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The autumn carried along with it, like the roller coaster of a flesh-eating plant, port wine and the people who drank that dark sweet wine, people long since gone, except for me.
Always wary of the police, we drank in the safest place we could find, the park across from the church.
There were three poplar trees in the middle of the park and there was a statue of Benjamin Franklin in front of the trees. We sat there and drank port.
At home my wife was pregnant.
I would call on the telephone after I finished work and say, "I won't be home for a little while. I'm going to have a drink with some friends."
The three of us huddled in the park, talking. They were both broken-down artists from New Orleans where they had drawn pictures of tourists in Pirate's Alley.
Now in San Francisco, with the cold autumn wind upon them, they had decided that the future held only two directions: They were either going to open up a flea circus or commit themselves to an insane asylum.
So they talked about it while they drank wine.
They talked about how to make little clothes for fleas by pasting pieces of colored paper on their backs.
They said the way that you trained fleas was to make them dependent upon you for their food. This was done by letting them feed off you at an appointed hour.
They talked about making little flea wheelbarrows and pool tables and bicycles.
They would charge fifty-cents admission for their flea circus. The business was certain to have a future to it. Perhaps they would even get on the Ed Sullivan Show.
They of course did not have their fleas yet, but they could easily be obtained from a white cat.
Then they decided that the fleas that lived on Siamese Cats would probably be more intelligent than the fleas that lived on just ordinary alley cats. It only made sense that drinking intelligent blood would make intelligent fleas.
And so it went on until it was exhausted and we went and bought another fifth of port wine and returned to the trees and Benjamin Franklin.
Now it was close to sunset and the earth was beginning to cool off in the correct manner of eternity and office girls were returning like penguins from Montgomery Street. They looked at us hurriedly and mentally registered: winos.
Then the two artists talked about committing themselves to an insane asylum for the winter. They talked about how warm it would be in the insane asylum, with television, clean sheets on soft beds, hamburger gravy over mashed potatoes, a dance once a week with the lady kooks, clean clothes a locked razor and lovely young student nurses.
Ah, yes, there was a future in the insane asylum. No winter spent there could be a total loss.
Richard Brautigan
Trout Fishing in America
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