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XXVIII The Captain Gives A Couple
More Readings With Me and Other Locals
I wish I could recall the following episodes better, but I’m fifty-six,
five years older than Richard when he blew his brains out, and on various
medications, so I’ll have to go with what I’ve got. It was the fall of
1981 when some writers in the Bozeman community decided to have a poetry
reading at Chico Hot Springs which is about fifty miles from Bozeman--but
twenty miles from Richard’s house. One of the people putting it on called
me and asked if I’d participate and, with tremulous voice, asked if I’d
invite the Captain to participate too.
Richard seemed willing and ready to plunge into “community activities” so
before you can say George Dickel, the Captain, I, my poet-artist friend
Dave Waldman and several other practitioners of the cinder- block art of
poetry were all reading our stuff to a small but attentive audience at
Chico Hot Springs. Richard read his poem that goes something like this:
“Two guys get out of a car./ They stand beside it./ They don’t know what
else to do,” and the place erupted. Then I read a poem about trash fish
that starts “Here’s to the carp, fat on mud bloat and algae,” and the
place erupted. In fact, probably because of the Captain’s presence, people
would have erupted if the cook had walked out of the kitchen and farted.
In the fall of ‘82, the same folks put on the same deal at Chico, but they
put Richard on the poster without his permission. He went ape-shit and
blamed me, so I contacted the organizers and asked them to print some kind
of retraction in the newspaper and one of them called me a spineless sack
of shit. At the Captainless reading, I read a poem about bluegrass
instruments, including the dobro, and someone there went to Dobro Dick and
told him that I had written a sarcastic poem about him. The person didn’t
know that the dobro itself is a sarcastic instrument, so the whole episode
made me feel like hammered chicken shit.
The next year, Richard read with us locals at Chico, but it still wasn’t
exactly peachy. He got mad at me when I sat next to Paul Ferlazzo, my
department head, instead of him and said, “I guess you know which side
your bread’s buttered on.” When he read, of course, the place erupted. No
matter what mood he was in, audiences always seemed to be there, ready to
erupt for him--as well they should have. I’d just been to England that
summer, so I read a poem about an English trash fish called a tench, after
which there was a polite smattering of applause. Richard leaned over to me
and said, (and I’ll always remember this) “That was pretty pre-tench-ous.
You need a muse injection, big boy.”
Gorgo's Brautigan Stories Index
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