Richard Brautigan
Revenge of the Lawn
A NEED FOR GARDENS
When I got there they were burying the lion in the back yard again. As usual, it was a hastily dug grave, not really large enough to hold the lion and dug with a maximum of incompetence and they were trying to stuff the lion into a sloppy little hole.
The lion as usual took it quite stoically. Having been buried at least fifty times during the last two years, the lion had gotten used to being buried in the back yard.
I remember the first time they buried him. He didnt know what was happening. He was a younger lion, then, and was frightened and confused, but now he knew what was happening because he was an older lion and had been buried so many times.
He looked vaguely bored as they folded his front paws across his chest and started throwing dirt in his face.
It was basically hopeless. The lion would never fit the hole. It had never fit a hole in the back yard before and it never would. They just couldnt dig a hone big enough to bury that lion in.
“Hello,” I said. “The holes too small.”
“Hello,” they said, “No, it isnt.”
This had been our standard greeting now for two years.
I stood there and watched them for an hour or so struggling desperately to bury the lion, but they were only able to bury of him before they gave up in disgust and stood around trying to blame each other for not making the hole big enough.
“Why dont you put a garden in next year? I said. ”This soil looks like it might grow some good carrots.“
They didnt think that was very funny.
THE OLD BUS
I do what everybody else does: I live in San Francisco. Sometimes I am forced by Mother Nature to take the bus. Yesterday was an example. I wanted to get some place beyond the duty of my legs, far out on Clay Street, so I waited for a bus.
It was not a hardship but a nice warm autumn day and fiercely clear. An old woman waited, too. Nothing unusual about that, as they say. She had a large purse and white gloves that fit her hands like the skins of vegetables.
A Chinese fellow came by on the back of a motorcycle. It startled me. I had just never thought about the Chinese riding motorcycles before. Sometimes reality is an awfully close fit like the vegetable skins on that old womans hands.
I was glad when the bus came. There is certain happiness sighted when your bus comes along. It is of course a small specialized form of happiness and will never be a great thing.
I let the old woman get on first and trailed behind in classic medieval tradition with cantle floors following me onto the bus.
I dropped in my fifteen cents, got my usual transfer, even though I did not need one. I always get a transfer. It gives me something to do with my hands while I am riding the bus. I need activity.
I sat down and looked the bus over to see who was there, and it took me about a minute to realize that there was something very wrong with that bus, and it took the other people about the same period to realize that there was something very wrong with the bus, and the thing that was wrong was me.
I was young. Everybody else, about nineteen of them, were men and women in their sixties, seventies and eighties, and I only in my twenties. They stared at me and I stared at them. We mere all embarrassed and uncomfortable.
How had this happened? Why were we suddenly the players in this cruel fate and could not take our eyes off one another?
A man about seventy-eight began to clutched desperately at the lapel of his coat. A woman maybe sixty-three began to filter her hands, finger by finger through a white handkerchief.
I felt terrible to remind them of their lost youth, their passage through slender years in such a cruel and unusual manner. Why were we tossed this way together as if we were nothing but a weird salad served on the seats of a God-damn bus?
I got off the bus at the next possibility. Everybody was glad to see me go and none of them were more glad than I.
I stood there and watched after the bus, its strange cargo now secure, growing distant in the journey of time until the bus was gone from sight.
PALE MARBLE MOVIE
The room had a high Victorian ceiling and there was a marble fireplace and an avocado tree growing in the window, and she lay beside me sleeping in a very well-built blond way.
And I was asleep, too, and it was just starting to be dawn in September.
1964.
Then suddenly, without any warning, she sat up in bed, waking me instantly, and she started to get out of bed. She was very serious about it.
”What are you doing?“ I said.
Her eyes were wide open.
”Im getting up,“ she said.
They were a somnambulist blue.
”Get back in bed,“ I said.
”Why?“ she said, now halfway out of bed with one blond foot touching the floor.
”Because youre still asleep,“ I said.
”Ohhh…OK, she said. That made sense to her and she got back into bed and pulled the covers around herself and cuddled up close to me. She didnt say another word and she didnt move.
She lay there sound asleep with her wanderings over and mine just beginning. I have been thinking about this simple event for years now. It stays with me and repeats itself over and over again like a pale marble movie.
PARTNERS
I like to sit in the cheap theaters if America here people live and die with Elizabethan manners while watching the movies. There is a theater down on Market Street where I can see four movies for a dollar. I really dont care how good they are either. Im not a critic. I just like to watch movies. Their presence on the screen is enough for me.
The theater is filled with black people, hippies, senior citizens, sordiers, sailors ane the innocent people who talk to the movies because the movies are just as real as anything else that has ever happened to them.
“No! No! Get mack in the car, Clyde. Oh, God, theyre killing Bonnie!”
I am the poet-in-residence at these theaters but I dont plan on Getting a Guggenheim for it.
Once I went into the theater at six oclock in the evening and got out at one oclock in the morning. At seven I crossed my legs and they stayed that way until ten and I never did stand up.
In other words, I am not an art film fan. I do not care to be esthetically tickled in a fancy theater surrounded by an audience drenched in the confident perfume of culture. I cant afford it.
I was sitting in a two-pictures-for-seventy-five-cents theater called the Times in North Beach last month and there was a cartoon about a chicken and a dog.
The dog was trying to get some sleep and the chicken was keeping him awake and what followed was a series of adventures that always ended up in cartoon mayhem.
There was a man sitting near to me.
He was WHITEWHITEWHITE: fat, about fifty fears old, balding sort of and his face was completely minus any human sensitivity
His baggy no-style clothes covered hem like the banner of a defeated country and he looked as if the only mail he had ever gotten in his life were bills.
Just then the dog in the cartoon let go with a huge yawn because the chicken was still keeping him awake and before the dog had finished yawning, the man next to me started yawning, se that the dog in the cartoon and the man, this living human being, were yawning together, partners in America.
LINT
Im haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary and events that should be explained in dimensions of lint rather than words.
Ive been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happened like lint.