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I've come home from Trout Fishing in America, the highway bent its long smooth anchor about my neck and then stopped. Now I live in this place. It took my whole life to get here, to get to this strange cabin above Mill Valley.
We're staying with Pard and his girlfriend. They have rented a cabin for three months, June 15th to September 15th, for a hundred dollars. We are a funny bunch, all living here together.
Pard was born of Okie parents in British Nigeria and came to America when he was two years old and was raised as a ranch kid in Oregon, Washington and Idaho.
He was a machinegunner in the Second World War, against the Germans. He fought in France and Germany. Sergeant Pard. Then he came back from the war and went to some hick college in Idaho.
After he graduated from college, he went to Paris and became an Existentialist. He had a photograph taken of Existentialism and himself sitting at a sidewalk cafe. Pard was wearing a beard and he looked as if he had a huge soul, with barely enough room in his body to contain it.
When Pard came back to America from Paris, he worked as a tugboat man on San Francisco Bay and as a railroad man in the roundhouse at Filer, Idaho.
Of course, during this time he got married and had a kid. The wife and kid are gone now, blown away like apples by the fickle wind of the Twentieth Century. I guess the fickle wind of all time. The family that fell in the autumn.
After he split up with his wife, he went to Arizona and was a reporter and editor of newspapers. He honky-tonked in Naco, a Mexican border town, drank illescal Mescal Triunfo, played cards and shot the roof of his house full of bullet holes.
Pard tells a story about waking one morning in Naco, all hungover, with the whips and jingles. A friend of his was sitting at the table with a bottle of whisky beside him.
Pard reached over and picked up a gun off a chair and took aim at the whisky bottle and fired. His friend was then sitting there, covered with flecks of glass, blood and whisky. "What the fuck you do that for?" he said.
Now in his late thirties Pard works at a print shop for $1.35 an hour. It is an avant-garde print shop. They print poetry and experimental prose. They pay him $1.35 an hour for operating a linotype machine. A $1.35 linotype operator is hard to find, outside of Hong Kong or Albania.
Sometimes when he goes down there, they don't even have enough lead for him. They buy their lead like soap, a bar or two at a time.
Pard's girlfriend is a Jew. Twenty-four years old, getting over a bad case of hepatitis, she kids Pard about a nude photograph of her that has the possibility of appearing in Playboy magazine.
"There's nothing to worry about," she says. "If they use that photograph, it only means that 12,000,000 men will look at my boobs."
This is all very funny to her. Her parents have money. As she sits in the other room in the California bush, she's on her father's payroll in New York.
What we eat is funny and what we drink is even more hilarious: turkeys, Gallo port, hot dogs, watermelons, Popeyes, salmon croquettes, frappes, Christian Brothers port, orange rye bread, canteloupes, Popeyes, salads, cheese — booze, grub and Popeyes.
Popeyes?
We read books like The Thief's Journal, Set This House on Fire, The Naked Lunch, Krafft-Ebing. We read Krafft-Ebing aloud all the time as if he were Kraft dinner.
"The mayor of a small town in Eastern Portugal was seen one morning pushing a wheelbarrow full of sex organs into the city hall. He was of tainted family. He had a woman's shoe in his back pocket. It had been there all night." Things like this make us laugh.
The woman who owns this cabin will come back in the autumn. She's spending the summer in Europe. When she comes back, she will spend only one day a week out here: Saturday.
She will never spend the night because she's afraid to. There is something here that makes her afraid.
Pard and his girlfriend sleep in the cabin and the baby sleeps in the basement, and we sleep outside under the apple tree, waking at dawn to stare out across San Francisco Bay and then we go back to sleep again and wake once more, this time for a very strange thing to happen, and then we go back to sleep again after it has happened, and wake at sunrise to stare out across the bay.
Afterwards we go back to sleep again and the sun rises steadily hour after hour, staying in the branches of a eucalyptus tree just a ways down the hill, keeping us cool and asleep and in the shade. At last the sun pours over the top of the tree and then we have to get up, the hot sun upon us.
We go into the house and begin that two-hour yak-yak activity we call breakfast. We sit around and bring ourselves slowly back to consciousness, treating ourselves like fine pieces of china, and after we finish the last cup of the last cup of the last cup of coffee, it's time to think about lunch or go to the Goodwill in Fairfax.
So here we are, living in the California bush above Mill Valley. We could look right down on the main street of Mill Valley if it were not for the eucalyptus tree. We have to park the car a hundred yards away and come here along a tunnel-like path.
If all the Germans Pard killed during the war with his machine-gun were to come and stand in their uniforms around this place, it would make us pretty nervous.
There's the warm sweet smell of blackberry bushes along the path and in the late afternoon, quail gather around a dead unrequited tree that has fallen bridelike across the path. Sometimes I go down there and jump the quail. I just go down there to get them up off their butts. They're such beautiful birds.
They set their wings and sail on down the hill.
O he was the one who was born to be king! That one, turning down through the Scotch broom and going over an upside-down car abandoned in the yellow grass. That one, his gray wings.
One morning last week, part way through the dawn, I awoke under the apple tree, to hear a dog barking and the rapid sound of hoofs coming toward me. The millennium? An invasion of Russians all wearing deer feet?
I opened my eyes and saw a deer running straight at me.
It was a buck with large horns. There was a police dog chasing after it.
Arfwowfuck ! Noisepoundpoundpoundpoundpoundpound ! POUND ! POUND !
The deer didn't swerve away. He just kept running straight at me, long after he had seen me, a second or two had passed.
Arfwowfuck ! Noisepoundpoundpoundpoundpoundpound ! POUND ! POUND !
I could have reached out and touched him when he went by.
He ran around the house, circling the john, with the dog hot after him. They vanished over the hillside, leaving streamers of toilet paper behind them, flowing out and entangled through the bushes and vines.
Then along came the doe. She started up the same way, but not moving as fast. Maybe she had strawberries in her head.
"Whoa!" I shouted. "Enough is enough! I'm not selling newspapers!"
The doe stopped in her tracks, twenty-five feet away and turned and went down around the eucalyptus tree.
Well, that's how it's gone now for days and days. I wake up just before they come. I wake up for them in the same manner as I do for the dawn and the sunrise. Suddenly knowing they're on their way.
Richard Brautigan
Trout Fishing in America
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