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1. Hell, these days sex is out of the question unless I can find two
rubber bands and a popsicle stick for a splint.
2. Keeler, if you ever got divorced you'd be like an uzi in a
balloon factory.
3. My childhood, let's see. I remember being tied to a bed while my
mother went to work in Great Falls, Montana. I remember an aunt
throwing a pair of scissors at me.
I remember fishing for carp with salmon eggs among flecks of toilet
paper where the sewer went into the river in Tacoma. I remember
seeing my father on the street once and he gave me some money to go
to a movie.
4. I got a remote controlled sexual device and had my girlfriend put
it in her so that I could secretly activate it during a dinner with
some drama professors from Montana State.
5. I really like the way you hold that burger. You've got a damned
good burger grip.
6. I don't use drugs. They're illegal. I use alcohol because I know
where it's coming from.
7. I would never commit suicide because I wouldn't want anyone to
have to clean up the mess.
8. I have a friend who walked in on a woman with her head in the
oven, so he sneaked behind the house to the gas main and turned it
off.
9. Please come out to my place; all I have for company are the
ghosts of former lovers and the hollow clomping of my own feet.
10. (as he dumps a bowl of popcorn on his head in a bar) It's a
North Dakota blizzard.
11. (as he puts the convexed part of a spoon under the crotch of his
index and middle finger and gyrates them for a reflection) Look, a
North Dakota skin flick.
12. (as he reaches around me at the Livingston Bar and Grill and
taps the guy next to me on the shoulder). Hey, this guy wants to
fight you.
13. (after watching women in a bar as we got more and more wasted)
Why don't we just go into the women's room and hang our tongues over
the toilet paper roller?
14. I broke my leg trying to cross the living room to turn off the
television.
15. After Aki left me, I woke up at around 3 a.m. one night in front
of the TV in my San Francisco apartment, and Gabby Haze was on the
screen saying "She's got Californy fever!"
16. (at his house in Bolinas shortly before his death) I've been
wandering the highways around here trying to pass myself off as road
meat on the chance that some woman might pick me up and fuck me.
17. (after coming back from a reading at Notre Dame) These damned
herpes. Two women wanted to go at once. I could have had a tricycle.
18. (after I read him a complex passage from the Frenchman, Mark
Chenier's, deconstructionist book praising his work and asked him if
he had intended all that complexity) Damn straight, every word. The
frog got it right.
19. (after cocking and firing his .22 pump action rifle) Listen to
that! This little beauty is like a poem.
20. (after keeping me up until 3 a.m. and blaming me for his
problems) I'm using you like a woman.
21. (after I ask him why
he has a bunch of upscale fly-fishing equipment) Everything here's
tax deductable, big boy, after all I'm Mr. Trout Fishing in America.
22. (screaming at a stranger across the Gallatin as he sends his son
out into fast, deep water to retrieve a lure snagged on a log.) What
the hell kind of father ARE you!
23. (after I let Paul Ferlazzo, my department head, instead or
Richard sit next to me at a Chico Hot Springs poetry reading) I
guess you know which side YOUR bread's buttered on.
24. (after I read a poem about a tench, a British coarse fish I saw
on a trip to England,at the poetry reading) You need a muse
injection, big guy. That was pretty pre"tench"ous.
25. Sometimes I think there are two Richard Brautigans, the famous
author that people are constantly judging as a genious or an idiot
and me, the guy who's here talking to you now.
26. (after seeing that there was just one of his books left in the
fiction section of the local B. Dalton) Who are these fuckers
anyway? Don't they want to make money? Do I have to go around the
country begging them to sell my books and make money?
27. (while I'm trying to eat some sort of purple fruit and whipped
cream concoction at Martin's Cafe in Livingston) How about a bite of
that bite dwarf vomit, big guy.
28. (at the Sport Restaurant in Livingston after our first meal
together and I offer to get the check) You bet, big guy. You'll
learn.
29. (from a short story Richard wrote for his creative writing
class, a science fiction story, unbeknownst to the the class, based
on his frequent herpes outbreaks and a little garden next to Willson
Hall called the grotto) Every month the boils would trudge to the
grotto to be drained.
30. (after realizing in horror that editors had not caught his
improper use of "it's" in an exclusive hand-made volume of his work)
Grammar is very important to me. I had a very good high school
English teacher who helped me to become a writer. I always use
Strunk and White: Elements of Style when I write.
Gorgo's Brautigan Stories Index |