Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away

by Richard Brautigan

  The last person between me and the teller is totally anonymous looking. He is so anonymous that he's 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.

  A High Building in Singapore

  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!"

  An Unlimited Supply of 35 Millimeter Film

  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 tiling 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.

  The Scarlatti Tilt

  "IT'S very hard to live in a studio apartment in San Jose with a man who's learning to play the violin." That's what she told the police when she handed them the empty revolver.

  The Wild Birds of Heaven

  I'd rather dwell in some dark holler

  where the sun refuses to shine,

  where the wild birds of heaven

  can't hear me when I whine.

  —Folk Song

  THAT'S 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 insurance 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 children's 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, "Get a new television set for the kids. What are you: some kind of human monster?"

  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, "Hi, there."

  "I'll take it," Mr. Henly said.

  "Cash or credit?"

  "Credit."

  "Do you have one of our credit cards?" The clerk looked down at Mr. Henly's feet. "No, you don't have one," he said. "Just give me your name and address and the television set will be home when you get there."

  "What about my credit?" Mr. Henly said.

  "That won't be any problem,' the clerk said. "Our credit department is waiting for you."

  "Oh," Mr. Henly said.

  The clerk pointed the way back to the credit department. "They're waiting for you."

  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 advertisements and on television.

  Wow! Mr. Henly took out his pack and lit up. After all he was no fool.

  The girl smiled and said, "May I help you?"

  "Yes. I want to buy a television set on credit, and I'd like to open an account at your store. I have a steady job, three children and I'm buying a house and a car. My credit's good," he said. "I'm already 25,000 dollars in debt."

  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 didn't.

  "Don't worry about anything," she said. She certainly did have a nice voice. "The set is yours. Just step in there."

  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, "Take off your shoes, please."

  "I just want to sign the papers," Mr. Henly said. "I've got a steady job. I'll pay on time."

  "Don't worry about it," the man said. "Just take off your shoes."

  Mr. Henly took off his shoes.

  "The socks, too."

  He did this and then did not think it strange because after all he didn't have any money to buy the television set with. The floor wasn't cold.

  "How tall are you?" the man asked.

  "5-11."

  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.

  "What's that?"

  "It's the shadow of a bird," 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. Henly's 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.

  "Wha
t are you doing?" Mr. Henly said. He wasn't afraid. Just a little curious.

  "Putting the shadow on," the man said and nailed the bird's shadow onto his feet. At least it didn't hurt.

  "There you go," the man said. "You have 24 months to pay for the television set. When you finish paying for the set, we'll switch shadows. It looks pretty good on you."

  Mr. Henly stared down at the shadow of a bird coming off his human body. It doesn't look bad, Mr. Henly thought.

  When he left the room the beautiful girl behind the desk said, "My, how you've changed."

  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.

  Winter Rug

  MY credentials? Of course. They are in my pocket. Here: I've had friends who have died in California and I mourn them in my own way. I've been to Forest Lawn and romped over the place like an eager child. I've 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 aggressive action in traffic.

  My friend looked at the lady or gentleman corpse as it went by and said, "Being dead is one step up from living in that hotel."

  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 veterinarian 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 dog's 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 couldn't get out of it. The dog stood there for hours until it collapsed from exhaustion, which conveniently happened 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 excellent 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.

  "Where is your pet?" he said.

  "On his rug," she said.

  The dog lay exhausted and sprawled across beautiful Chinese flowers and things from a different world. "Please do it on his rug," she said. "I think he would like that."

  "Certainly," he said. "Don't worry. He won't feel a thing. It's painless. Just like falling asleep."

  "Good-bye, Charlie," the old woman said. The dog of course didn't 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 pointing toward Los Angeles.

  As he carried the coffin outside he peeked in at the thousand-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!

  "But I did it," he told me. "I buried that dog with the rug and I don't know why. It's a question that I'll 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."

  Ernest Hemingway's Typist

  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.

  Homage to the San Francisco YMCA

  ONCE upon a time in San Francisco there was a man who really liked the finer things in life, especially poetry. 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 the 15th of eve
ry 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 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.