Free Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan Page A

never knew what the exact number of their room was. I knew secretly it was in the three hundreds and that was all.
    Anyway, it was easier for me to establish order in my mind by pretending that the cat was named after their room number. It seemed like a good idea and the logical reason for a cat to have the name 208. It, of course, was not true. It was a fib. The cat’s name was 208 and the room number was in the three hundreds.
    Where did the name 208 come from? What did it mean? I thought about it for a while, hiding it from the rest of my mind. But I didn’t ruin my birthday by secretly thinking about it too hard.
    A year later I found out the true significance of 208’s name, purely by accident. My telephone rang one Saturday morning when the sun was shining on the hills. It was a close friend of mine and he said, “I’m in the slammer. Come and get me out. They’re burning black candles around the drunk tank.”
    I went down to the Hall of Justice to bail my friend out, and discovered that 208 is the room number of the bail office. It was very simple. I paid ten dollars for my friend’s life and found the original meaning of 208, how it runs like melting snow all the way down the mountainside to a small cat living and playing in Hotel Trout Fishing in America, believing itself to be the last cat in the world, not having seen another cat in such a lone time, totally unafraid, newspaper spread out all over the bathroom floor, and something good cooking on the hot plate.

The Surgeon
    I watched my day begin on Little Redfish Lake as clearly as the first light of dawn or the first ray of the sunrise, though the dawn and the sunrise had long since passed and it was now late in the morning.
    The surgeon took a knife from the sheath at his belt and cut the throat of the chub with a very gentle motion, showing poetically how sharp the knife was, and then he heaved the fish back out into the lake.
    The chub made an awkward dead splash and obeyed all the traffic laws of this world SCHOOL ZONE SPEED 25 MILES and sank to the cold bottom of the lake. It lay there white belly up like a school bus covered with snow. A trout swam over and took a look, just putting in time, and swam away.
    The surgeon and I were talking about the AMA. I don’t know how in the hell we got on the thing, but we were on it. Then he wiped the knife off and put it back in the sheath. I actually don’t know how we got on the AMA.
    The surgeon said that he had spent twenty-five years becoming a doctor. His studies had been interrupted by the Depression and two wars. He told me that he would give up the practice of medicine if it became socialized in America.
    â€œI’ve never turned away a patient in my life, and I’ve never known another doctor who has. Last year I wrote off six thousand dollars worth of bad debts,” he said.
    I was going to say that a sick person should never under any conditions be a bad debt, but I decided to forget it. Nothing was going to be proved or changed on the shores of Little Redfish Lake, and as that chub had discovered, it was not a good place to have cosmetic surgery done.
    â€œI worked three years ago for a union in Southern Utah that had a health plan,” the surgeon said. “I would not care

to practice medicine under such conditions. The patients think they own you and your time. They think you’re their own personal garbage can.
    â€œI’d be home eating dinner and the telephone would ring, ‘Help! Doctor! I’m dying! It’s my stomach! I’ve got horrible pains!’ I would get up from my dinner and rush over there.
    â€œThe guy would meet me at the door with a can of beer in his hand. ‘Hi, doc, come on in. I’ll get you a beer. I’m watching TV. The pain’s all gone. Great, huh? I feel like a million. Sit down. I’ll get you a beer, doc. The Ed Sullivan Show’s on.’
    â€œNo thank you,” the surgeon