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

by Richard Brautigan

  I also don't think they would have listened to me anyway, and I certainly didn't want to make them angry at me because frankly they were the most interesting thing happening in my life.

  They were better than any radio programs I heard or movies I saw that summer.

  Sometimes I wished there was a set of them like toys that I could take home with me and play with: Carved wooden miniatures of the man and the woman and all their furniture and the truck (it was all right for that to be metal) and a green cloth that was shaped just like the pond with everything on it the way it actually was.

  I also wished that I had miniatures of the old man and his shack and his garden and of course the dock and his boat.

  What an interesting game that would be.

  Sometimes I tried to think of a name for it just before I fell asleep but I never could think of a good name for it and afterwhile it got lost in my dreams because I couldn't keep up with it.

  I arrived at the place where their living room would be set up at the pond's edge just about a minute or so before they got there.

  While the minute passes before they get here with their furniture, there will be a huge INTERRUPTION like a black wet Titanic telegram or a telephone call that sounds like a man with a chain saw cutting up a cemetery at midnight or just the very rude distraction of death itself, the final end of all childhoods including mine which started to dramatically begin its descent when I passed the restaurant that February rainy afternoon in 1948 and should have gone inside and gotten a hamburger and a Coke. I was hungry, too. They would have been a welcome addition to my existence.

  There was not a single reason in the world for me to walk past the restaurant and look in the window of the gun shop next door. But I did and the dice were getting ready to be thrown.

  There was a beautiful-looking .22 caliber rifle in the window. I had a .22. Looking at that gun made me think about my gun, and when I thought about my gun, I thought about the fact that my gun didn't have any bullets. I had been planning on getting some for the last couple of weeks.

  If I had some bullets, I could go out and shoot.

  I could go to the junkyard and shoot bottles and cans and any abandoned old thing that looked attractive through my sights or there was an old apple orchard that had rotten apples still clinging to its leafless branches. It was fun to shoot rotten apples. They exploded when a bullet hit them. It was the kind of effect that kids love if they're slightly bloodthirsty for one reason or another and can dump their aggressions on passed-away objects like rotten apples.

  I had a friend who liked to shoot apples, too, but he didn't like to go to the junkyard to practice the little decisions of destruction that a .22 rifle can provide a kid. But I couldn't shoot anything one way or another if I didn't have any bullets.

  Some bullets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .or a burger, a burger. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . or some bullets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . paddled back and forth in my brain like a Ping-Pong ball.

  The door to the restaurant opened just then and a satisfied customer came out with a burger-pleased smile on his face. The open door also allowed a gust of burger perfume to escape right into my nose.

  I took a step toward the restaurant but then I heard in my mind the sound of a .22 bullet turning a rotten apple into instant rotten apple sauce. It was a lot more dramatic than eating a hamburger. The door to the restaurant closed escorting the smell of cooking hamburgers back inside like an usher.

  What was I to do?

  I was twelve years old and the decision was as big as the Grand Canyon. I should have gone to neutral territory to think it over instead of just standing right there in the battleground of their beckoning.

  I could have gone across the street to a magazine store and looked at comic books while I thought about how seriously I wanted a box of apple-splattering bullets or a delicious hamburger with lots of onions on it.

  I could have thought about it while looking at comic books until the owner of the store started giving me the evil eye because obviously I was not a potential comic-book purchaser. I was just a kid hanging out with Superman and Batman while I made up my mind.

  Too bad Superman couldn't have told me what to do.

  SUPERMAN: Kid, go get a burger.

  ME: Yes, sir!

  SUPERMAN: And don't forget the onions.

  ME: How did you know that I liked onions?

  SUPERMAN: If you're faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings with a single bound, onions aren't that hard.

  ME: Yes, sir!

  SUPERMAN (flying away): Be kind to your kitten! (I would have to think that one over because I didn't have a kitten. Anyway, not one that I could remember. Maybe Superman knew something that I didn't know. Of course he did!)

  ME: I promise, Superman!

  What did I have to lose?

  Yeah, everything would have been different if Superman would have told me to get a hamburger. Instead I walked across the street to the gun shop and bought a box of .22 shells. The hamburger had lost. The sound of instant rotten apple sauce had won.

  I have replayed that day over and over again in my mind like the editing of a movie where I am the producer, the director, the editor, scriptwriter, actors, music, and everything.

  I have a gigantic motion picture studio in my mind where I have been working constantly on this movie since February 17th, 1948. I have been working on the same movie for 31 years. I believe that this is a record. I don't think I will ever finish it.

  I have, more or less, about 3,983,421 hours of film.

  But it's too late now.

  Whereas I could never find a name for my pond game, I've always had a title for my movie starting with the day I bought the bullets instead of the hamburger. I call my picture Hamburger Cemetery.

  After I bought the bullets, I didn't have any more money for a hamburger, so I started home. The box of bullets felt very good in my pocket. When I got home I would show them to my gun. I would load and unload my gun a couple of times. That would make the gun happy because guns like bullets. They are nothing without bullets. They need bullets like a camel needs the desert.

  My gun had an interesting story about how it got into my life. I knew this boy whose parents didn't like him because he was always getting into trouble. He was fourteen, smoked, had a reputation as a well-known masturbator and had been picked up by the police half-a-dozen times though he had never been formally charged with anything. His parents always got him off.

  His father had some thread-thin political influence that was left over from having had a bright future in local politics about ten years ago. He had lost his political future when he was arrested the second time for drunk driving and running over an old lady who broke like a box of toothpicks being stepped on by an elephant. She was in the hospital so long that when she got out, she thought it was the Twenty-First Century.

  But he still had a few political debts owed him—before he ran over the old lady there was talk in high places about him being the next mayor—and he collected them whenever he went and got his son out of jail.

  Anyway, the boy's parents didn't like him and after the last time he was arrested they decided not to let him sleep in the house any more. From now on after that, he was to sleep out in the garage. He could take his meals in the house and bathe and go to the toilet there, but those were the only times they wanted him in there.

  To make sure that he got the point of their dislike, they did not provide him with a bed when they exiled him to the garage. That's where I come in and the gun comes in.

  The boy had a .22 caliber pump rifle. I had for some unknown reason, I can't remember why, a mattress.

  Just after his parents Siberia-ized him to the garage, he came over to visit me. I'll never totally know why because we were not that good of friends. In the first place, his reputation as a prodigious masturbator did not weigh well with me. I had jacked off a few times you kno
w, but I was not interested in making it a career.

  Also, he had eyes that were born to look at things that he could steal. I of course stole a few things, but I wasn't interested in stealing everything. And, finally, I didn't like his smoking all the time and trying to get me to smoke. I just wasn't interested in smoking but he kept insisting that I smoke with him.

  Though he was fourteen and I was twelve and he was bigger than me, for some strange reason he was almost afraid of me. I encouraged his fear by telling him a few gory lies about my prowess in hand-to-hand combat with other twelve-year-old kids. I also told him that I had once beaten up a seventeen-year-old. That really registered with him.

  "It doesn't matter how big they are. You hit them in the right place and they all fall. You just have to know that place," I said, finishing up my tale of Jack Dempsey-like heroics that convinced him into being a minor coward around me, which I enjoyed enormously but not enough to have him for a friend to bully.

  As I said earlier, he just had too many things going that were not in his favor.

  And then he arrived one day and told me his story of parental rejection and how he had to sleep in the garage and he didn't have anything to sleep on.

  The cement floor was cold.

  "I don't know what I'm going to do," he said.

  I knew what he was going to do. The words had barely escaped his mouth when I had it all planned out. What was to form an eternal breach between him and his parents and eventually lead him to doing three years in the pen for stealing a car and then a marriage with a spiteful woman ten years older than him who had five children who all grew to hate him, causing him to gain his only and ultimate solace in this world by buying a telescope and becoming an extremely incompetent but diligent astronomer, was to work to my brief advantage.

  "Mommy, where's Daddy?"

  "Looking at the stars. "

  "Mommy, do you hate Daddy, too ?"

  "Yes, child. I hate him, too. "

  "Mommy, I love you. Do you know why?"

  "Why?"

  "Because you hate Daddy. It's fun to hate Daddy, isn't it?"

  "Yes, child."

  "Why does Daddy look at the stars all the time, Mommy?"

  "Because he's an asshole. "

  "Do assholes always look at the stars, Mommy?"

  "Your father does. "

  He had his telescope in the attic and he was always confusing his constellations. He could never get it quite straight between what was Orion and what was the Big Dipper. For some strange reason he couldn't accept that the Big Dipper looked like a big dipper, but at least he wasn't in jail for stealing cars.

  He worked hard and gave his wife all his money and she went to bed with the postman every chance she got. It was barely a life but being always confused about the Big Dipper gave it a fingernail-clipping continuity and meaning. "How could it be the Big Dipper if it looks like a big dipper?" was the way he approached it.

  But all that was years in the future and now he was standing in front of me bedless and telling me all the details.

  Changing the subject completely, I put my plan in effect by asking him if he still had that old .22 rifle of his.

  "Yes," he said, looking slightly bewildered at the turn of mental events. "What does that have to do with anything? What am I going to do? I'll catch pneumonia out there in the garage."

  I successfully concealed my instantaneous revulsion when he said the dreaded word pneumonia. I had more serious things on my mind than to be rattled by the idea of pneumonia.

  "No, you won't," I said.

  "How do you know?" he said.

  "I've got a mattress," I said.

  He looked at me.

  "I've got a mattress, too," he said. "But my folks won't let me take it out of the house into the garage."

  Good! I thought: My plan is a certain success.

  "I've got an extra mattress," I said, emphasizing the word EXTRA. He was impressed, but he knew that there was a catch to it. He waited.

  I made it simple and sweet using the English language like a brain surgeon ordering a sequence of nerve events with his scalpel.

  "I'll trade you my mattress for your .22."

  His face showed that he didn't like that idea. He took out a twisted and hunchbacked cigarette butt. It looked as if he had found it in the Hugo novel.

  Before he could light it, I said, "I just read someplace that it's going to be a . . . . . very . . . . . cold . . . . . winter." I dragged the key words out until they sounded as long as December.

  "Ah, shit," he said.

  That's how I got the gun that led me to making the fatal decision to get a box of bullets instead of a hamburger.

  If his parents hadn't made him go live in the garage, I never would have traded my mattress for his gun. Even if they'd still made him go live in the garage, but had given him a mattress, I wouldn't have had that gun. I got the gun in October of 1947 when time-sequenced nature was beginning to close the pond down for winter.

  When the first cold rainy winds of a big autumn storm blew across the pond, everything changed, but of course none of this has happened yet.

  It is the future.

  The present is watching their truckload of furniture drive/rattle down the road toward me, but somehow they never seem to get any closer.

  They are like a mirage that refuses to have any responsibility toward reality. It just stands there satirizing actual things. I try to make it respond like reality but it refuses. It won't come any closer.

  They and their truck are pasted like a child's drawing against the fourth dimension. I want them to come, but they won't come, so I am catapulted into the future where it is November 1948 and the February-17th apple orchard event is history. The court found me not guilty of criminal negligence in the shooting.

  A lot of people wanted me sent to reform school, but I was found innocent. The subsequent scandal forced us to move and now I'm living in another town where nobody knows what happened in that orchard.

  I am going to school.

  I'm in the seventh grade and we are studying the American Revolution, but I have no interest in the American Revolution. I am only interested in everything that I can find out about hamburgers.

  Somehow I believe that only a complete knowledge of hamburgers can save my soul. If I had gotten a hamburger that February day instead of bullets, everything would have been different, so I must find out all that I car about hamburgers.

  I go to the public library and pour over books like intellectual catsup to gain information about the hamburger.

  My desire for hamburger knowledge dramatically increases the level of my reading. One of my teachers gets alarmed. She calls in my mother trying to find out the origins of my gigantic intellectual leap.

  My mother can only help by saying that I like to read a lot.

  This does not satisfy the teacher.

  One day the teacher asks me to stay after school. The teacher is becoming obsessed by my newly-found reading level.

  "You're reading a lot," the teacher says. "Why?"

  "I like to read," I say.

  "That's not good enough," the teacher says, her eyes brightening. I'm beginning not to like this at all.

  "I talked to your mother. That's what she also told me," the teacher says. "But you don't think I believe that, do you?"

  I'd had teachers before who were strict disciplinarians and wouldn't think twice about whacking a kid, but this teacher was rapidly becoming dangerous right in front of my eyes.

  "What have I done wrong?" I say. "I just like to read."

  "That's what you think!" the teacher yells, loud enough to summon the principal who takes her away to his office, sobbing hysterically.

  Following a period of recuperation, a month's sick leave, total rest, the teacher was transferred to another school. After a series of substitute teachers, we got a new permanent teacher who didn't give a damn about my reading, so I continued gaining the reading tools to aid in my exploration of the ha
mburger and possible redemption through a complete knowledge of its origins, quirks and basic functioning.

  Looking back on it now, I guess I used the hamburger as a form of mental therapy to keep from going mad because what happened in that orchard was not the kind of thing that causes a child to have a positive outlook on life. It was the kind of thing that challenged your mettle and I used the hamburger as my first line of defense.

  Because I looked older than I actually was—I was thirteen, then, but I was tall for my age, so that I could easily be mistaken for fifteen—I passed myself off as a high school student who was a reporter for the school paper and doing an article on hamburgers.

  This gave me access to almost all the fry cooks in the new town where we had been forced to move. Ostensibly, I interviewed them about their experiences cooking, but always worked the interview around to their involvement with hamburgers. The interview would start out being about one thing and would always end up being about hamburgers.

  A bright young high school reporter (me): When was the first time that you cooked a hamburger?

  A Mexican fry cook approaching forty the hard way: Do you mean professionally?

  Reporter: Yes, professionally or just as an amateur.

  Mexican Fry Cook: Let me think. I was just a kid when I cooked my first hamburger.

  Reporter: Where was that?

  Mexican Fry Cook: Albuquerque.

  Reporter: How old were you?

  Mexican Fry Cook: Ten.

  Reporter: Did you enjoy cooking it?

  Mexican Fry Cook: What was that question again?

  Reporter: Was it fun cooking your first hamburger?

  Mexican Fry Cook: What kind of article did you say this was?

  Reporter: It's about cooks here in town.

  Mexican Fry Cook: You sure ask a lot of questions about hamburgers.

  Reporter: You cook a lot of hamburgers, don't you?

  Mexican Fry Cook: But I cook a lot of other things, too. Why don't you ask me about grilled cheese sandwiches?