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

by Richard Brautigan

  "No," he said. "It's all the same. Nothing is different."

  A Telephone Call from Woolworth's

  THE government man, whose name we never got, left us on the Main Street of Tijuana and pointed out the Government Tourist Building as a place that could tell us things to do while we were in Tijuana.

  The Government Tourist Building was small and glass and very modern and had a statue in front of it. The statue was a gray stone statue and did not look at peace. It was taller than the building. The statue was a pre-Columbian god or fella doing something that did not make him happy.

  Though the building was quite attractive, there was nothing the people in that little building could do for us. We needed another service from the Mexican people.

  Everybody was shoving us for dollars, trying to sell us things that we didn't want: kids with gum, people wanting us to buy border junk from them, more taxicab drivers shouting that they wanted to take us back to the border, even though we had just gotten there, or to other places where we would have some fun.

  "TAXI!"

  "BEAUTIFUL GIRL!"

  "TAXI!"

  "BEATLE!"

  (Wolf whistle.)

  The taxicab drivers of Tijuana remained constant in their devotion to us. I had no idea my hair was so long and of course Vida had her thing going.

  We went over to the big modern Woolworth's on the Main Street of Tijuana to find a telephone. It was a pastel building with a big red Woolworth's sign and a red brick front and big display windows all filled up with Easter stuff: lots and lots and lots of bunnies and yellow chicks bursting happily out of huge eggs.

  The Woolworth's was so antiseptic and clean and orderly compared to the outside which was just a few feet away or not away at all if you looked past the bunnies in the front window.

  There were very attractive girls working as sales girls, dark and young and doing lots of nice things with their eyes. They all looked as if they should work in a bank instead of Woolworth's.

  I asked one of the girls where the telephone was and she pointed out the direction to me.

  "It's over there," she said in good-looking English.

  I went over to the telephone with Vida spreading erotic confusion like missile jam among the men in the store. The Mexican women, though very pretty, were no match for Vida. She shot them down without even thinking about it.

  The telephone was beside an information booth, next to the toilet, near a display of leather belts and a display of yarn and the women's blouse section.

  What a bunch of junk to remember, but that's what I remember and look forward to the time I forget it.

  The telephone operated on American money: a nickel like it used to be in the good old days of my childhood.

  A man answered the telephone.

  He sounded like a doctor.

  "Hello, Dr. Garcia?" I said.

  "Yes."

  "A man named Foster called you yesterday about our problem. Well, we're here," I said.

  "Good. Where are you?"

  "We're at Woolworth's," I said.

  "Please excuse my English. Isn't so good. I'll get the girl. Her English is ... better. She'll tell you how to get here. I'll be waiting. Everything is all right."

  A girl took over the telephone. She sounded very young and said, "You're at Woolworth's."

  "Yes," I said.

  "You're not very far away," she said.

  That seemed awfully strange to me.

  "When you leave Woolworth's, turn right and walk down three blocks and then turn left on Fourth Street, walk four blocks and then turn left again off Fourth Street," she said. "We are in a green building in the middle of the block. You can't miss it. Did you get that?"

  "Yes," I said. "When we leave Woolworth's, we turn right and walk three blocks down to Fourth Street, then we turn left on Fourth Street, and walk four blocks and then turn left again off Fourth Street, and there's a green building in the middle of the block, and that's where you're at."

  Vida was listening.

  "Your wife hasn't eaten, has she?"

  "No," I said.

  "Good, we'll be waiting for you. If you should get lost, telephone again."

  We left Woolworth's and followed the girl's directions amid being hustled by souvenir junk salesmen, the taxi drivers and gum kids of Tijuana, surrounded by wolf whistles, cars cars cars, and cries of animal consternation and HEY, BEATLE!

  Fourth Street had waited eternally for us to come as we were always destined to come, Vida and me, and now we'd come, having started out that morning in San Francisco and our lives many years before.

  The streets were filled with cars and people and a fantastic feeling of excitement. The houses did not have any lawns, only that famous dust. They were our guides to Dr. Garcia.

  There was a brand-new American car parked in front of the green building. The car had California license plates. I didn't have to think about that one too much to come up with an answer. I looked in the back seat. There was a girl's sweater lying there. It looked helpless.

  Some children were playing in front of the doctor's office. The children were poor and wore unhappy clothes. They stopped playing and watched us as we went in.

  We were no doubt a common sight for them. They had probably seen many gringos in this part of town, going into this green adobe-like building, gringos who did not look very happy. We did not disappoint them.

  BOOK 5: My Three Abortions

  Furniture Studies

  THERE was a small bell to ring on the door. It was not like the silver bell of my library, so far away from this place. You rang this bell by pressing your finger against it. That's what I did.

  We had to wait a moment for someone to answer. The children stayed away from their play to watch us. The children were small, ill-dressed and dirty. They had those strange undernourished bodies and faces that make it so hard to tell how old children are in Mexico.

  A child that looks five will turn out to be eight. A child that looks seven will actually be ten. It's horrible.

  Some Mexican mother women came by. They looked at us, too. Their eyes were expressionless, but showed in this way that they knew we were abortionistas.

  Then the door to the doctor's office opened effortlessly as if it had always planned to open at that time and it was Dr. Garcia himself who opened the door for us. I didn't know what he looked like, but I knew it was him.

  "Please," he said, gesturing us in.

  "Thank you," I said. "I just called you on the telephone. I'm Foster's friend."

  "I know," he said, quietly. "Follow, please."

  The doctor was small, middle-aged and dressed perfectly like a doctor. His office was large and cool and had many rooms that led like a labyrinth far into the back and places that we knew nothing about.

  He took us to a small reception room. It was clean with modern linoleum on the floor and modern doctor furniture: an uncomfortable couch and three chairs that you could never really fit into.

  The furniture was the same as the furniture you see in the offices of American doctors. There was a tall plant in the corner with large flat cold green leaves. The leaves didn't do anything.

  There were some other people already in the room: a father, a mother and a young teen-age daughter. She obviously belonged to the brand-new car parked in front.

  "Please," the doctor said, gesturing us toward the two empty chairs in the room. "Soon," he said, smiling gently. "Wait, please. Soon."

  He went away across the corridor and into another room that we could not see, leaving us with the three people. They were not talking and it was strangely quiet all through the building.

  Everybody looked at everybody else in a nervous kind of way that comes when time and circumstance reduce us to seeking illegal operations in Mexico.

  The father looked like a small town banker in the San Joaquin Valley and the mother looked like a woman who participated in a lot of social activities.

  The daughter was pretty and obviously
intelligent and didn't know what to do with her face as she waited for her abortion, so she kept smiling in a rapid knife-like way at nothing.

  The father looked very stern as if he were going to refuse a loan and the mother looked vaguely shocked as if somebody had said something a little risque at a social tea for the Friends of the DeMolay.

  The daughter, though she possessed a narrow budding female body, looked as if she were too young to have an abortion. She should have been doing something else.

  I looked over at Vida. She also looked as if she were too young to have an abortion. What were we all doing there? Her face was growing pale.

  Alas, the innocence of love was merely an escalating physical condition and not a thing shaped like our kisses.

  My First Abortion

  ABOUT forever or ten minutes passed and then the doctor came back and motioned toward Vida and me to come with him, though the other people had been waiting when we came in. Perhaps it had something to do with Foster.

  "Please," Dr. Garcia said, quietly.

  We followed after him across the hall and into a small office. There was a desk in the office and a typewriter. The office was dark and cool, the shades were down, with a leather chair and photographs of the doctor and his family upon the walls and the desk.

  There were various certificates showing the medical degrees the doctor had obtained and what schools he had graduated from.

  There was a door that opened directly into an operating room. A teen-age girl was in the room cleaning up and a young boy, another teen-ager, was helping her.

  A big blue flash of fire jumped across a tray full of surgical instruments. The boy was sterilizing the instruments with fire. It startled Vida and me. There was a table in the operating room that had metal things to hold your legs and there were leather straps that went with them.

  "No pain," the doctor said to Vida and then to me. "No pain and clean, all clean, no pain. Don't worry. No pain and clean. Nothing left. I'm a doctor," he said.

  I didn't know what to say. I was so nervous that I was almost in shock. All the color had drained from Vida's face and her eyes looked as if they could not see any more.

  "250 dollars," the doctor said. "Please."

  "Foster said it would be 200 dollars. That's all we have," I heard my own voice saying. "200. That's what you told Foster."

  "200. That's all you have?" the doctor said.

  Vida stood there listening to us arbitrate the price of her stomach. Vida's face was like a pale summer cloud.

  "Yes," I said. "That's all we have."

  I took the money out of my pocket and gave it to the doctor. I held the money out and he took it from my hand. He put it in his pocket, without counting it, and then he became a doctor again, and that's the way he stayed all the rest of the time we were there.

  He had only stopped being a doctor for a moment. It was a little strange. I don't know what I expected. It was very good that he stayed a doctor for the rest of the time.

  Foster was of course right.

  He became a doctor by turning to Vida and smiling and saying, "I won't hurt you and it will be clean. Nothing left after and no pain, honey. Believe me. I'm a doctor."

  Vida smiled 1/2: ly.

  "How long has she been?" the doctor said to me and starting to point at her stomach but not following through with it, so his hand was a gesture that didn't do anything.

  "About five or six weeks," I said.

  Vida was now smiling 1/4: ly.

  The doctor paused and looked at a calendar in his mind and then he nodded affectionately at the calendar. It was probably a very familiar calendar to him. They were old friends.

  "No breakfast?" he said, starting to point again at Vida's stomach but again he failed to do so.

  "No breakfast," I said.

  "Good girl," the doctor said.

  Vida was now smiling 1/37: ly.

  After the boy finished sterilizing the surgical instruments, he took a small bucket back through another large room that was fastened to the operating room.

  The other room looked as if it had beds in it. I moved my head a different way and I could see a bed in it and there was a girl lying on the bed asleep and there was a man sitting in a chair beside the bed. It looked very quiet in the room.

  A moment after the boy left the operating room, I heard a toilet flush and water running from a tap and then the sound of water being poured in the toilet and the toilet was flushed again and the boy came back with the bucket.

  The bucket was empty.

  The boy had a large gold wristwatch on his hand.

  "Everything's all right," the doctor said.

  The teen-age girl, who was dark and pretty and also had a nice wristwatch, came into the doctor's office and smiled at Vida. It was that kind of smile that said: It's time now; please come with me.

  "No pain, no pain, no pain," the doctor repeated like a nervous nursery rime.

  No pain, I thought, how strange.

  "Do you want to watch?" the doctor asked me, gesturing toward an examination bed in the operating room where I could sit if I wanted to watch the abortion.

  I looked over at Vida. She didn't want me to watch and I didn't want to watch either.

  "No," I said. "I'll stay in here."

  "Please come, honey," the doctor said.

  The girl touched Vida's arm and Vida went into the operating room with her and the doctor closed the door, but it didn't really close. It was still open an inch or so.

  "This won't hurt," the girl said to Vida. She was giving Vida a shot.

  Then the doctor said something in Spanish to the boy who said OK and did something.

  "Take off your clothes," the girl said. "And put this on."

  Then the doctor said something in Spanish and the boy answered him in Spanish and the girl said, "Please. Now put your legs up. That's it. Good. Thank you."

  "That's right, honey," the doctor said. "That didn't hurt, did it? Everything's going to be all right. You're a good girl."

  Then he said something to the boy in Spanish and then the girl said something in Spanish to the doctor who said something in Spanish to both of them.

  Everything was very quiet for a moment or so in the operating room. I felt the dark cool of the doctor's office on my body like the hand of some other kind of doctor.

  "Honey?" the doctor said. "Honey?"

  There was no reply.

  Then the doctor said something in Spanish to the boy and the boy answered him in something metallic, surgical. The doctor used the thing that was metallic and surgical and gave it back to the boy who gave him something else that was metallic and surgical.

  Everything was cither quiet or metallic and surgical in there for a while.

  Then the girl said something in Spanish to the boy who replied to her in English. "I know," he said.

  The doctor said something in Spanish.

  The girl answered him in Spanish.

  A few moments passed during which there were no more surgical sounds in the room. There was now the sound of cleaning up and the doctor and the girl and the boy talked in Spanish as they finished up.

  Their Spanish was not surgical any more. It was just casual cleaning-up Spanish.

  "What time is it?" the girl said. She didn't want to look at her watch.

  "Around one," the boy said.

  The doctor joined them in English. "How many more?" he said.

  "Two," the girl said.

  "¿Dos?" the doctor said in Spanish.

  "There's one coming," the girl said.

  The doctor said something in Spanish.

  The girl answered him in Spanish.

  "I wish it was three," the boy said in English.

  "Stop thinking about girls," the doctor said, jokingly.

  Then the doctor and the girl were involved in a brief very rapid conversation in Spanish.

  This was followed by a noisy silence and then the sound of the doctor carrying something heavy and unconscious out o
f the operating room. He put the thing down in the other room and came back a moment later.

  The girl walked over to the door of the room I was in and finished opening it. My dark cool office was suddenly flooded with operating room light. The boy was cleaning up.

  "Hello," the girl said, smiling. "Please come with me.

  She casually beckoned me through the operating room as if it were a garden of roses. The doctor was sterilizing his surgical instruments with the blue flame.

  He looked up at me from the burning instruments and said, "Everything went OK. I promised no pain, all clean. The usual." He smiled. "Perfect."

  The girl took me into the other room where Vida was lying unconscious on the bed. She had warm covers over her. She looked as if she were dreaming in another century.

  "It was an excellent operation," the girl said. "There were no complications and it went as smoothly as possible. She'll wake up in a little while. She's beautiful, isn't she?"

  "Yes."

  The girl got me a chair and put it down beside Vida. I sat down in the chair and looked at Vida. She was so alone there in the bed. I reached over and touched her cheek. It felt as if it had just come unconscious from an operating room.

  The room had a small gas heater that was burning quietly away in its own time. The room had two beds in it and the other bed where the girl had lain a short while before was now empty and there was an empty chair beside the bed, as this bed would be empty soon and the chair I was now sitting in: to be empty.

  The door to the operating room was open, but I couldn't see the operating table from where I was sitting.

  My Second Abortion

  THE door to the operating room was open, but I couldn't see the operating table from where I was sitting. A moment later they brought in the teen-age girl from the waiting room.

  "Everything's going to be all right, honey," the doctor said. "This won't hurt." He gave her the shot himself.

  "Please take off your clothes," the girl said.

  There was a stunned silence for a few seconds that bled into the awkward embarrassed sound of the teen-age girl taking her clothes off.