Flash player not available.
by Rip Torn?
I had met Richard Brautigan in the fall, in a sushi bar in San Francisco. Now I was back in San Francisco, not to see Brautigan, but to meet with the poet Michael McClure? and discuss directing his avant-garde play The Beard, which was to be produced in New York. I waited for McClure and some of his friends, who wanted to check me out, at Enrico's, the writers' bar across from the City Lights Bookstore. Along with McClure came Don Carpenter?, a novelist and playwright; Emmett Grogan, author of Ringelevio and a famous outlaw; and Jim Walsh?, a producer from New York. Jim had seen my production of Kenneth Brown's The Happy Bar at the Actors Studio and was championing me as director of his project.
What I remember of that day at Enrico's is excellent linguini and white clam sauce, and the sight of Shirley Temple Black at a nearby table. I nodded in her direction, and she coolly nodded back. We were of different political persuasions, but belonged to the same fraternity of acting. This cut across the status barrier — she a UN ambassador and me a prolabor, unemployable, troublemaking movie actor.
But Richard wasn't at Enrico's. In fact, it wasn't until after the owner, Banducci, sat with us and treated us to espresso and Courvoisier that Richard's name was even mentioned. McClure, who could tell I would have been just as content to stay at Enrico's all day, started to giggle. "I wish I didn't have to work today" he said to me. "Well, we won't wait up for you tonight. You and Richard are going fishing. Two Aquarians!" And he laughed and shook his head. "Try to get back before the week ends."
Carpenter said, "Are you really a fly fisherman? Richard's one of the best. He's going to take you down to Stinson Beach."
Richard had an apartment on the north side of Geary, where it tunnels under Presidio. Sears was right across the street. The door opened. A woman friend of Richard's said, "I'm on my way out. Richard's in the back brewing some tea." I stepped over the threshold and over the sign of the fisher of men. There was another fish on the floor in the kitchen. When I had first met Richard at the sushi bar, he had hidden from me. This day I got a better look. Richard was a giant, but he stooped; standing up, he would be around six four. His turned-up hat and old-fashioned glasses made him look like Custer or Mark Twain? surveying the terrain with a falcon's gaze. He truly was a Confederate general.
We drank tea and talked about McClure's play, about the San Francisco poets, about Beowulf about fishing for half-pounders in Oregon, where Richard grew up, and all the time he was rummaging through tackle looking for some 7X tippet material, which we would need to go after these small nine-inch fish bottled up in a fresh pond behind the sand bar. I was fishing a twelve-dollar Berkley Sweetheart and getting it rigged up. Taking some needle-nosed pliers, Richard bent down the barbs of a few size 18 Royal Coachmen and Mosquitoes. We ran over to Sears to get some fly dope, picked up my rental car from the Sears parking lot, and were on our way to Stinson Beach.
"Everybody says I'm crazy," said Richard, "that these fish are just rainbows planted by the parks department, but I think they're little steelhead waiting for a rain so the creek will cut the sand bar and they can go to sea." Here he handed me a pair of hemostats. "We won't even take them out of the water."
Richard checked out my gear. "Bass fisherman." He grinned. "I think you'd better use a tapered leader," and he took leader spools from his vest. He tied me up a good nine-foot trace with a 7X tippet. I followed suit, biting my tongue to get the blood knot right. I didn't cast badly but nothing compared with Richard's effortless form. I confessed I didn't know a thing about trout fishing and that all I had ever caught on dry flies were bluegills, and that even then I preferred a Black Gnat fished wet. Richard caught and released three small fish, and I caught one.
"Look," he suddenly confided, "so many times someone will want to go fishing with me, and I end up tying all their knots, taking off all their fish, rebaiting their hook. Hell, if I wanted to be a gillie, I'd get paid. We're all friends of McClure's. We hear you're right to direct his play, but I'm leery of New York and, well, I figured if you checked out as a real fisherman, were telling the truth about that, you were probably straight in the art department, too. Let's leave these little fish to the Rain God, who can get them to sea, and go to Sausalito and have a sundowner at the No Name Bar. We'll plot some real trout fishing."
Sometime after our afternoon in the No Name, Richard called to say he wanted to go fishing on Deer Creek, below Big Sur. I remember his words tumbling over each other and the funny chortling noises he made. "I don't know, Richard," I said. "If I can get a real cheap flight, I will."
I was married to Geraldine Page then, and she was going to L.A. to do a film. She decided to fly out early with me and take the kids. We flew to San Francisco, borrowed a car, picked up Richard, and drove down to Monterey, where we visited Bruce and Price Dunn?, friends of Richard's who were going fishing with us.
At the Dunns' home, we sat on cushions at a round table for supper, and the boys had prepared an apple-box table for our daughter, Angelica, and twin boys, Tony and Jon, who were two and in diapers. We planned our fishing trip over linguini and pesto, and Gerry and the kids decided to visit with the Dunn women and not leave for L.A. right away.
The men piled into Bruce's car and rocketed down the Coast Highway toward Big Sur and Deer Creek. Richard said that Deer Creek was supposed to have a lot of trout, maybe some steelhead — but no one really knew.
Sometime near noon, we turned off onto a dirt road that led to the creek. Excitement built as we traded stories about growing up in small towns, about fishing set-hooks, trotlines, and jugs for channel cats, about going "noodling" for big yellows. (As a kid, I wouldn't stick my arm under a riverbank or my hand through willow roots into the den of a sitting mama catfish weighing almost a hundred pounds — past the cottonmouth and past the horny beak of the snapping turtle, a finger to tickle the mama's chin in order to get your hand in her mouth and out past her gills to grab the plate and then try to tear her from her nest. Those big mama catfish could drown a man, and sometimes did.)
We were all more civilized now, using light tackle, but we delighted in describing the terrible outlaw ways poachers used — mashed buckeyes in a sack thrown in a pool, a field telephone to crank them up, dynamite, so popular in Mexico, the Philippines, and the USA.
We were a mixed bag: Bruce, a spin-caster: Price, a bait-dunker; and Richard and I fly fishermen. Soon we hit a turn, an abandoned farm perched right on the rim of the deep gorge carved by the tiny glint of water far below — Deer Creek. Like military men, like the crackers they were, Richard, Bruce, and Price surveyed the best route to take. Fixed on that glint below, they ignored the old machinery and farm houses, grabbed tackle and beers, and over the edge we plunged, whooping rebel yells.
It took us about forty minutes to hit the creek and about three hours to climb out. But down at the bottom, the creek was nearly dry "It looks like — " Richard paused — "it looks like an army of hippies has bivouacked here." Sinkers and lines and hooks were draped over every tree, bush, and boulder. What trout we saw were so terrified, they burrowed like gophers between the rocks in the shallow water. I told a trout, "I'm not going to bother you, fish." There was one campfire that had gone out, with the remains of a card game thrown in it. Burnt kings, queens, and deuces.
The Confederate general surveyed the terrain. "Better get out of this canyon before it gives me the willies." For a while, I kept up with Richard and Price. Richard started to chortle. "Rip, do you think Hollywood would be interested in a series called 'The Blunder Brothers'? We've got a fine cast here. We could profit from our blunders, and, looking at this crew, I doubt we'd run out of script, even if we ran as long as 'Gunsmoke.' What do you think? Hell, this bunch could never run out of blunders! There's two cold beers in the truck. First up top gets 'em." Richard and Price poured on coal, and soon I was trailing, climbing now with Bruce. Halfway out I panted, "Hey you don't have to meet nobody for dinner, do you?" He said, "What do you mean?" "Well," I said, "they've got the beers and done 'em, so there's no reason we shouldn't sit down and have a smoke, take a break." "Oh, Lordy," said Bruce, "I was hoping you meant that."
A little later, we came up out of the canyon. Richard looked at his pocket watch, tapped it, and said, "We've been here, I don't know, thirty-five minutes. Time to have a game of cribbage." I said, "It's more like fifteen." "Here — " he pitched me a cold can — "we saved you laggards a brew to share."
Blunder Brothers, we plotted our way up the coast. Well, what is the most famous fly-fishing river in America? We didn't know. In Montana, the Madison. In the East, the Au Sable or the Yellow Beeches, or maybe the Beaverkill. But in Northern California, we agreed, it was the Feather, the north fork of the Feather River.
About five months later, I got a call from Richard. "I'm getting another Blunder Brothers Act together. Interested in a Feather River adventure?" "Damn right!" I yelled back. And the Blunder Brothers plus two fellows from Boston, whose names I can't recall, got together in another old car and headed toward Sacramento, where Richard was to give a poetry reading at a small college.
Richard was a splendid reader, of his poems and of others', and the crowd was excited. He became interested in a redhead in the audience, a nurse. She looked enraptured with Brautigan, but leaving the party after the reading, Richard said, "I talked too damn much and ruined it. I scared her off Dammit! They said they were going to feed us, and all they had were dips and cheese balls and cheap wine."
We stayed near the college in Sacramento. It was an upstairs back-of-the-house apartment with a screened-in porch. We had half a bottle of Jim Beam, a few beers, and, on the stove, a vegetable stew that we kept dosing with bonita flakes, lemon, and Tabasco.
Down to his skivvies, Richard headed for the mattress on the porch. He poked his head in the door "Ah, dammit! No blanket. I hate to ask you, but I'd hate worse to have to get dressed again." I was going to sleep in the car, where the bedding was. "Sure, Richard, I'll get you one." He sighed and scratched. "You see, I talked too much." But as he lamented, there came a shy knock at the door, and in walked the red-headed nurse. By the time I got back up, they were out on the porch and on the mattress.
"You want your blanket? I'll leave it on this chair next to the stove." "Forget the blanket; where's that Jim Beam?" Richard asked. "I'll take a snort and leave it right by the door," I said. "No, bring it here. I'm a poet and she's a nurse. We don't care. You can have a look. She's beautiful. Give old Rip a look. It'll keep him warm." They laughed as I set the bottle of Beam inside the door sill. I went out and down the stairs to sleep in the car It sure got cold in the night.
When the nurse left in the early morning to go to work, she forgot to cover the bare-assed poet, and he caught a monstrous head and chest cold.
We got on the road and hit the north fork of the Feather about sundown. By the time we made camp, it was dark. A blunder of a camp. It was right off the road, and what seemed a nice clearing was studded with root gnarls and outcroppings of stone. And, at about five in the morning, a squad of motorcycles roared up the canyon, about seven in all. The Feather River Commandos. Geronimo! Here come some more! Battle stations!
Around eleven-thirty, I burned out on the Feather and sat on the bank airing out, my waders down at the knees. Richard came down the river and then turned to fish the tail of a great pool. The sun, nearly overhead, shafted down into deep blue holes, intersected by giant stone ridges and caverns. Gorgeous water that should have had some real alligators in it, big old cannibal 'bows or browns. Richard didn't like to false-cast, but he did. He lengthened his line and with effortless grace sent it to the far end of the pool, some sixty feet away. The poet was poetry in performance. The line and leader floated down. "Why aren't you fishing, Rip?" "I don't know, Richard. There's something funny here. I haven't seen any fish except those two little suckers over there. There's also no insect life in the weeds or on any stone that I can find."
He cast again and chortled, "It's like fishing over mausoleums." Reeling in, he said, "Let's go into Oroville for a chicken-fried steak. I'm gonna feed this cold and get some medicine before it kills me. After chow and the drugstore, we hit a grocery and tackle shop, where we bought size 14 egg hooks, spinners, and three jars of Balls 0' Fire salmon eggs.
"Want any corn, marshmallows, worms, boys?" asked the owner. "We might use Velveeta, if we stay skunked," said Richard. "Where ya been fishing?" asked the proprietor. "North fork of the Feather, one of the premier fly-fishing rivers," we replied. "Usta be, boys, usta be. Didn't ya know? Couple years ago, PG & E and the Fish and Game Department established a put-and-take policy on the Feather, and at the end of the season they poison the river to check the program. What they've done, though, is poisoned the entire historical life of the Feather, killed everything wild, including the bugs, to promote hatchery trout that eat poultry pellets. Try the north fork of the Yuba, boys."
That afternoon, we fished the Yuba. I was amazed at how a trout could come rocketing up to snatch a bit of bait in the tumbling white water. Throwing spinners and eggs, we all caught fish in the wonderful clear waters that cascade past old gold digs, boulders, and tailings, past rusting machinery that once sluiced the gravel banks and turned the Yuba muddy.
"Here," said Richard, pulling in another one, "we're finally gonna eat fish! I'm tired of chicken-fried steak. We've caught enough with bait. Put this on, Rip." He bit off my egg rig and tied on a tippet and a Royal Coachman. "See right there? That big boulder in the cascade? There's fish behind that boulder. You can't see them because of the bubbles, but then, they can't see you either. Cast right where that rill comes over that crack in the stone."
"Gimme some fly dope, Rich," I said, "some gink to smear on this fly. How am I gonna keep it dry on top in that water?" Richard replied, "If it floats, fish it dry. If it goes under, fish it wet." I placed the Coachman right on top of the boulder. For a second, it spun around in the rill and then washed over. Like an electric spark, a silver-blue-and-pink flash hit the Coachman and was hooked. "That's him, Rip, downriver." The fish jumped, a good two-pounder, and was barreling down the river with me in hot pursuit. My heart was pounding so hard in that thin, cold air that I didn't notice I had skinned my ankle. I slid the 'bow onto a tiny beach of sand, jumped on him, and flung him back into the rocks, where I hollered like an Indian, quickly thumped him with a stone priest, and took out my old yellow Case pocket knife, so I could gut my fish and examine its innards. Sticks and gravel.
"These are caddis houses, or casements, and this little fellow" — Richard pointed to a small, cream-colored worm he had pulled out of its house of sticks and stones — "is the caddis worm. I've caught a lot of fish using these on a fine hook and . . . Come on! We've got enough fish. We're gonna fry 'em up with some bacon and onions. We got ketchup and lemons and parsley and potatoes." And, stumbling, wheezing with his flu and rattling excitement, Richard set off.
Richard loved to cook, and we really rustled up that grub, because nothing compares with fish that are taken right from the water to the flame.
We camped on the river, across the road from a high butte. When the sun went down, it was like opening the door on a freezer. All the cold air in the world flowed down that butte to our little camp. Gorged to the gills with trout, Brautigan was wedged between two boulders. He was asleep, but he was shaking and didn't sound good at all. Bruce Dunn said, "Do you think he'll make it through the night?" I replied, "He might, but I'm not sure about myself. We need to get some medicine, like a big bottle of Spanish brandy." We counted out change and uncrumpled bills. I talked to the boys from Boston, and they coughed up some. Bruce put another blanket on Richard and woke him to get the rest. "Hurry!" wheezed Richard. "Look at this!" His hand was puffed up and red. Somehow, in spearing fish or bacon or spuds from the skillet, telling a story with a wild comical gesture, Richard had stabbed himself with the tines of the barbecue fork. With a groan, he pulled the lobster claw back under the covers and disappeared between the boulders. "Thanks for the blanket, boys. Why didn't you give it to me sooner? Hurry up!" he croaked.
Legend has it that Richard's mother was a barmaid, a good-hearted woman with lots of boyfriends. She had a baby boy and an older girl and sometimes abandoned them for long periods to run and throw a fling. Richard told me that, at about age four, his mother took his sister and left him in the care of a boyfriend, a fry-cook who lived in a corner room of an old hotel and worked in the kitchen below. The fry-cook, having no funds for a baby-sitter, tied Richard to the bedpost. Richard remembered this man with affection. "He gave me enough slack so I could get to the can and, more important, I could get to the corner and look out the window."
The mystery of Brautigan is: How, out of that tortured childhood, did he manage to find the joy and the cheer and the enthusiasm that shone from his character? In those days, he had a lot of friends, and on that cold night along the Yuba, two of them were hurtling through the dark, following the headlights in search of a roadhouse.
About an hour later, after conversation with the locals at the bar, we wheeled back to the river with the medicine. The brandy we located wasn't Mexican or Spanish, but a California brand, which wasn't good. Richard may have grown up dirt-poor, but he had exquisite tastes, leaning to the likes of Courvoisier and Martell, at least three-star. Since he had contributed a lion's share to the cost, we decided we'd better sample this quarter-star stuff to see if it was worth his while. After all, we had driven all that way and not yet touched a drop.
The hardest part of our journey was from the road, where Bruce parked the ear, down to the river to find the patient. The Blunder Brothers had picked a ghostly old gold camp to bed down in. So Bruce and I eased along the spoil bank to locate Richard. Slipping on the rounded stones, we finally stood where we had left our partner. He was nowhere to be found. Did we walk by him in the dark?
Bruce reminded me of my uncle Weldon before he gave up the sauce. "You better grab the bottle if you want a drink." I did. "Hold it, Hoss — save some for me," said Bruce. It was then, while we were sampling the medicine, that we heard a muffled groan and felt the ground shift. We hadn't lost Richard. We were standing on him.
I didn't see Richard for a few years after that. When I did, it was during the time when I had been eighty-sixed from films, television, and Broadway, and was doing a summer-stock tour It was just before our opening at the summer theater in Westport, Connecticut, that I got a call from California. It was Richard, and he wanted to come east and fish in the Catskills. I warned him that I hardy had time to piss, much less fish, and that I'd probably only see him after the show at night. He came anyway. because of a publishing party to be given in his honor in New York.
I finally got some time and called Richard in the city. "I've caught my breath," I said, "so we can talk and maybe fish the Saugatuck, which flows into Long Island Sound at Westport. They say the river's got some sea-run browns in it."
Gerry, the kids, and I were staying at a farmhouse near the salt pond in Westport, and the moment Richard set foot in the place he became itchy and perturbed. He didn't like the family we were living with. And one night after our host had told us stories of the old days in Connecticut, which I thoroughly enjoyed, Richard and I stayed up alone, and I asked him, "Didn't you enjoy those stories, Richard?" He shot back, "Hell, no! They're so goddamned middle-class. I come across a continent to talk with you, and what do you do? You sit around bullshitting with those damn people. I'm going to see your plays, we're going to fish, and I'll ride back to the city with you and your family, because I want you to go to my publishing party."
"Okay General," was all I could say.
We fished but didn't catch anything more than five small bluegills and one stunted bass. On our way back from fishing, I tried to joke about our not catching any trout and pointed to a sign that suggested why we hadn't. Painted on an old and abandoned factory, it proclaimed, EMBALMING FLUIDS. "Look, Richard, it's Trout Fishing in America." He was not amused. I never went to the publishing party.
More than a decade passed before we got together again. In that time I had separated from Gerry and gone to live with Amy Wright in California. That didn't work out either, so I lived by myself in a place above Malibu and below Paradise Cove.
Gerry called me one day to announce that she could no longer manage the twins. They were sixteen and undisciplined. "They want to go out and live with you. Now we see who they love," she said. I told her I'd give it a try but that it probably wouldn't last long. "Tell 'em it'll be a different ball game living with old Dad."
So my boys came west, and at sixteen they were writers, directors, actors, and poets. They devoured books and movies and television. "Listen, boys," I said, "if you want to be artists, learn from life. And learn some discipline." They had no discipline. They couldn't even keep their shoelaces tied.
What my boys needed was good old-fashioned work. I wanted them to learn what it was like to work all day and sweat your ass off and feel good about it at the end. I called my friend Joe Sedgwick in Montana. Joe owns a ranch on Big Elk Creek, above Two-Dot, and is a champion Montana cowboy. I couldn't think of a better place for my boys to learn about hard work.
Joe said, "Hell, Rip, I ain't got time to entertain 'em." And I said, "I don't want you to entertain 'em. I want you to work the piss out of 'em." There was a pause while Joe considered what I had said. "You mean shoveling shit? Pounding post holes?" I laughed and said, "Sounds just right." His answer came without hesitation "Send 'em up, Rip. We've got enough of that kind of work for everybody!"
So I put the boys on an airplane and sent them to Montana. When I visited them a month later, they were a lot closer to being men. We fished Big Elk Creek and the Musselshell near Two-Dot and caught some nice browns on spinners.
After our day of fishing, we went down to Chico Hot Springs to have dinner and visit with Mike Art, who owns the place. I asked about Richard. "I've lost touch with him. He's been eighty-sixed out of every bar from here to Bozeman. He's welcome here, but he's mad at me... or someone. We're worried about him. I'll call him for you, but he won't come," he said. "Tell him I'm here with my boys. Tell him Jon and Tony are here," I replied. "Okay, but..." Mike said as he sauntered out to the office. Mike came back with a big grin. "Son of a bitch! Richard'll be here in about forty-five minutes." And amazing everyone, as if a ghost had appeared, Richard slouched in a while later. He'd never looked better.
He was tickled to see Tony and Jon and asked questions and teased the hell out of them. Richard had on the kind of Norwegian cap with a button on top that Montana ranchers wear instead of Stetsons. At some time in the evening, he wanted to trade hats with me. We wore about the same size. I got his blue one and he got a black bill with the logo "CAT." I had worn that cap in a film called Jinxed.
Someone was puking in the men's room, and Richard smiled and said, "I'll try the road — and a little air." He went out for a moment. Mike Art said, "That's the old Richard."
Richard came back in the bar and gave me a hug. "I want you boys and your dad to take a walk with me down the road. Let's drink to Tony and Jon," he said. "I like these boys; I liked them when they were tykes and I like 'em now. They get on their feet, come to you, and shake your hand hard and look you in the eye." And he hooted a rebel yell. "Hey, Jon, can you catch?" Jon, who was famous in the family for his fumbles, said, "Okay, sure." And Brautigan rifled a bottle of brandy across the road. Jon caught it against his chest with one hand, and we cheered that night in Pray, Montana.
The last time I saw Richard was the summer after our reunion. The twins and my daughter, Angelica, were working for Mike Art at Chico. One day I took them to visit Joe Sedgwick and his family. I taught the kids to drive in a little rental car with the stick on the floor. We shifted gears and bumped down the road where Richard's house stood and left him a note asking if he would like to get together with me and the kids.
To everyone's surprise, Richard invited us over. He came out of the top of his barn, waved, and came down his stairs to the ground between his house and barn. He blinked in the light like an owl, yawned, scratched his pot under his union suit, squinted at the sun — Custer, Mark Twain — hooked his thumb, placed his hand on his back. He looked his falcon look at each of us and spoke to my kids. "You see your dad's timing is still good." Then he grinned. "Let's jump in your car and get some groceries. You see, today just before you came here, I was finishing my novel. It's done. I've turned into a hermit, but I want to celebrate." We rocketed to the store and back to Richard in his extended living room, one of the old cars in his yard, the General with a battle plan. "I don't fish anymore!" He smiled shyly, as if to say he'd given up making love or drinking. "No, I don't fish anymore," he said. "I've given my gear away."
I went out alone and caught two trout, and that evening we had a party. From somewhere appeared a bottle of champagne and some kind of hooch — Daniel's or Dant. Richard's old chortle, his grin and excitement made him a kid again. As for the trout, we discovered a can of mushroom soup, and Richard said, "Let's poach these beauties in this soup. And how about a dash of champagne?" I and my kids and the hermit had a feast. Toward dawn, Richard went to bed and we went back to Chico.
I never saw Richard again. His last book, Before the Wind Blows It All Away, was savaged by the East Coast critics, for whose approval Richard greatly hungered. His career was reassessed and found wanting, and Brautigan was dismissed as unimportant. The main damage was not to ego, but to income, and Richard knew he had to lose his place in Montana. He retreated to Bolinas, facing a taste of the poverty that he had escaped for a while.
I was in the basement of the house that Gerry and I shared in New York when my son Tony came downstairs to talk with me.
"I suppose you saw that small notice on Richard in Time magazine," said Tony.
"About his book? I heard they killed it," I said.
"Yes, Dad," said Tony "They killed his book, but I guess you don't know..."
"Don't know what?" I said.
"Dad, Richard shot himself. He's dead."
I called Don Carpenter, and he told me what he knew about Richard's last days. Richard had gone to North Beach, in San Francisco, and had run into Akiko, a Japanese woman whom he had broken up with some time before. The story goes that when they met, Richard ran away from her but she followed. He ran into a bookstore and she came up behind him. When she put her hand on his back, Richard fled. He went to a friend's house and borrowed a gun, then returned home to Bolinas to kill himself. Cut up by the critics, his ex-wife counting coup on him, Custer went for his gun. Brautigan was standing when the bullet hit him. That's the story they tell.
Richard, when I was in San Francisco I visited Carpenter in Mill Valley, and there was your picture on the wall looking at me over a bedpost. I said to Don, "Let's go to North Beach to Enrico's and see if Richard's there." We sped across the Golden Gate Bridge. Enrico's has been remodeled. We sat at the new bar under the portrait of Bill Cosby and had a brandy in your honor, Richard. Don doesn't booze anymore and had a soda-and-lemon. We saluted the owner, Banducci, who nodded back. I said to Don, "Richard isn't here," and Don replied, "No, he isn't." We paid the check and left.
I lift a fly rod and get glints of you, Brautigan; I salute you, Blunder Brother. I'm on the road now, Coast Highway I'm reporting to you, General. Zuma, Paradise Cove, home to Hidden Beach. Black horse up on the hill, fields of mustard. Sky's blue and clear out here on the Pacific shore of America. Brother, I'm praying for your tormented soul. Be at ease. Stand in clear water that rushes to the sea. Keep that humor and enthusiasm you had on earth in the days before you stopped fishing.
In a play by John Arden, a soldier, facing the threat of imminent death, says:
...a man can laugh, because or else he might well howl — and howling's not for men but for dogs, wolves, seagulls — like o' that ent it?
David Seybold (ed)
Seasons of the Angler
New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988: 127-139
Copyright note: My purpose in putting this material on the web is to provide Brautigan scholars and fans with ideas for further research into Richard Brautigan's work. It is used here in accordance with fair use guidelines. No attempt is made regarding commercial duplication and/or dissemination. If you are the author of this article or hold the copyright and would like me to remove your article from the Brautigan Archives, please contact me at birgit at cybernetic-meadows.net.
![[toggle]](javascript:icntoggle('mod-Brautigan_Resourcesl2','module.png'); "[toggle]"){kind=small}