An Unfortunate Woman. Richard Brautigan
contents all have something to do with the lifestyle of the automobile.
I think the worst case of “Los Angeles” automobile cultural damage I’ve ever seen is Honolulu. For all practical purposes of survival you might as well drop dead if you don’t have a car in Honolulu.
I’m not talking about being a tourist at Waikiki and lying around like a suntan lotion postage stamp on the beach, mounted right next to thousands of other postage stamps in a stamp collector’s album owned and operated by the sun.
I’m referring to living in Honolulu.
I think I saw more cars there than I ever saw people.
Often whenever I saw somebody just walking down the street with their feet actually touching the ground and not accompanied by four wheels and a metal eggshell around them, I was startled.
I almost felt like stopping the car I was driving in and offering the person sympathy for the circumstances of misfortune that had led them to walking.
A folksinger has written a song about Honolulu in which she mentions tearing down paradise and putting up a parking lot.
I saw a downtown restaurant that had a sidewalk café as a part of the restaurant. It was a rainy day and nobody was sitting there. “That must be an interesting place to sit and watch people when the weather’s good,” I said to the woman I was, of course, driving with, because it really doesn’t make any sense to try and walk around Honolulu. It’s a problem of you can’t get there from here that would have baffled Einstein. E = MC2 was duck soup compared to Honolulu traffic.
“You used the wrong word,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Cars. You watch cars, not people.”
We drove on to the next place where we had to drive because if we didn’t drive there, we wouldn’t be able to find a parking space, and that’s very important in Honolulu. I think that I would find automobiles a little more interesting if they carried their own parking space with them.
When I arrived in Honolulu from Alaska, I saw a bird flying around in the Honolulu International Airport. I had never seen a bird inside an airport before. It flew casually around people boarding airplanes, and people just getting off them.
The bird did not act frightened as if it had accidentally been trapped in the airport. The bird was quite comfortable. I think the airport was its home and this was a poetic life, not touched by fear of flying. Also, the bird was perhaps an omen, a portent of the chicken photograph.
When I stepped outside the airport, a Japanese woman was waiting for me, and I got into her car, not knowing what I was really getting into, which became a way of life when Los Angeles visited Hawaii on vacation but decided not to go home.
Oh, yes, I forgot to mention there’s been a change in the calendar map. I moved out of Berkeley yesterday and came back across to stay in San Francisco for two weeks before I go to Chicago.
What led me to leave the house where the woman hanged herself needs a few days sorting through details before I perhaps attempt to describe my leaving or I may not put it down at all. I probably should because in a remote way it has something to do with the woman hanging herself.
But, also, we must not forget that this is the route of a calendar map following one man’s existence during a few months’ period in time, and I think that it would probably be unfair to ask for perfection if there is such a thing. Probably the closest things to perfection are the huge absolutely empty holes that astronomers have recently discovered in space.
If there’s nothing there, how can anything go wrong?
February 1, 1982 Finished.
Speaking of things going not according to plan, the morning that I moved over from the strange house in Berkeley back to San Francisco, the bus taking me here to the Japanese section of town, where I am at a hotel, was rerouted because a building was burning down.
Then the driver stopped and asked us all to get off the bus and change to another bus, so obligingly we all got off, but then somebody came running up to the bus, carrying himself in an official manner and uniform, yelling at the driver, trying to get his attention.
I paid no other attention to what was going on with the bus because I was too busy watching the building burn down. It was a huge fire with smoke rising like a vaporous tower from a disorganized fairy tale that I had failed to finish reading when I was a child or so the smoke seemed.
I had walked away from the other passengers to observe this burning phenomenon of architecture gone awry. It was a huge building and flames were pouring out the roof.
Suddenly, almost instinctively, I turned around and saw the bus I had just gotten off driving away with all the passengers back on it. We all got off when we were told to, and then they all got back on again, except of course for me. I think it had something to do with the official who was running up to the bus, yelling. He must have told the driver to let the passengers return to the bus, which they all did, except for one passenger who was busy watching the fire.
That passenger decided to walk to his hotel.
He did not want to deal anymore that morning with buses that had revolving doors. The fire was on the way to his hotel, so he stopped briefly and watched the flamey doings. The passenger had never been fascinated with burning buildings before, so his watching the fire was an exception to his lifestyle.
There were three ladder trucks with firemen on top of long-flame-reaching ladders pouring water down on the fire, and there was a good crowd of people watching the building go.
The passenger noticed that there was almost a festive feeling among the observers. Many were smiling and some of them were laughing. Not attending fires regularly, preferring movies, he was fascinated by this.
A man complete with a sleeping bag and backpack containing what he called his life was sitting down across the street from the fire drinking a bottle of wino-type wine. The man looked as if wherever he went was his address, and only a bloodhound had any possibility of delivering his mail.
He enjoyed long, carefully thought-out sips of wine from a bottle in a paper bag while he watched the building burn down. It would be an easy matter for a trained mail-delivering bloodhound to track this man down. All the dog would have to do would be to follow a trail of paper bags with empty wine bottles in them to deliver this man a letter from his mother saying: “Don’t ever come home again and stop calling. We don’t want to have anything to do with you anymore. Get a job. —Love, your ex-mother.”
It was not a building occupied on a Sunday morning, so there was no drama of life and death to mar or perhaps enhance the fire viewing. The passenger had no idea why people gathered to watch buildings burn down, especially if it had nothing to do with them, if it wasn’t their house burning down or one nearby threatening to burn down where they lived.
Yes, the passenger found it all very different and interesting, and then he remembered a woman that he had been involved with years ago. They’d had an often very intense love affair that occupied large portions of his time in the late 1960s and finally dwindled out in the early 1970s. It was the kind of involvement referred to as “off and on.”
During a time when he was not seeing her, she had picked up an undue interest in fires and become a firetruck chaser. She would go out of her way anytime, day or night, to be at the site of a burning building. One morning around 4 a.m., she found herself watching a duplex join the kingdom of ashes and ruin when she noticed that she was wearing a bathrobe over her pajamas and had a pair of slippers on. She had just jumped out of bed when she heard the sound of nearby fire engines, slipped on her bathrobe, put on her slippers, and headed out the door toward the fire.
She had been watching the fire for about half an hour before she noticed what she was wearing. Her attire startled her. She had gone a little too far, so she hung fire-watching up.
She had absolutely no interest in becoming a nut.
She