Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (3 page)

There were some dirty dishes in the little sink. The dishes looked as if they had always been dirty: born dirty to last forever.

I could hear a radio playing Western music someplace in the trailer, but I couldn't find it. I looked all over but it was nowhere in sight. It was probably under a shirt or something.

"He's the kid with the typewriter," she said. "He'll get 1/3 for typing it."

"That sounds fair," he said. "We need somebody to type it. I've never done anything like this before."

"Why don't you show it to him?" she said. "He'd like to take a look at it."

"OK. But it isn't too carefully written," he said to me. "I only went to the fourth grade, so she's going to edit it, straighten out the grammar and commas and stuff."

There was a notebook lying on the table, next to an ashtray that probably had 600 cigarette butts in it. The notebook had a color photograph of Hopalong Cassidy on the cover.

Hopalong looked tired as if he had spent the previous night chasing starlets all over Hollywood and barely had enough strength to get back in the saddle.

There were about twenty-five or thirty pages of writing in the notebook. It was written in a large grammar school sprawl: an unhappy marriage between printing and longhand.

"It's not finished yet," he said.

"You'll type it. I'll edit it. He'll write it," she said.

It was a story about a young logger falling in love with a waitress. The novel began in 1935 in a cafe in North Bend, Oregon.

The young logger was sitting at a table and the waitress was taking his order. She was very pretty with blond hair and rosy cheeks. The young logger was ordering veal cutlets with mashed potatoes and country gravy.

"Yeah, I'll do the editing. You can type it, can't you? It's not too bad, is it?" she said in a twelve-year-old voice with the Welfare peeking over her shoulder.

"No," I said. "It will be easy."

Suddenly the rain started to come down hard outside, without any warning, just suddenly great drops of rain that almost shook the trailer.

You sur lik veel cutlets dont you Maybell said she was
holding her pensil up her mowth that was preti and red like an apl!

Onli wen you tak my oder Carl said he was a kind of bassful loger but big and strong lik his dead who ownd the starmill!

Ill mak sur you get plenti of gravi!

Just ten the caf door opend and in cam Rins Adams he was hansom and meen, everi bodi in thos parts was afrad of him but not Carl and his
dad they wasnt afrad of him no sur!

Maybell shifard wen she saw him standing ther in his blac macinaw he smild at her and Carl felt his blod run hot lik scallding cofee and fiting mad!

Howdi ther Rins said Maybell blushed like a
flouar while we were all sitting there ir that rainy trailer, pounding at the gates of American literature.

L
IKE
most Californians, I come from someplace else and was gathered to the purpose of California like a metal-eating flower gathers the sunshine, the rain, and then to the freeway beckons its petals and lets the cars drive in, millions of cars into but a single flower, the scent choked with congestion and room for millions more.

California needs us, so it gathers us from other places. I'll take you, you, you, and I from the Pacific Northwest: a haunted land where nature dances the minuet with people and danced with me in those old bygone days.

I brought everything I knew from there to California: years and years of a different life to which I can never return nor want to and seems at times almost to have occurred to another body somehow vaguely in my shape and recognition.

It's strange that California likes to get her people from every place else and leave what we knew behind and here to California we are gathered as if energy itself, the shadow of that metal-eating flower, had summoned us away from other lives and now to do the California until the very end like the Taj Mahal in the shape of a parking meter.

T
HERE
are thousands of stories with original beginnings. This is not one of them. I think the only way to start a story about contemporary life in California is to do it the way Jack London started
The Sea-Wolf.
I have confidence in that beginning.

It worked in 1904 and it can work in 1969. I believe that beginning can reach across the decades and serve the purpose of this story because this is California—we can do anything we want to do—and a rich young literary critic is taking a ferryboat from Sausalito to San Francisco. He has just finished spending a few days at a friend's cabin in Mill Valley. The friend uses the cabin to read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche during the winter. They all have great times together.

While travelling across the bay in the fog he thinks about writing an essay called "The Necessity for Freedom: A Plea for the Artist."

Of course Wolf Larsen torpedoes the ferryboat and captures the rich young literary critic who is changed instantly
into a cabin boy and has to wear funny clothes and take a lot of shit off everybody, has great intellectual conversations with old Wolf, gets kicked in the ass, grabbed by the throat, promoted to mate, grows up, meets his true love Maud, escapes from Wolf, bounces around the damn Pacific Ocean in little better than a half-assed rowboat, finds an island, builds a stone hut, clubs seals, fixes a broken sailing ship, buries Wolf at sea, gets kissed, etc.: all to end this story about contemporary life in California sixty-five years later.

Thank God.

T
HE
largest ocean in the world starts or ends at Monterey, California. It depends on what language you are speaking. My friend's wife had just left him. She walked right out the door and didn't even say good-bye. We went and got two fifths of port and headed for the Pacific.

It's an old song that's been played on all the jukeboxes in America. The song has been around so long that it's been recorded on the very dust of America and it has settled on everything and changed chairs and cars and toys and lamps and windows into billions of phonographs to play that song back into the ear of our broken heart.

We sat down on a small corner-like beach surrounded by big granite rocks and the hugeness of the Pacific Ocean with all its vocabularies.

We were listening to rock and roll on his transistor radio and somberly drinking port. We were both in despair. I didn't know what he was going to do with the rest of his life either.

I took another sip of port. The Beach Boys were singing a song about California girls on the radio. They liked them.

His eyes were wet wounded rugs.

Like some kind of strange vacuum cleaner I tried to console him. I recited the same old litanies that you say to people when you try to help their broken hearts, but words can't help at all.

It's just the sound of another human voice that makes the only difference. There's nothing you're ever going to say that's going to make anybody happy when they're feeling shitty about losing somebody that they love.

Finally he set fire to the radio. He piled some paper around it. He struck a match to the paper. We sat there watching it. I had never seen anybody set fire to a radio before.

As the radio gently burned away, the flames began to affect the songs that we were listening to. A record that was #1 on the Top-40 suddenly dropped to #13 inside of itself. A song that was #9 became #27 in the middle of a chorus about loving somebody. They tumbled in popularity like broken birds. Then it was too late for all of them.

I return as if in the dream of a young American duck hunting prince to Elmira and I am standing again on the bridge across the Long Tom River. It is always late December and the river is high and muddy and stirs dark leafless branches from its cold depths.

Sometimes it is raining on the bridge and I'm looking downstream to where the river flows into the lake. There is always a marshy field in my dream surrounded by an old black wooden fence and an ancient shed showing light through the walls and the roof.

I'm warm and dry under sweet layers of royal underwear and rain clothes.

Sometimes it is cold and clear and I can see my breath and there's frost on the bridge and I'm looking upstream into a tangle of trees that lead to the mountains many miles away where the Long Tom River starts its beginning.

Sometimes I write my name on the bridge in frost. I spell
my name out very carefully, and sometimes I write "Elmira" in frost, too, and just as carefully.

I'm always carrying a double-barrel sixteen-gauge shotgun with lots of shells in my pockets ... perhaps too many shells because I am a teen-ager and it's easy to worry about running out of shells, so I'm weighed down with too many shells.

I'm almost like a deep-sea diver because my pockets are filled with such an abundance of lead. Sometimes I even walk funny because I've got so many shells in my pockets.

I'm always alone on the bridge and there's always a small flock of mallards that fly very high over the bridge and down toward the lake.

Sometimes I look both ways on the road to see if a car is coming and if a car isn't coming, I shoot at them, but they are too high for my shot to do anything but annoy them a little.

Sometimes a car is coming and I just watch the ducks fly down the river and keep the shooting to myself. It might be a game warden or a deputy sheriff. I have an idea somewhere in my head that it is against the law to shoot at ducks from a bridge.

I wonder if I am right.

Sometimes I don't look to see if there is a car on the road. The ducks are too high to shoot at. I know I'll just waste my ammunition, so I let them pass.

The ducks are always a flock of fat mallards just in from Canada.

Sometimes I walk through the little town of Elmira and everything is very quiet because it's so early in the morning and God forsaken with either rain or cold.

Whenever I walk through Elmira, I stand and look at the
Elmira Union High School. The; classrooms are always empty and dark inside. It seems as if nobody ever studies there and the darkness is never broken because there is no reason to ever turn the lights on.

Sometimes I don't go into Elmira. I cross over the black wooden fence and go into the marshy field and walk past the ancient religious shed and follow the river down to the lake, hoping to hit some good duck hunting.

I never do.

Elmira is very beautiful but it is not a lucky place for mc to hunt.

I always get to Elmira by hitch-hiking about twenty miles. I stand out there in the cold or the rain with my shotgun, wearing my royal duck hunting robes and people stop and pick me up, and that's how I get there.

"Where are you going?" people say when I get in. I sit beside them with my shotgun balanced like a scepter between my legs and the barrels pointing up at the roof. The gun is at an angle, so the barrels point toward the passenger side of the roof, and I'm always the passenger.