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He went up to Chemault, that's in Eastern Oregon, to cut Christmas trees. He was working for a very small enterprise. He cut the trees, did the cooking and slept on the kitchen floor. It was cold and there was snow on the ground. The floor was hard. Somewhere along the line, he found an old Air Force flight jacket. That was a big help in the cold.
The only woman he could find up there was a three-hundred-pound Indian squaw. She had twin fifteen-year-old daughters and he wanted to get into them. But the squaw worked it so he only got into her. She was clever that way.
The people he was working for wouldn't pay him up there. They said he'd get it all in one sum when they got back to San Francisco. He'd taken the job because he was broke, really broke.
He waited and cut trees in the snow, laid the squaw, cooked bad food — they were on a tight budget — and he washed the dishes. Afterwards, he slept on the kitchen floor in his Air Force flight jacket.
When they finally got back to town with the trees, those guys didn't have any money to pay him off. He had to wait around the lot in Oakland until they sold enough trees to pay him off.
"Here's a lovely tree, ma'am."
"How much?"
"Ten dollars."
"That's too much."
"I have a lovely two-dollar tree here, ma'am. Actually, it's only half a tree, but you can stand it up right next to a wall and it'll look great, ma'am."
"I'll take it. I can put it right next to my weather clock. This tree is the same color as the queen's dress. I'll take it. You said two dollars?"
"That's right, ma'am."
"Hello, sir. Yes ... Uh-huh ... Yes ... You say that you want to bury your aunt with a Christmas tree in her coffin? Uh-huh ... She wanted it that way ... I'll see what I can do for you, sir. Oh, you have the measurements of the coffin with you? Very good ... We have our coffin-sized Christmas trees right over here, sir."
Finally he was paid off and he came over to San Francis- co and had a good meal, a steak dinner at Le Boeuf and some good booze, Jack Daniels, and then went out to the Fillmore and picked up a good-looking, young, Negro whore, and he got laid in the Albert Bacon Fall Hotel.
The next day he went down to a fancy stationery store on Market Street and bought himself a thirty-dollar fountain pen, one with a gold nib.
He showed it to me and said, "Write with this, but don't write hard because this pen has got a gold nib, and a gold nib is very impressionable. After a while it takes on the personality of the writer. Nobody else can write with it. This pen becomes just like a person's shadow. It's the only pen to have. But be careful."
I thought to myself what a lovely nib trout fishing in America would make with a stroke of cool green trees along the river's shore, wild flowers and dark fins pressed against the paper.
Richard Brautigan
Trout Fishing in America
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