Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
REVENGE of the Lawn
Revenge of the Lawn
1692 Cotton Mather Newsreel
1/3, 1/3, 1/3
The Gathering of a Californian
A Short Story about Contemporary Life in California
Pacific Radio Fire
Elmira
Coffee
The Lost Chapters of Trout Fishing in America: "Rembrandt Creek" and "Carthage Sink"
The Weather in San Francisco
Complicated Banking Problems
A High Building in Singapore
An Unlimited Supply of 35 Millimeter Film
The Scarlatti Tilt
The Wild Birds of Heaven
Winter Rug
Ernest Hemingway's Typist
Homage to the San Francisco YMCA
The Pretty Office
A Need for Gardens
The Old Bus
The Ghost Children of Tacoma
Talk Show
I was Trying to Describe You to Someone
Trick or Treating Down to the Sea in Ships
Blackberry Motorist
Thoreau Rubber Band
44:40
Perfect California Day
The Post Offices of Eastern Oregon
Pale Marble Movie
Partners
Getting to Know Each Other
A Short History of Oregon
A Long Time Ago People Decided to Live in America
A Short History of Religion in California
April in God-damn
One Afternoon in 1939
Corporal
Lint
A Complete History of Germany and Japan
The Auction
The Armored Car
The Literary Life in California/1964
Banners of My Own Choosing
Fame in California/1964
Memory of a Girl
September California
A Study in California Flowers
The Betrayed Kingdom
Women When They Put Their Clothes On in the Morning
Halloween in Denver
Atlantisburg
The View from the Dog Tower
Greyhound Tragedy
Crazy Old Women are Riding the Buses of America Today
The Correct Time
Holiday in Germany
Sand Castles
Forgiven
American Flag Decal
The World War I Los Angeles Airplane
The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966
BOOK 1: Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?
The Library
The Automobile Accident
The 23
Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?
BOOK 2: Vida
Vida
Counting toward Tijuana
The Decision
A Continuing Decision
Two (37-19-36) Soliloquies
BOOK 3: Calling the Caves
Calling the Caves
Outside (Briefly)
Foster's Coming
Masturbation
Foster
The AD Standoff
The Plan for Tijuana
Foster's Girl #1
Blank like Snow
The Van
Johnny Cash
"Genius"
Foster's Bell
The TJ Briefing
The Library Briefing
Foster's Heart
Vida Meets the Van
BOOK 4: Tijuana
The Freewayers
The San Francisco International Airport
PSA
The Coffee Stain
Bing-Bonging to San Diego
Hot Water
Flying Backwards
Downtown
The Green Hotel
The Bus to Tijuana
Slides
The Man from Guadalajara
A Telephone Call from Woolworth's
BOOK 5: My Three Abortions
Furniture Studies
My First Abortion
My Second Abortion
Chalkboard Studies
My Third Abortion
BOOK 6: The Hero
Woolworth's Again
The Green Hotel Again
The San Diego (Not Los Angeles) International Tipping Abyss
Farewell, San Diego
My Secret Talisman Forever
Perhaps and Eleven
Fresno, Then 3½ Minutes to Salinas
The Saint of Abortion
A New Life
So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
About the Author
Footnotes
Revenge of the Lawn copyright © 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966. 1967. 1969, 1970, 1971 by Richard Brautigan
The Abortion copyright 6 1970, 1971 by Richard Brautigan
So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away copyright © 1982 by Richard Brautigan
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions. Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Brautigan. Richard.
Revenge of the lawn : The abortion ; So the wind won't blow it all away / Richard Brautigan.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-395-70674-2
I. Brautigan, Richard. Abortion. II. Brautigan, Richard. So the wind won't blow it all away.
PS3503.R2736A6 1995
813'.54—dc20 94-26177 CIP
Printed in the United Slates of America
DOC 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
Some of the stories in Revenge of the Lawn first appeared in Rolling Stone. Playboy, Ramparts. New American Review. Vogue. Coyote's Journal. Mademoiselle. Nice. Tri-Quarterly, Esquire. Evergreen Review, Kulchur, Now Now, Sum, Jeopardy. R. C. Lion, Parallel, and Change.
A portion of The Abortion originally appeared in The Dutton Review, volume I.
REVENGE of the Lawn
STORIES
1962–1970
BY RICHARD BRAUTIGAN
This book is for
Don Carpenter
Revenge of the Lawn
MY grandmother, in her own way, shines like a beacon down the stormy American past. She was a bootlegger in a little county up in the state of Washington. She was also a handsome woman, close to six feet tall who carried 190 pounds in the grand operatic manner of the early 1900s. And her specialty was bourbon, a little raw but a welcomed refreshment in those Volstead Act days.
She of course was no female Al Capone, but her bootlegging feats were the cornucopia of legend in her neck of the woods, as they say. She had the county in her pocket for years. The sheriff used to call her up every morning and give her the weather report and tell her how the chickens were laying.
I can imagine her talking to the sheriff: "Well, Sheriff, I hope your mother gets better soon. I had a cold and a bad sore throat last week myself. I've still got the sniffles. Tell her hello for me and to drop by the next time she's down this way. And if you want that case, you can pick it up or I can have it sent over as soon as Jack gets back with the car.
"No, I don't know if I'm going to the firemen's ball this year, but you know that my heart is with the firemen. If you don't see me there tonight, you tell the boys that. No, I'll try to get there, but I'm still not fully recovered from my cold. It kind of climbs on me in the evening."
My g
randmother lived in a three-story house that was old even in those days. There was a pear tree in the front yard which was heavily eroded by rain from years of not having any lawn.
The picket fence that once enclosed the lawn was gone, too, and people just drove their cars right up to the porch. In the winter the front yard was a mud hole and in the summer it was hard as a rock.
Jack used to curse the front yard as if it were a living thing. He was the man who lived with my grandmother for thirty years. He was not my grandfather, but an Italian who came down the road one day selling lots in Florida.
He was selling a vision of eternal oranges and sunshine door to door in a land where people ate apples and it rained a lot.
Jack stopped at my grandmother's house to sell her a lot just a stone's throw from downtown Miami, and he was delivering her whiskey a week later. He stayed for thirty years and Florida went on without him.
Jack hated the front yard because he thought it was against him. There had been a beautiful lawn there when Jack came along, but he let it wander off into nothing. He refused to water it or take care of it in any way.
Now the ground was so hard that it gave his car flat tires in the summer. The yard was always finding a nail to put in one of his tires or the car was always sinking out of sight in the winter when the rains came on.
The lawn had belonged to my grandfather who lived out the end of his life in an insane asylum. It had been his pride and joy and was said to be the place where his powers came from.
My grandfather was a minor Washington mystic who in 1911 prophesied the exact date when World War I would start: June 28, 1914, but it had been too much for him. He never got to enjoy the fruit of his labor because they had to put him away in 1913 and he spent seventeen years in the state insane asylum believing he was a child and it was actually May 3, 1872.
He believed that he was six years old and it was a cloudy day about to rain and his mother was baking a chocolate cake. It stayed May 3, 1872 for my grandfather until he died in 1930. It took seventeen years for that chocolate cake to be baked.
There was a photograph of my grandfather. I look a great deal like him. The only difference being that I am over six feet tall and he was not quite five feet tall. He had a dark idea that being so short, so close to the earth and his lawn would help to prophesy the exact date when World War I would start.
It was a shame that the war started without him. If only he could have held back his childhood for another year, avoided that chocolate cake, all of his dreams would have come true.
There were always two large dents in my grandmother's house that had never been repaired and one of them came about this way: In the autumn the pears would get ripe on the tree in the front yard and the pears would fall on the ground and rot and bees would gather by the hundreds to swarm on them.
The bees somewhere along the line had picked up the habit of stinging Jack two or three times a year. They would sting him in the most ingenious ways.
Once a bee got in his wallet and he went down to the store to buy some food for dinner, not knowing the mischief that he carried in his pocket.
He took out his wallet to pay for the food.
"That will be 72 cents," the grocer said.
" AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" Jack replied, looking down to see a bee busy stinging him on the little finger.
The first large dent in the house was brought about by still another bee landing on Jack's cigar as he was driving the car into the front yard that peary autumn the stock market crashed.
The bee ran down the cigar, Jack could only stare at it cross-eyed in terror, and stung him on the upper lip. His reaction to this was to drive the car immediately into the house.
That front yard had quite a history after Jack let the lawn go to hell. One day in 1932 Jack was off running an errand or delivering something for my grandmother. She wanted to dump the old mash and get a new batch going.
Because Jack was gone, she decided to do it herself. Grandmother put on a pair of railroad overalls that she used for working around the still and filled a wheelbarrow with mash and dumped it out in the front yard.
She had a flock of snow-white geese that roamed outside the house and nested in the garage that had not been used to park the car since the time Jack had come along selling futures in Florida.
Jack had some kind of idea that it was all wrong for a car to have a house. I think it was something that he had learned in the Old Country. The answer was in Italian because that was the only language Jack used when he talked about the garage. For everything else he used English, but it was only Italian for the garage.
After Grandmother had dumped the mash on the ground near the pear tree, she went back to the still down in the basement and the geese all gathered around the mash and started talking it over.
I guess they came to a mutually agreeable decision because they all started eating the mash. As they ate the mash their eyes got brighter and brighter and their voices, in appreciation of the mash, got louder and louder.
After a while one of the geese stuck his head in the mash and forgot to take it out. Another one of the geese cackled madly and tried to stand on one leg and give a W. C. Fields imitation of a stork. He maintained that position for about a minute before he fell on his tail feathers.
My grandmother found them all lying around the mash in the positions that they had fallen. They looked as if they had been machine-gunned. From the height of her operatic splendor she thought they were all dead.
She responded to this by plucking all their feathers and piling their bald bodies in the wheelbarrow and wheeling them down to the basement. She had to make five trips to accommodate them.
She stacked them like cordwood near the still and waited for Jack to return and dispose of them in a way that would provide a goose for dinner and a small profit by selling the rest of the flock in town. She went upstairs to take a nap after finishing with the still.
It was about an hour later that the geese woke up. They had devastating hangovers. They had all kind of gathered themselves uselessly to their feet when suddenly one of the geese noticed that he did not have any feathers. He informed the other geese of their condition, too. They were all in despair.
They paraded out of the basement in a forlorn and wobbly gang. They were all standing in a cluster near the pear tree when Jack drove into the front yard.
The memory of the time he had been stung on the mouth by that bee must have come back to his mind when he saw the defeathered geese standing there, because suddenly like a madman he tore out the cigar he had stuck in his mouth and threw it away from him as hard as he could. This caused his hand to travel through the windshield. A feat that cost him thirty-two stitches.
The geese stood by staring on like some helpless, primitive American advertisement for aspirin under the pear tree as Jack drove his car into the house for the second and last time in the Twentieth Century.
***
The first time I remember anything in life occurred in my grandmother's front yard. The year was either 1936 or 1937. I remember a man, probably Jack, cutting down the pear tree and soaking it with kerosene.
It looked strange, even for a first memory of life, to watch a man pour gallons and gallons of kerosene all over a tree lying stretched out thirty feet or so on the ground, and then to set fire to it while the fruit was still green on the branches.
1692 Cotton Mather Newsreel
O 1939 Tacoma Washington witch, where are you now that I am growing toward you? Once my body occupied a child's space and doors had a large meaning to them and were almost human. Opening a door meant something in 1939 and the children used to make fun of you because you were crazy and lived by yourself in an attic across the street from where we sat in the gutter like two slum sparrows.
We were four years old.
I think you were about as old as I am now with the children always teasing and calling after you, "The crazy woman! Run! Run! The witch! The witch! Don't let her look at you in th
e eye. She looked at me! Run! Help! Run!"
Now I am beginning to look like you with my long hippie hair and my strange clothes. I look about as crazy in 1967 as you did in 1939.
Little children yell, "Hey, hippie!" at me in the San Francisco mornings like we yelled, "Hey, crazy woman!" at you plodding through Tacoma twilights.
I guess you got used to it as I've gotten used to it.
As a child I would always hang my hat on a dare. Dare me to do anything and I'd do it. Ugh! some of the things that I did following, like a midget Don Quixote, trails and visions of dares.
We were sitting in the gutter doing nothing. Perhaps we were waiting for the witch or anything to happen that would free us from the gutter. We had been sitting there for almost an hour: child's time.
"I dare you to go up to the witch's house and wave at me out the window," my friend said, finally to get things going.
I looked up at the witch's house across the street. There was one window in her attic facing down upon us like a still photograph from a horror movie.
"OK," I said.
"You've got guts," my friend said. I can't remember his name now. The decades have filed it off my memory, leaving a small empty place where his name should be.
I got up from the gutter and walked across the street and around to the back of the house where the stairs were that led to her attic. They were gray wooden stairs like an old mother cat and went up three flights to her door.
There were some garbage cans at the bottom of the stairs. I wondered what garbage can was the witch's. I lifted up one garbage can lid and looked inside to see if there was any witches' garbage in the can.
There wasn't.
The can was filled with just ordinary garbage. I lifted up the lid to the next garbage can but there wasn't any witches' garbage in that can either. I tried the third can but it was the same as the other two cans: no witches' garbage.
There were three garbage cans and there were three apartments in the house, including the attic where she lived. One of the cans had to be her garbage but there wasn't any difference between her garbage and the other people's garbage.
... so ...
I walked up the stairs to the attic. I walked very carefully as if I were petting an old gray mother cat nursing her kittens.
I finally arrived at the witch's door. I didn't know whether she was inside or not. She could have been home. I felt like knocking but that didn't make any sense. If she were there, she'd just slam the door in my face or ask me what I wanted and I'd run screaming down the stairs, "Help! Help! She looked at me!"
Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away Page 1
