|
Gorgo's Stories about Richard Brautagan |
|
VI Fishing
Fishing the Tenses With Captain Richard
For the captain, fishing was usually past or future tense. The equipment, the flies, etc., were in the present. He had a glass rod, light as a weed and he liked to hold it out and shake it slightly then pass it to the person next to him to experience the proper awe. The flies he used were also next to nothing, size 16 to 20. Most of the time, this wonderful tackle sat unused in the washroom. But there were those rare occasions when we would actually put the equipment in the back of my Mazda station wagon, and go out to a local stream. One such excursion was to the Yellowstone about a mile behind Richard's house. He was in a twinkling mood because he had just sold the options on Dreaming of Babylon to Kate Jackson. Maybe that and the cool, clear weather got him out from behind the Dickel, into my car, and down a dirt road to the river. Taking his stuff out of the back, he hit his head on the swing-up tailgate so that he bled a little. But it didn't seem to phase him. As we squeaked and wallowed down the bank in our huge, clown-like chest waders, we commented on what the Japanese must have intended when they built cars with tailgates like that and sold them to big lumbering Americans. Richard waded upstream and fished the slower water inside a big riffle on a bend in the river with a tiny dark nymph. I waded downstream a ways where the water was straight and fast and lobbed a big spoon toward the deep blue-green near the undercut of the far bank. Richard looked down at me from where he was fishing. He never fished with anything but flies--at least as an adult. Once he told me that he used to fish salmon eggs to carp where the sewage came into a river in Tacoma. He said he could actually see flecks of toilet paper among the wallowing carp. But apparently he HD left that kind of behavior behind with his youth, or maybe that was the only part of his youth that he had left behind. Actually, fishing salmon eggs to toilet paper carp still sounds pretty good to me. I've never gotten over my childish infatuation with bait and lures, though I'll fish with flies if they happen to be working better. After a while, the Captain caught a couple of nice whitefish. Local fishermen usually throw whitefish up on the bank and let them rot, but not Richard. He had seen too many of them smoked and selling for five dollars a pound in the Bay area. He had also seen Japanese friends go ape-shit when they got their hands on a whitefish. No sir, these whitefish were immediately cleaned and popped in my creel which I had left up on the bank near him. He called my creel "The Death Bag" since he knew how much meat had passed through it. Soon, I was fooling some rainbow trout in the deep water with my big hunk of metal. Since I didn't have my creel, I just threw them up on the bank in a sort of frenzy. After a while, I turned to deal with the flopping fish, but Richard was already there, clonking each fish very precisely on the head with a small rock. "You should kill them quickly," he said with a smile of mild accusation. Later, I filleted the trout and Richard put the whitefish in for smoking. I have a smoker in my back yard made from a converted refrigerator. Richard called it Auschwitz. Smoked fish were always an integral part of our relationship. Sometimes he'd have me send boxes of smoked fish express mail to people like Shiina Takako, his Japanese sister in Tokyo, or Terry Gardiner, the "wild legislator" in Ketchikan, Alaska. And sometimes that worked out pretty well for me. Once Shiina Takako sent me a box of ayu, a rare Japanese fish, preserved in a delicate oil. But Terry Gardiner never responded. I have a feeling that he might have come home from some political junket to find a package of smoked trout rotting in his mailbox. Perhaps the most idyllic trip we ever took was to Bridger Creek just outside the Bozeman city limits. Richard really liked small streams, maybe because they seemed more magical, and the fish that come out of these streams are almost always harder, crisper, and brighter in color. We waded just upstream from a small irrigation dam and started flailing. This time, Richard had shamed me into bringing my fly rod, so we were more or less on even footing. Richard was using about a size 18 white gnat-like fly and I was using some crude thing I'd made by tying frazzled chunks of nylon to small hooks, but the fish didn't seem to care what we threw at them. They were so hungry we probably would have done pretty well using rabbit shit. We must have caught and released ten or fifteen fish apiece (Yes, I said released; Richard shamed me into that too.) before the land owner came down and ran us off. Richard may have had his way on using flies and releasing fish, but I still managed to drag him into one of my foul fishing practices. As we left, he said, "You see, Greggie, you're supposed to ask permission," in a tone quite similar to the previous, "You should kill them quickly." But as I mentioned in starting, most of my fishing trips with the Captain had very little to do with fishing. They usually went something like this: Richard would call me around nine or ten in the morning and say, "Let's go fishing." Since he knew that I was always suspicious of this midmorning suggestion, he would throw in something like "I know the perfect spot on Trail Creek" or "Go ahead and bring some sculpins too. I won't mind." And when he knew he had my interest, he would say, "Oh, and on your way, Stop and buy some George Dickel. I'll pay you back." Of all these suggestions, usually the only one which transpired was my buying the Dickel. When I got to the ranch, the Dickel would be opened for "just a quick snort for the road." But soon the road would lead into long painful discussions of his divorce, his water rights, the teen-agers who had "vandalized" his barn, and the black hole where money-grubbing publishers live, the question of whether or not to marry Masako and have a hit squad of Japanese-American kids, the doppleganger cat which had invaded his ranch, or the deer that wandered near his barn. As we stared at the sky and mountains turning gold through our Dickel, his words drifted out in the air among the cottonwood seeds which always seemed to be there in warm weather, as if his ranch were suspended in one of those shakeup water balls. By dark fishing was usually somewhere on another planet, and I would wind up driving the mountain passes back to Bozeman at two or three in the morning, drunk and depressed. But by midmorning, I would hear again the merry jingle of my telephone, and it would be the Captain. "Let's go fishing tomorrow. Really." The fishing trips that Richard and I planned in detail but never went on were probably the most interesting. Because of his fascination with small streams, he always liked the creeks in the Bozeman city limits. One of them, Bozeman (Sourdough) Creek, runs right under the Eagles Bar (about two blocks from my house) where he spent most of his drinking time here. Once while we were walking from the Eagles to my house, we saw a little girl pull a brook trout that weighted almost a pound out from under a tire store. That really got him going. He wondered how fishing was under the Eagles Bar, under Main Street, or in Bogart Park next to my house. The only obstacle in our way to finding out was a law restricting fishing within the city limits to children under the age of twelve. Later, over Dickel in the Eagles, our plan began to take shape. We would make plywood cutouts of barefoot boys with straw hats and weeds in their teeth and hide behind them while we fished. We were so proud of our plan that we decided we should bring a photographer along and publish our expedition in some classy magazine like Gray's Sporting Journal. Of course, the plan never materialized. Now, I guess, if I'm going to follow through with it. I will have to make plywood cutouts of both a kid and Richard. The last, and now, under the circumstances, the saddest fishing trip the Captain and I ever planned was to take place in the Bay area in August. Since I still have his letters which set the plan in motion, I'll let Richard tell part of the story. I was teaching summer school at M.S.U. in Bozeman when I got a letter from Richard letting me know he was in Bolinas: June 8, 1984 Dear Greg, Fooled you! doubled back, returned to America, and I'm out here in my house in Bolinas where I plan on spending the summer before returning to Montana in the fall. There's a lot of work I want to do and I think this is a good place to do it. It's interesting to be back in America, but you knew that all the time, anyway. Love, Richard Glad to knoll he was back and hoping Montana wasn't too far in his future, I wrote him a letter pissing and moaning about my teaching and telling him that I would be playing songs at an anti gold mining fundraiser in Nevada City, California in June. The people who were putting it on were paying to fly me down and back to Bozeman, so there was really no way I could visit the Captain. I had to get right back for classes. But anyway, he wrote me the following: June 15, 1984 Dear Greg, I just got your letter. You poor sack of shit! I don't have a telephone and may not get one, but my neighbor does and he'll come over and get me if somebody calls. His number is 415 868 1568. I use his telephone sparingly, so don't spread it all over the landscape of Montana. That's an interesting vision: Greggie wandering all over Montana, spreading 415 868 1568 on everything he comes across: dogs, trees, rocks, etc. Anyway, O unhappy one, I sure would like to see you. We'll get together for certain when you come down in July. Any chance in June? It's only a few more fucking hours down from Nevada Cliffy. LI know somebody out here who's got a salmon boat docked a few hundred yards away. It's something to think about. Let me know. Don't be afraid of the telephone number. Love, Richard Since I was going to the Bay area to visit my brother in late July and early August, I knew I would be seeing Richard, so I decided to get feisty. I knew his M.O. He was just trying to lure me over for Dickel drinking. Besides, one of my friends had told me that El Nino had wiped out most of the salmon fishing in the Bay area for a long time. So I wrote him back saying he'd have to get up awflly early in the morning to fool a wiley Oklahoman: I knew that the salmon fishing was shot. I wound up my letter with a hypothetical "Ancient Mariner story which ended something like "Nino Nino everywhere and all the salmon shrank," and he responded as follows: June 23, 1984 Dear Greg, The next time I pull a salmon out of the beautiful cold waters of the Pacific Ocean, I'll say, "This one is for Greggie. A loser in Montana." Love from the deck, Richard After that letter, I made some feeble response, knowing that I was fencing with a master of ridicule and said that we would solve the salmon question when I came down to visit my brother. Richard's next response was to the point: July 2, 1984 Dear Loser (formerly known as Greggie): Dream on... Losers tend to have loser friends. "She says...El Nino...changed...currents...salmon...moved...out." That was last year. It's nice to have good friends, loser. Excuse me while I have this delightful young girl place another bite of freshly-caught salmon in my jaws. Thank you, dear. No, we'll do that later again. You can rest for a while, honey. Now, where was I? O, yes, writing to a loser. Excuse me again-- No honey, I don't have losers for friends, this one is a special case. Don't worry your pretty little head about it. "She says...El Nino...changed...currents...salmon...moved out..." Yes, yes, yes. Meester Keeler. Why not do you geet me a salmon?!!! [a spot on the paper with an arrow to it and a note] (Caused by another bite of salmon being put in my mouth) Love, Richard Of course, when I got to the Bay area, the number Richard had given me didn't exactly work like a charm. I called the people at the number and they said they'd leave my message and number for Richard. But somehow, after a week or so of back and forth message leaving, we still hadn't talked. In the meantime, my car had broken down and was in the most expensive garage in San Francisco (since they were the only ones who could find parts for it); my oldest son, Chris, had been picked up and released by the Moonies; and the salmon were definitely biting like crazy. I sat down by the Berkeley pier and watched Japanese tourists come in from charter boats with huge bags of them. Finally, I got through to the Captain, and he said, "Here's the plan. I have this friend, Bob, in Stimson Beach who has a hot rod salmon boat with a couple of great big motors in it. We'll come down from Bolinas to Fisherman's Wharf in it, pick you up there, go out and murder salmon, then bring them back to North Beach and have my friend who owns a Japanese restaurant prepare them especially for us." Of course, as it turned out, Bob's boat wasn't working right, and the Japanese Restaurant owner loaned Richard his .44 magnum. |