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by Richard Brautigan
I've been thinking about this for years. It's been like a soup simmering on the back burner of my mind. I've stirred the soup thousands of times ... often out of nervousness as the years have slipped away, leaving me older and older, and not quite the man I once was.
... of course it had to be a woman ... that's taken so much time ... cooking
slowly down
until finally I have arrived at these words: I don't know her name or what she looked like other than she was a short blond woman, and comely. I think she had blue eyes but I'll never be certain.
I do remember that she had a very healthy outlook on things and glowed with cheerfulness, though I can remember only one thing we talked about.
I was very drunk. Whiskey had obscured my intelligence like a tropical rainstorm. Soaking wet monkeys were at play in my mind.
But she was interested in me, though what I was saying could hardly have made any sense. I remember her looking up at me. She was amused. We talked for a few moments or was it hours? We were in a bar someplace. There were a lot of people. They were a shimmering have of clothiing.
She kept listening to me.
The one thing I remember talking to her about was her body.
I wanted it.
"Yes!" she said, very enthusiastically - "But come back when you are sober."
That's the only thing I remember her saying the next morning, which was years ago, when I woke up alone in bed with a classic hangover like feeding time in an anteater grotto and you're it, buster. I still had my clothes on, or more accurately yet, my clothes had me on ... oh, God! I couldn't remember where I had been or how I got home.
So I lay there hurting and thinking about her.
I took her words, like fresh ingredients, and carefully sliced them into a huge mental pot, along with everything else about her that I had said here, and put a slow fire under the pot because it would have to cook for years.
"Yes!" she said, very enthusiastically - "But come back when you are sober."
Too bad I didn't know where back was.
Richard Brautigan
The Tokyo-Montana Express
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