by Brian Hickey
...the first time I encountered Richard Brautigan was in September of 1969. Just home from the Asian War and still pretty rattled inside, I was attending my first semester at San Jose State in California. I had moved down early and taken a very small room in a communal "student housing" home called Lime House. My room was what once had been the attic; not much standing up space but I had windows on all four corners. I also had the only TV in the house; an $8 a month black/white from the Arab store down the block. I didn't want any company.
...still 10 days before classes started, while wandering aimlessly around the Student Bookstore, I came across a thin volume entitled "Trout Fishing in America". On the cover was a very 'hippified' gentleman with wire rims, a funky hat, and a huge handlebar mustache, standing in front of a statue that I had seen in the North Beach area of San Francisco. Intrigued, I thumbed quickly thru the book, decided rapidly that the book was pretty weird, bought it, and headed back to the attic.
...two hours later, in the thick heat of the Southbay summer, I was just sitting and stupidly-staring at a finished "Trout Fishing...". I had never read anything like it. To use something so innocuous as trout fishing to chronicle one's life around was, to me, stunning. I didn't think such things were possible.("The Cleveland Wrecking Yard?" is still one of best pieces of American Short Fiction in the entire 20th century.)
...but there was something much deeper going on; a kind of longing behind the words and the sentences and the paragraphs; a kind of haunted melancholy behind the mud puddles and waterfall whiter houses and rainy rivers of Brautigan's Washington state childhood; a poignancy that reached inside of me, making me want very much to become not just a fan of his work but one of his friends.
...you see I clearly understood that 'aloofness', that sunset distance from 'home', that longing to go back to a different and better time when the world was not so complicated, so lonely, and so painful. Brautigan became a kind of Hip Heathcliff who didn't wander the Moors but the streets and hills of San Francisco; sitting at Coit Tower trying to describe the fog; buying Sherry wine by the pound from an old Italian grocer in North Beach...(pints a pound the world around; four pints, half a gallon, '...datsa foe dollah' the old Italian would tell him.) Drunkenness as a kind of soft landing zone when the world of his sorrows became too much to bear. I knew that pain and sorrow. I had left California a bright, ambitious teenager and come back a tortured, trained killer, wanting nothing more than to hide somewhere till the pain and the nightmares went away.
...needless to say, I went on to read everything I could find that he produced that was still in print. "In Watermellon Sugar" and "Revenge of the Lawn" his brilliance for understatement and the juxtaposition of opposites still shone through. (That comparison of opposites would come to be called 'Dylanizing' by my first year of grad school at Stanford. Mr.Dylan, in his autobiography years later would claim that there was no intention on his part to make "postcards of the hanging, sweet Melinda, the peasants call her the Goddess of Gloom" or "Farewell Angelina, the bells of the crown are being stolen by bandits, I must follow the sound" anything but words that rhymed; yea right.)
...with "Sombrero Fallout" and "Willard and his Bowling Trophies", Brautigan's penchant for drinking was getting the better of him. His work was suffering mightily as well as his health and in 1984, he finally took his own life. I never did get to meet him but I will always consider him a friend.
online source
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