Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Frontispiece
TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA
Dedication
The Original Cover for Trout Fishing in America
Knock on Wood (Part One)
Knock on Wood (Part Two)
Red Lip
The Kool-Aid Wino
Another Method of Making Walnut Catsup
Prologue to Grider Creek
Grider Creek
The Ballet for Trout Fishing in America
A Walden Pond for Winos
Tom Martin Creek
Trout Fishing on the Bevel
Sea, Sea Rider
The Last Year the Trout Came up Hayman Creek
Trout Death by Port Wine
The Autopsy of Trout Fishing in America
The Message
Trout Fishing in America Terrorists
Trout Fishing in America with the FBI
Worsewick
The Shipping of Trout Fishing in America Shorty to Nelson Algren
The Mayor of the Twentieth Century
On Paradise
The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari
The Salt Creek Coyotes
The Hunchback Trout
The Teddy Roosevelt Chingader’
Footnote Chapter to “The Shipping of Trout Fishing in America Shorty to Nelson Algren”
The Pudding Master of Stanley Basin
Room 208, Hotel Trout Fishing in America
The Surgeon
A Note on the Camping Craze that is Currently Sweeping America
A Return to the Cover of This Book
The Lake Josephus Days
Trout Fishing on the Street of Eternity
The Towel
Sandbox Minus John Dillinger Equals What?
The Last Time I Saw Trout Fishing in America
In the California Bush
The Last Mention of Trout Fishing in America Shorty
Witness for Trout Fishing in America Peace
Footnote Chapter to “Red Lip”
The Cleveland Wrecking Yard
A Half-Sunday Homage to a Whole Leonardo da Vinci
Trout Fishing in America Nib
Prelude to the Mayonnaise Chapter
The Mayonnaise Chapter
THE PILL VERSUS THE SPRINGHILL MINE DISASTER
Frontispiece
Dedication
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
Horse Child Breakfast
General Custer Versus the Titanic
The Beautiful Poem
Private Eye Lettuce
A Boat
The Shenevertakesherwatchoff Poem
Karma Repair Kit: Items 1-4
Oranges
San Francisco
Xerox Candy Bar
Discovery
Widow’s Lament
The Pomegranate Circus
The Winos on Potrero Hill
The First Winter Snow
Death Is a Beautiful Car Parked Only
Surprise
Your Departure Versus the Hindenburg
Education
Love Poem
The Fever Monument
At the California Institute of Technology
A Lady
“Star-Spangled” Nails
The Pumpkin Tide
Adrenalin Mother
The Wheel
Map Shower
A Postcard from Chinatown
The Double-Bed Dream Gallows
December 30
The Sawmill
The Way She Looks at It
Yes, the Fish Music
The Chinese Checker Players
I’ve Never Had It Done so Gently Before
Our Beautiful West Coast Thing
Man
The Silver Stairs of Ketchikan
Hollywood
Your Necklace Is Leaking
Haiku Ambulance
It’s Going Down
Alas, Measured Perfectly
Hey, Bacon!
The Rape of Ophelia
A CandleLion Poem
I Feel Horrible. She Doesn’t
Cyclops
Flowers for Those You Love
The Galilee Hitch-Hiker
It’s Raining in Love
Poker Star
To England
I Lie Here in a Strange Girl’s Apartment
Hey! This Is What It’s All About
My Nose Is Growing Old
Crab Cigar
The Sidney Greenstreet Blues
Comets
I Live in the Twentieth Century
The Castle of the Cormorants
Lovers
Sonnet
Indirect Popcorn
Star Hole
Albion Breakfast
Let’s Voyage into the New American House
November 3
The Postman
A Mid-February Sky Dance
The Quail
1942
Milk for the Duck
The Return of the Rivers
A Good-Talking Candle
The Horse That Had a Flat Tire
Kafka’s Hat
Nine Things
Linear Farewell, Nonlinear Farewell
Mating Saliva
Sit Comma and Creeley Comma
Automatic Anthole
The Symbol
I Cannot Answer You Tonight in Small Portions
Your Catfish Friend
December 24
Horse Race
The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster
After Halloween Slump
Gee, You’re so Beautiful That It’s Starting to Rain
The Nature Poem
The Day They Busted the Grateful Dead
The Harbor
The Garlic Meat Lady from
In a Cafe
Boo, Forever
IN WATERMELON SUGAR
Frontispiece
BOOK ONE: IN WATERMELON SUGAR
In Watermelon Sugar
Margaret
My Name
Fred
Charley’s Idea
Sundown
The Gentle Cricket
Lighting the Bridges
iDEATH
The Tigers
More Conversation at iDEATH
A Lot of Good Nights
Vegetables
Margaret Again
Pauline’s Shack
A Love, a Wind
The Tigers Again
Arithmetic
She Was
A Lamb at False Dawn
The Watermelon Sun
Hands
Margaret Again, Again
Strawberries
The Schoolteacher
Under the Plank Press
Until Lunch
The Tombs
The Grand Old Trout
BOOK TWO: inBOIL
Nine Things
Margaret Again, Again, Again
A Nap
Whiskey
Whiskey Again
The Big Fight
Time
The Bell
Pauline
The Forgotten Works
A Conversation with Trash
In There
The Master of the Forgotten Works
The Way Back
Something Is Going to Happen
Rumors
The Way Back Again
Dinner That Night
Pauline Again
Faces
Shack
The Girl with the Lantern
Chickens
Bacon
Prelude
An Exchange
The Trout Hatchery
inBoiL’s iDEATH
Wheelbarrow
A Parade
Bluebells
Margaret Again, Again, Again, Again
Shack Fever
BOOK THREE: MARGARET
Job
Meat Loaf
Apple Pie
Literature
The Way
The Statue of Mirrors
The Grand Old Trout Again
Getting Fred
The Wind Again
Margaret’s Brother
The Wind Again, Again
Necklace
Couch
Tomorrow
Carrots
Margaret’s Room
Bricks
My Room
The Girl with the Lantern Again
Margaret Again, Again, Again, Again, Again
Good Ham
Sunrise
Escutcheon
Sunny Morning
The Tomb Crew
The Dance
Cooks Together
Their Instruments Playing
About the Author
Trout Fishing in America Copyright © 1967 by Richard Brautigan
The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster Copyright © 1968 by Richard Brautigan
In Watermelon Sugar Copyright © 1968 by Richard Brautigan
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhco.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Brautigan, Richard.
[Selections. 1989]
The pill versus the Springhill mine disaster;
and, In watermelon sugar.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-395-50076-1
ISBN 978-0-395-50076-7
I. Title. II. Title: Trout fishing in America. III. Title: Pill versus the Springhill mine disaster. IV. Title: In watermelon sugar.
PS3503.R2736A6 1989
813'.54—dc19 88-38993
CIP
eISBN 978-0-547-52553-2
v2.0714
Frontispiece by Erik Weber
Interior photographs by Edmund Shea
Writing 14
There are seductions that should be
in the Smithsonian Institute,
right next to The Spirit of St. Louis.
The Original Cover for Trout Fishing in America
The frontispiece of this ebook collection, which is the original cover image for Trout Fishing in America, is a photograph taken late in the afternoon, a photograph of the Benjamin Franklin statue in San Francisco’s Washington Square.
Born 1706—Died 1790, Benjamin Franklin stands on a pedestal that looks like a house containing stone furniture. He holds some papers in one hand and his hat in the other.
Then the statue speaks, saying in marble:
PRESENTED BY
H.D. COGSWELL
TO OUR
BOYS AND GIRLS
WHO WILL SOON
TAKE OUR PLACES
AND PASS ON.
Around the base of the statue are four words facing the directions of this world, to the east WELCOME, to the west WELCOME, to the north WELCOME, to the south WELCOME. Just behind the statue are three poplar trees, almost leafless except for the top branches. The statue stands in front of the middle tree. All around the grass is wet from the rains of early February.
In the background is a tall cypress tree, almost dark like a room. Adlai Stevenson spoke under the tree in 1956, before a crowd of 40,000 people.
There is a tall church across the street from the statue with crosses, steeples, bells and a vast door that looks like a huge mousehole, perhaps from a Tom and Jerry cartoon, and written above the door is “Per L’Universo.”
Around five o’clock in the afternoon of my cover for Trout Fishing in America, people gather in the park across the street from the church and they are hungry.
It’s sandwich time for the poor.
But they cannot cross the street until the signal is given. Then they all run across the street to the church and get their sandwiches that are wrapped in newspaper. They go back to the park and unwrap the newspaper and see what their sandwiches are all about.
A friend of mine unwrapped his sandwich one afternoon and looked inside to find just a leaf of spinach. That was all.
Was it Kafka who learned about America by reading the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin . . .
Kafka who said, “I like the Americans because they are healthy and optimistic.”
Knock on Wood (Part One)
As a child when did I first hear about trout fishing in America? From whom? I guess it was a stepfather of mine.
Summer of 1942.
The old drunk told me about trout fishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal.
Silver is not a good adjective to describe what I felt when he told me about trout fishing.
I’d like to get it right.
Maybe trout steel. Steel made from trout. The clear snow-filled river acting as foundry and heat.
Imagine Pittsburgh.
A steel that comes from trout, used to make buildings, trains and tunnels.
The Andrew Carnegie of Trout!
The Reply of Trout Fishing in America:
I remember with particular amusement, people with three-cornered hats fishing in the dawn.
Knock on Wood (Part Two)
One spring afternoon as a child in the strange town of Portland, I walked down to a different street corner, and saw a row of old houses, huddled together like seals on a rock. Then there was a long field that came sloping down off a hill. The field was covered with green grass and bushes. On top of the hill there was a grove of tall, dark trees. At a distance I saw a waterfall come pouring down off the hill. It was long and white and I could almost feel its cold spray.
There must be a creek there, I thought, and it probably has trout in it.
Trout.
At last an opportunity to go trout fishing, to catch my first trout, to behold Pittsburgh.
It was growing dark. I didn’t have time to go and look at the creek. I walked home past the glass whiskers of the houses, reflecting the downward rushing waterfalls of night.
The next day I would go trout fishing for the first time. I would get up early and eat my breakfast and go. I had heard that it was better to go trout fishing early in the morning. The trout were better for it. They had something extra in the morning. I went home to prepare for trout fishing in America. I didn’t have any fishing tackle, so I had to fall back on corny fishing tackle.
Like a joke.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
I bent a pin and tied it onto a piece of white string.
And slept.
The next morning I got up early and ate my breakfast. I took a slice of white bread to use for bait. I planned on making doughballs from the soft center of the bread and putting them on my vaudevillean hook.
I left the place and walked down to the different street corner. How beautiful the field looked and the creek that came pouring down in a waterfall off the hill.
But as I got closer to the creek I could see that something was wrong. The creek did not act right. There was a strangeness to it. There was a thing about its motion that was wrong. Finally I got close enough to see what the trouble was.
The waterfall was just a flight of white wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees.
I stood there for a long time, looking up and looking down, following the stairs with my eyes, having trouble believing.
Then I knocked on my creek and heard the sound of wood.
I ended up by being my own trout and eating the slice of bread myself.
&nb
sp; The Reply of Trout Fishing in America:
There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t change a flight of stairs into a creek. The boy walked back to where he came from. The same thing once happened to me. I remember mistaking an old woman for a trout stream in Vermont, and I had to beg her pardon.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I thought you were a trout stream.”
“I’m not,” she said.
Red Lip
Seventeen years later I sat down on a rock. It was under a tree next to an old abandoned shack that had a sheriff’s notice nailed like a funeral wreath to the front door.
NO TRESPASSING
4/17 OF A HAIKU
Many rivers had flowed past those seventeen years, and thousands of trout, and now beside the highway and the sheriff’s notice flowed yet another river, the Klamath, and I was trying to get thirty-five miles downstream to Steelhead, the place where I was staying.
It was all very simple. No one would stop and pick me up even though I was carrying fishing tackle. People usually stop and pick up a fisherman. I had to wait three hours for a ride.
The sun was like a huge fifty-cent piece that someone had poured kerosene on and then had lit with a match and said, “Here, hold this while I go get a newspaper,” and put the coin in my hand, but never came back
I had walked for miles and miles until I came to the rock under the tree and sat down. Every time a car would come by, about once every ten minutes, I would get up and stick out my thumb as if it were a bunch of bananas and then sit back down on the rock again.
The old shack had a tin roof colored reddish by years of wear, like a hat worn under the guillotine. A corner of the roof was loose and a hot wind blew down the river and the loose corner clanged in the wind.
A car went by. An old couple. The car almost swerved off the road and into the river. I guess they didn’t see many hitchhikers up there. The car went around the corner with both of them looking back at me.
I had nothing else to do, so I caught salmon flies in my landing net. I made up my own game. It went like this: I couldn’t chase after them. I had to let them fly to me. It was something to do with my mind. I caught six.
A little ways up from the shack was an outhouse with its door flung violently open. The inside of the outhouse was exposed like a human face and the outhouse seemed to say, “The old guy who built me crapped in here 9,745 times and he’s dead now and I don’t want anyone else to touch me. He was a good guy. He built me with loving care. Leave me alone. I’m a monument now to a good ass gone under. There’s no mystery here. That’s why the door’s open. If you have to crap, go in the bushes like the deer.”