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Russell Chatham's Brautigan memoir
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Dust to Dust

by Russell Chatham?

Late one night in the fog, just before Labor Day of 1984, upstairs in a hollow old summer home in the northern California beach town of Bolinas, the author Richard Brautigan let himself have it with a .44 magnum. What was left of him was found four or five weeks later because, according to the papers, when he failed to arrive in Montana for the hunting season, worried friends up there called the Bay Area and sent someone over to check out his house.

I was a friend of Richard's for nearly twenty years, which was long enough to have watched him shoot to smithereens any number of unlikely items including an entire wall of his Montana home, clocks, telephones, dinnerware, sport jackets, and, his favorite target, television sets. It was enough to make me feel downright effete for shooting at the stars from the yard of my house just a few miles away.

In any case, during all the years I knew him, both in California and Montana, I can never remember him going hunting, or even talking much about it except in passing. Once he presented a gift of a sixteen-gauge, double-barreled shotgun to Jim Harrison, inscribed "Big Fish," to commemorate a four-pound brown trout Jim had landed in the Yellowstone River, but that was it.

The word "macho" appeared in the postmortem press just as it so often does when journalists turn in a report on a man reputed to like the blood sports, and who happens to live someplace other than in a condo or co-op apartment on one of the Dream Coasts.

Webster gives macho a certain amount of negative weight by defining it as, "A virile man, especially one who takes excessive pride in his virility." Interestingly enough, there is no correlative word which unflatteringly describes the female who is feminine and who "takes excessive pride in her femininity." Even the archaic term feminie, which means womankind (especially the Amazons) is largely meaningless to us. The closest female equivalent of machismo may be what some modern women — secretaries and shop girls in particular — refer to among themselves as femme femme. This term describes a woman who is preoccupied with feminine sexuality as well as perhaps the coy and stereotyped behavior usually listed under the heading of the Feminine Mystique. Unlike the obviously macho male who is scoffed at by nearly everyone, the femme femme woman is disliked only by bull dykes, resentful spinsters and certain humorless members of the clergy. This is true even in San Francisco where the board of supervisors recently declared the three-dollar bill legal tender.

The media, with the exception of that small part of it devoted specifically to the blood sports, tends to view hunters as people of imperfect character; macho, overly competitive boors who are boisterous, boastful, uncultured, rude, insensitive and violent.

The sad truth is that probably eighty percent of those who go afield with a gun or rifle fit the above description. These people aren’t hunters in any true sense of the word. They're gunners trespassing in the woods under direction of some very suspect motives.

One often hears, especially from non-hunters, that men confuse their guns with their penises. This has never happened to me, and so it seems absurd, something like confusing your nose with a car wash. The confusion might have been started years ago, the first time an army recruit mistakenly referred to his rifle as his gun during boot camp, and the outraged drill sergeant made him parade around the grounds with his rifle in one hand and his dick in the other, repeating over and over, "This is my rifle, this is my gun, one is for fighting, the other’s for fun."

In a similar vein, psychoanalysts love to make inferences and draw conclusions by relating real events to hypothetical ones. For instance, a friend of mine told his therapist he had always wanted to make love to his aunt. The doctor explained what that really meant was he wanted to make love to his mother. "No I don’t," my friend replied. "My mother was a dog. My aunt was beautiful. Nobody in his right mind would want to screw my mother." So much for Freud.

Richard Brautigan was not a macho man. He was unyielding and often infuriatingly obtuse, but he had a certain defiant dignity and great personal strength because of his strict literary convictions. At the core he was essentially fragile and sensitive in a society which tends to reward those virtues with poverty and an early death.

(...)
I went on a controlled pheasant hunt in California recently. As we were uncasing our guns, a young boy, hunting nearby, accidentally shot the man who had taken him out. I saw how it happened and it was clearly not the boy's fault. The kid became hysterical, and was largely ignored in the confusion that followed. The man didn't die, but it was close. The boy had not been instructed on how to use the gun, and the man foolishly and carelessly stepped in front of him to flush a bird which was being pointed by the dog.

There were many reasons for the accident, all of them having to do with lack of proper teaching. The boy didn't know exactly how the gun worked physically, and he was not prepared to deal with the excitement of the flush or the ease with which the trigger could actually be pulled. Most of all, because of the casual, commercial, obvious, easy way these birds were dumped in the field only to be harvested hours later, he had no reason to adopt an attitude of wonder, reverence and respect for the incomprehensible mysteries of a real hunt. I suspect that boy will not want to hunt again for a very long time, if ever.

Richard Brautigan's last published book was called So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away. It is, in part, about a family who sets up a living-room group of furniture on the shore of a lake.

I had become so quiet and so small in the grass by the pond that I was barely noticeable, hardly there. I think they had forgotten all about me. I sat there watching their living room shining out of the dark beside the pond. It looked like a fairy tale functioning happily in the post-World War II gothic of America before television crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity.

It is also about how he, Richard, accidentally shot and killed his best friend with a .22 while out pheasant hunting.

"What happened?" I said, bending down to look at all the blood that was now covering the ground. I had never seen so much blood before in my entire life, and I had never seen blood that was so red. It looked like some liquid flag on his leg.

"You shot me," David said.

His voice sounded very far away.

"It doesn't look good."

So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away

Dust ... American ... Dust

I love you Richard, and although hunting has saved my life more than once, and I don't want to go on without it, I understand perfectly why you wanted to shoot Sonys rather than roosters.


Dark Waters
Livingston, MT: Clark City Press, 1988. 28-34



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