Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (14 page)

Anyway, it's hard to holiday on $1400 a year and yesterday I was taking the Greyhound bus to Monterey to stay for a couple of weeks as a kind of exile from San Francisco.

I won't go into the reasons why. I am afraid that too much humor would ruin this story because actually it has very little to do with me. I just went along for the ride.

It concerns the two German boys that were on the bus. They were in their early twenties and sitting in the seat in front of me. They were in America for a three-week vacation. It was almost over: too bad.

They were yakking it up in German and touristing away, pointing out this and that as the bus rolled toward Monterey.

The German boy sitting next to the window also had a deep interest in the contents of American automobiles, especially the female contents. Whenever he would spot a good-looking girl driving along, he would point her out to his friend as part of their itinerary in America.

They were healthy, normal sex fiends.

A Volkswagen sedan came by the German boy on the window and he immediately got his friend's attention by pointing out two good-looking young girls in the Volkswagen. The German boys really had their faces pressed against the window now.

The girl on the passenger side, she was right beneath us, had short blond hair and a gentle white neck. The Volkswagen and the bus were travelling at the same rate of speed.

As the German boys continued to stare down at her, she grew kind of nervous, self-conscious, but she did not know why this was happening because she couldn't see us. She was now playing with her hair as women are prone to do under such conditions, even if they don't know quite what's up.

The lane of traffic in front of the Volkswagen slowed down and our bus went roaring ahead of the car. We were gone from each other for about a minute when the Volkswagen came up on us again.

The German boys picked up on this instantly and their faces were pressed against the window, participating in the age-old Candy-Store-Sex-Window Syndrome.

This time the girl looked up and saw the German boys staring down, all big smiles and flirting. The girl returned a kind of ambiguous half-smile. She was a perfect freeway Mona Lisa.

We hit another scramble of traffic and the Volkswagen
suffered from it and fell back, but a couple of minutes later it was up with us again. We were both moving about sixty miles an hour.

This time when she of the blond hair, the gentle white neck looked up and saw the German boys flirting away, she gave them a great big smile and waved enthusiastically. They had shattered her cool.

The German boys were waving like a convention of flags with mile-a-minute flirting and smiling. They were very happy: Ah, America!

The girl had a lovely smile. Her friend waved, too, driving the Volkswagen with one hand. She was also a good-looking girl: another blonde, but with long hair.

The German boys were having a fine holiday in America. Too bad there was no way they could get out of that bus and into the Volkswagen to meet the girls, but things like that are impossible.

Soon the girls took an off ramp to Palo Alto and disappeared forever, not unless of course, they take a holiday next year in Germany and are driving along the autobahn in a bus.

S
TRANGE
fences grow on Point Reyes Peninsula which is fastened like a haunted fingerprint to the California coast. Odd perspectives are constantly drifting out of sight or becoming too intimate in this place where white medieval Portuguese dairies suddenly appear cradled by cypress trees and then disappear as if they had never really been there at all.

Hawks circle in the sky like the lost springs of old railroad watches looking for correct protein wandering somewhere below to swoop down upon and devour chronologically.

It is not often that I journey to Point Reyes because, frankly, my mind is seldom in that place, but when I do go there I always enjoy myself. That is, if enjoy is the right word, driving down a road lined with fences that look like cemeteries lost in half-vague and half-mercuric spiritual density.

I usually end up going to a place called McClures Beach at the end of the peninsula. There's a parking lot where you
leave your car and then it's a good hike down a gradual canyon to the beach, following a small creek.

Watercress grows luxuriously in the creek.

There are many peculiar flowers as step by step you disappear down into the turns of the canyon until at last you arrive at the Pacific Ocean and a dramatic beach like a photograph if they'd had cameras in the days when Christ lived, and now you are a part of the photograph, but sometimes you have to pinch yourself to make sure that you are really there.

I remember one afternoon many years ago I went with a friend to Point Reyes where my mind was exactly in that kind of place and stared at the fences as we drove deeper and deeper into the peninsula which of course unfolded like layers of abstraction and intimacy constantly being circled by hawks.

We parked at McClures Beach. I remember very clearly the sound of the car being parked. It made a lot of noise. There were some other cars parked there. Even after our car was parked, totally silent, it was still making noise.

Warm fog swirled in the canyon as we gradually descended. A hundred feet in front of us everything was lost in the fog and a hundred feet behind us everything was lost in the fog. We were walking in a capsule between amnesias.

There were hushed flowers all around us. The flowers looked as if they had been painted by a Fourteenth Century anonymous French painter. My friend and I had not said anything to each other for a long time. Perhaps our tongues had joined the brushes of that painter.

I stared at the watercress in the creek. It looked wealthy. Whenever I see watercress, which isn't very often, I think of the rich. I think they are the only people who can afford it and they use watercress in exotic recipes that they keep hidden in vaults from the poor.

Suddenly we went around a turn in the canyon and there were five handsome teen-age boys in swimming suits burying five pretty teen-age girls in the sand. They were all carved from classical California physical marble.

The girls had arrived at various stages of being buried. One of them was completely buried with only her head above the sand. She was very beautiful with long black hair stretched out along the sand as if it were some kind of dark water, perhaps jade, flowing out of her head.

The girls were all very happy being buried in the sand and so were the boys who were burying them in the sand. It was a teen-age graveyard party because they had run out of everything else to do. They were surrounded by towels, beer cans, beach baskets, picnic leftovers, etc.

They gave us no particular attention as we walked by and down to the Pacific Ocean where I mentally pinched myself to make sure that I was still in this Christ-powered photograph.

T
HIS
story is a close friend or perhaps even a lover to a story called "Elmira." They both deal in a way with the Long Tom River and the time when I was young, a teen-ager, and somehow the Long Tom River was a part of my spiritual DNA.

I really needed that river. It was the beginning answers to some very complicated questions in my life that I am still trying to work out.

I'm quite aware that Richard Brautigan has written a novel called
Trout Fishing in America
that deals thoroughly with trout fishing and its kaleidoscope of environments, so I'm a little embarrassed to try something in the same theme, but I'm going to go ahead because this is a story that I have to tell.

I used to go fishing on the Long Tom River way back in the mountains where the river in parts wasn't much wider than a coffee table with a best seller sitting on it.

The trout were little cutthroats between six and ten inches long and a lot of fun to catch. I really got good at fishing the Long Tom and could take my limit of ten fish in little over an hour if I had any kind of luck at all.

The Long Tom River was forty miles away. I usually hitch-hiked there late in the afternoon and would leave in the twilight to hitch-hike the forty miles back home.

A few times I hitch-hiked there in the rain and fished in the rain and hitch-hiked back in the rain. I travelled eighty miles in a wet circle.

I'd get out at a bridge across the Long Tom and fish down half a mile to another bridge across the river. It was a wooden bridge that looked like an angel. The river was sort of murky. It was gentle fishing between the bridges, down through a lazy dripping landscape.

Below the second bridge, which looked like a white wooden angel, the Long Tom River flowed into very strange ways. It was dark and haunting and went something like this: Every hundred yards or so there was a large open swamp-like pool and then the river flowed out of the pool into a fast shallow run covered over closely with trees like a shadowy knitted tunnel until it reached the next swampy pool and very seldom did I let the Long Tom River call me down into there.

But late one August afternoon I had fished down to the angel bridge and the fishing hadn't been very good. I only had four or five trout.

It was raining and very warm up there in the mountains and edging toward sundown and actually it may have been early twilight. I couldn't tell exactly what time it was because of the rain.

Anyway: I was taken by some goofy kid reason to try a little fishing down below the bridge into those knitted river tunnels and big swampy open pools.

It was really too late to go down into there and I should have just turned around and got out of there and hitch-hiked the forty miles back home through the rain.

I should have let well enough alone.

But, Oh no, I started fishing down into there. It was tropical in the tunnels and I was catching trout where the tunnels flowed into the big swampy pools. Then I'd have to wade around the pools through deep warm mud.

I lost a trout that went about thirteen inches long and that really got my excitement up, so I continued fishing down further and further until I was six swampy pools past the wooden angel bridge when suddenly, out of nowhere, the light just dropped away within a few moments, falling into total night and there I was halfway around the sixth swampy pool in the dark, and in front of me there was nothing but darkness and water, and behind me was nothing but darkness and water.

The strangest God-damn feeling of fear shook through me. It was just like a crystal chandelier made out of adrenaline swaying wildly in an earthquake, and I turned around and fled up the river, splashing like an alligator around the big swampy pools and running like a dog up the shallow tunnels.

Every horror in the world was at my back, at my sides and directly in front of me and they were all without names and had no shape but perception itself.

When at last I ran out of the final tunnel and saw the dim white outline of the bridge standing out against the night, my soul was born again through a vision of rescue and sanctuary.

As I got closer and closer, the bridge bloomed like a white wooden angel in my eyes until I was sitting on the bridge, resting and soaking wet but not at all cold in the constant rain of the mountain evening.

I hope that Richard Brautigan will forgive me for writing this story.

T
HIS
story begins with an American flag decal on the rear window of a pickup truck, but you can barely see it because the truck is far away and then it turns off the highway onto a side road and it's gone, but somehow we have started again.

It's good to be back in California after a very unhappy month in the East: New York, etc.... with too much drunkenness, days and days of cold autumn rain and love affairs that were breathing mirrors of my unhappiness.

Now out here driving through the California countryside with a friend all we have to do is find somebody to repair his broken cesspool. It's a mess. We need somebody right now whose living is made from the knowing and handling of cesspools.

We drive down one road and then another, looking for a particular cesspool man. We stop at a place where we think he lives, but we are very wrong by about a million miles. It's a place that sells honey.

We don't know how we made the mistake. It's a long ways
from a cesspool man to some women behind a screen door selling honey.

We think it's amusing and so do they. We laugh at ourselves and they laugh at us. We are funny and drive away talking about the inner and outer roads that a man travels down to arrive at owning a grocery store or being a doctor or knowing cesspools intimately or how somebody else decides te sell honey but then is mistaken for a cesspool man.

A short, humorously spiritual distance away we find a cesspool man who's at home surrounded by all the equipment that he needs to successfully exercise cesspools.

Three men are fixing a broken truck. They stop working and turn to look at us. They are very serious in a country-casual way.

"No, not today. We got to fix this truck, so we can go bear hunting."

And that's it and there you have it: They want to fix the truck, so they can go bear hunting. Our cesspool is transparent, child-like. Bears are more important. I'm glad to be back in California.

H
E
was found lying dead near the television set on the front room floor of a small rented house in Los Angeles. My wife had gone to the store to get some ice cream. It was an early-in-the-night-just-a-few-blocks-away store. We were in an ice-cream mood. The telephone rang. It was her brother to say that her father had died that afternoon. He was seventy. I waited for her to come home with the ice cream. I tried to think of the best way to tell her that her father was dead with the least amount of pain but you cannot camouflage death with words. Always at the end of the words somebody is dead.

She was very happy when she came back from the store.

"What's wrong?" she said.

"Your brother just called from Los Angeles," I said.