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The Great Golden Telescope

by Richard Brautigan

She has let herself go and she is thirty-five pounds overweight. Her long dark hair is a tangled rebel against combs and brushes. Her wardrobe could be described as sloppy and desolate.

And all she wants to do is talk.

There are a bunch of us in a cabin: twelve or fourteen. The occasion is a very loose dinner party in the foothills of New Mexico, just outside of a small town.

The food is delicious.

We sit around on the floor eating it.

We all look like hippies.

On my way to the house, riding on the back of a truck, some spring snow fell. It was a slight flurry that didn't stick, and a short while later I watched a beautiful sunset from outside the house and I played with two kittens and a tomcat and marvelled at how big New Mexico is.

Everything is very casual inside the house, low-geared, mellow, except for the girl. She interrupts whatever we are talking about, which isn't very important stuff, but still after a while it gets on our nerves a little.

We are all very patient with her. She talks very slowly in a shy bumbling way. She is like having a difficult child about the house.

These are the things that she talks about:

1. We should all make our clothes out of a special seaweed that grows along the California coast. She has a notebook full of designs for seaweed clothes out in the Volkswagen bus. She will go and get the book after she has finished eating. Her three children are asleep in the bus. She never eats meat, so she is making an exception with this meal. They're very tired.

(It turns out later that nobody in the house had ever seen her before. She just came by and joined in. Maybe she smelled dinner when it was cooking and figured that this was a good place to park her bus for a while and get something to eat.)

2. We'll take the massive profits that will be earned from the seaweed clothes, everybody will want them, Dennis Hopper, he lives at Taos, and just everybody, maybe Frank Zappa too, and Carole King, and buy a mountain where people can live in peace and harmony with a great golden telescope. She knows right where the mountain is. It's a cheap mountain, too. It could be purchased for just a few hundred thousand dollars from the seaweed clothes profits.

(Nobody is really very interested in what she is talking about because it is such a familiar conversation that everybody has heard again and again coming from people who have been wiped out by taking too many drugs or living a life style that's just too estranged from reality but somebody has to ask her about the telescope and they do, but ...)

3. By this time she has gone onto something else and the future of the great golden telescope is in serious doubt.

(I take another bite of food.)

4. "Do you know what?" she says suddenly, having just told us a long story about the possibility of building boats that look like old-timey train engines like the ones you see in Western movies and shipping them by real four-wheeled trains to the California coast, where they would look beautiful anchored beside out seaweed boutiques, "I think I've been in a Volkswagen bus too long."


Richard Brautigan
The Tokyo-Montana Express