earth and return roaring to the earth. I am the master of my waters. I am the mother and father of myself. I donât need a single drop of rain. Look at my smooth strong white muscles. I am my own future!â
The Carthage River kept this kind of talking up for thouÂsands of years. Needless to say: Everybody (everybody being the sky, etc.) was bored up to here with that river.
Birds and deer tried to keep away from that part of the country if they could avoid it. The stars had been reduced to playing a waiting game and there was a dramatically noticeÂable lack of wind in that area, except of course for the CarÂthage River.
Even the trout that lived there were ashamed of the river and always glad when they died. Anything was better than living in that God-damn bombastic river.
One day the Carthage River in mid-breath telling about how great it was, dried up, âI am the master of my âŠâ It just stopped.
The river couldnât believe it. Not one more drop of water came from the ground and its sink was soon just a trickle dripping back into the ground like the runny nose of a kid.
The Carthage Riverâs pride vanished in an irony of water and the canyon turned into a good mood. Birds suddenly flew all over the place and took a happy look at what had happened and a great wind came up and it even seemed as if the stars were out earlier that night to take a look and then smile beatifically.
There was a summer rainstorm a few miles away in some mountains and the Carthage River begged for the rain to come to its rescue.
âPlease,â the river said with a voice that was now only the shadow of a whisper. âHelp me. I need water for my trout. Theyâre dying. Look at the poor little things.â
The storm looked at the trout. The trout were very happy with the way things were now, though they would soon be dead.
The rainstorm made up some incredibly elaborate story about having to visit somebodyâs grandmother who had a broken ice-cream freezer and somehow lots of rain was needed to repair it, âBut maybe hi a few months we might get together. Iâll call you on the telephone before I come over.â
The next day which was of course August 17, 1921 a lot of people, townspeople and such, drove out in their cars and looked at the former river and shook their heads in wonder. They had a lot of picnic baskets with them, too.
There was an article in the local paper with two photoÂgraphs showing two large empty holes that had been the fountainhead and the sink of the Carthage River. The holes looked like nostrils.
Another photograph was of a cowboy sitting on his horse, holding an umbrella in one hand and pointing into the depths of the Carthage Sink with his other hand. He was looking very serious. It was a photograph to make people laugh and thatâs exactly what they did.
Well, there you have the lost chapters of Trout Fishing in America. Their style is probably a little different because Iâm a little different now, Iâm thirty-four, and they were probably written in a slightly different form, too. Itâs interesting that I didnât rewrite them back there in 1961 but waited until DeÂcember 4, 1969, almost a decade later, to return and try to bring them back with me.
The Lost Chapters of âTrout Fishing in Americaâ: Rembrandt Creek
Rembrandt Creek looked just like its name and it was in lonely country that had very bad winters. The creek started in a high mountain meadow surrounded by pine trees. That was about the only real light that creek ever saw because after it had gathered itself from some small springs in the meadow, it flowed off into the pines and down to a dark-tree-tangled canyon that went along the edge of the mountains.
The creek was filled with little trout so wild that they were barely afraid when you walked up to the creek and stood there staring down at them.
I never really went fishing for them in any classical or even functioning sense. The only reason I knew that creek was because thatâs where we camped when we went deer hunting.
No, it was not a fishing creek for me but just a place where we got water that we needed for our camp but I seemed to carry most of the water that we used and I think I washed a lot of dishes because I was the teen-ager and it was easier to have me do those things than the men who were older and wiser and needed time to think about places where deer might be and also to drink a little whiskey which seemed to aid thoughts of hunting and other things.
âHey, kid, take your head out of your ass and see if you can do something about these dishes.â That was one of the elders of the hunt speaking. His voice is remembered down trails of sound-colored hunting marble.
Often I think about Rembrandt Creek and how much it looked like a painting hanging in the worldâs largest museum with a roof that went to the stars and galleries that knew the whisk of comets.
I only fished it once.
I didnât have any fishing tackle, just a 30:30 Winchester, so I took an old rusty bent nail and tied some white string onto it like the ghost of my childhood and tried to catch a trout using a piece of deer meat for bait and I almost caught one, too, lifting it out of the water just before it fell off my nail and back into the painting that carried it from my sight, returning it to the Seventeenth Century where it belonged on the easel of a man named Rembrandt.
Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee affords. I once read something about coffee. The thing said that coffee is good for you;
it stimulates all the organs.
I thought at first this was a strange way to put it, and not altogether pleasant, but as time goes by I have found out that it makes sense in its own limited way. I'll tell you what I mean.
Yesterday morning I went over to see a girl. I like her. Whatever we had going for us is gone now. She does not care for me. I blew it and wish I hadn't.
I rang the door bell and waited on the stairs. I could hear her moving around upstairs. The way she moved I could tell that she was getting up. I had awakened her.
Then she came down the stairs. I could feel her approach in my stomach. Every step she took stirred my feelings and lead indirectly to her opening the door. She saw me and it did not please her.
Once upon a time it pleased her very much, last week. I wonder where it went,
pretending to be naive.
'I feel strange now,' she said. 'I don't want to talk.'
'I want a cup of coffee,' I said, because it was the last thing in the world
that I wanted. I said it in such a way that it sounded as if I were reading her a telegram from somebody else, a person who really wanted a cup of coffee, who cared about nothing else.
'All right,' she said.
I followed her up the stairs. It was ridiculous. She had just put some clothes on. They had not quite adjusted themselves to her body. I could tell you about her ass. We went into the kitchen.
She took a jar of instant coffee off the shelf and put it on the table. She placed a
cup next to it, and a spoon. I looked at them. She put a pan full of water on the stove and turned the gas on under it.
All this time she did not say a word. Her clothes adjusted themselves to her body. I won't. She left the kitchen.
Then she went down the stairs and outside to see if she had any mail. I didn't remember seeing any. She came back up the stairs and went into another room. She closed the door after her. I looked at the pan full of water on the stove.
I knew that it would take a year before the water started to boil. It was now October and there was too much water in the pan. That was the problem. I threw half of the water into the sink.
The water would boil faster now. It would take only six months. The house was quiet.
I looked out the back porch. There were sacks of garbage there. I stared at the garbage and tried to figure out what she had been eating lately by studying the containers and peelings and stuff. I couldn't tell a thing.
It was now March. The water started to boil. I was pleased by this.
I looked at the table. There was the jar of instant coffee, the empty cup and the spoon all laid out like a funeral service. These are the things that you need to make a cup of coffee.
When I left the house ten minutes later, the cup of coffee safely inside me like a
grave, I said, 'Thank you for the cup of coffee.'
'You're welcome,' she said. Her voice came from behind a closed door. Her
voice sounded like another telegram. It was really time for me to leave.
I spent the rest of the day not making coffee. It was a comfort. And evening came, I had dinner in a restaurant and went to a bar. I had some drinks and talked to some people.
We were bar people and said bar things. None of them remembered, and the bar closed. It was two o'clock in the morning. I had to go outside. It was foggy and cold in San Francisco. I wondered about the fog and felt very human and exposed.
I decided to go visit another girl. We had not been friends for over a year. Once we were very close. I wondered what she was thinking about now.
I went to her house. She didn't have a door bell. That was a small victory. One must keep track of all the small victories. I do, anyway.
She answered the door. She was holding a robe in front of her. She didn't believe that she was seeing me. 'What do you want? ' she said, believing now that she was seeing me. I walked right into the house.
She turned and closed the door in such a way that I could see her profile. She had not bothered to wrap the robe completely around herself. She was just holding the robe in front of herself.
I could see an unbroken line of body running from her head to her feet. It looked kind of strange. Perhaps because it was so late at night.
'What do you want? ' she said.
'I want a cup of coffee,' I said. What a funny thing to say, to say again for
a cup of coffee was not what I really wanted.
She looked at me and wheeled slightly on the profile. She was not pleased to see me.
Let the AMA tell us that time heals. I looked at the unbroken line of her body.
'Why don't you have a cup of coffee with me? ' I said. 'I feel like talking to you. We haven't talked for a long time.'
She looked at me and wheeled slightly on the profile. I stared at the unbroken line of her body. This was not good.
'It's too late,' she said. 'I have to get up in the morning. If you want
a cup of coffee, there's instant in the kitchen. I have to go to bed.'
The kitchen light was on. I looked down the hall into the kitchen. I didn't feel like
going into the kitchen and having another cup of coffee by myself. I didn't feel like going to anybody else's house and asking them for a cup of coffee.
I realized that the day had been committed to a very strange pilgrimage, and I had not planned it that way. At least the jar of instant coffee was not on the table, beside an empty white cup and a spoon.
They say in the spring a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love. Perhaps if he has enough time left over, his fancy can even make room for a cup of coffee.Â
