Free Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away by Richard Brautigan Page B

car, Clyde. Oh, God, they're killing Bonnie!"
    I am the poet-in-residence at these theaters but I don't plan on getting a Guggenheim for it.
    Once I went into the theater at six o'clock in the evening and got out at one o'clock in the morning. At seven I crossed my legs and they stayed that way until ten and I never did stand up.
    In other words, I am not an art film fan. I do not care to be esthetically tickled in a fancy theater surrounded by an audience drenched in the confident perfume of culture. I can't afford it.
    I was sitting in a two-pictures-for-seventy-five-cents theater called the Times in North Beach last month and there was a cartoon about a chicken and a dog.
    The dog was trying to get some sleep and the chicken was keeping him awake and what followed was a series of adventures that always ended up in cartoon mayhem.
    There was a man sitting next to me.
    He was WHITEWHITEWHITE: fat, about fifty years old, balding sort of and his face was completely minus any human sensitivity.
    His baggy no-style clothes covered him like the banner of a defeated country and he looked as if the only mail he had ever gotten in his life were bills.
    Just then the dog in the cartoon let go with a huge yawn because the chicken was still keeping him awake and before the dog had finished yawning, the man next to me started yawning, so that the dog in the cartoon and the man, this living human being, were yawning together, partners in America.

Getting to Know Each Other
    S HE hates hotel rooms. It's like a Shakespearean sonnet. I mean, the childwoman or Lolita thing. It's a classic form:

    She hates hotel rooms. It's the light in the morning that really bothers her. She doesn't like to wake up surrounded by that kind of light.
    The morning light in hotel rooms is always synthetic, harshly clean as if the maid had let herself so quietly in, like a maidmouse, and put the light there by making phantom beds with strange sheets hanging in the very air itself.
    She used to lie in bed and pretend that she was still asleep, so as to catch the maid coming in with the morning light folded in her arms, but she never caught her and finally gave it up.
    Her father is asleep in the other room with a new lover. Her father is a famous movie director and in town to promote one of his pictures.
    This trip to San Francisco he is promoting a horror movie that he has just finished directing called
The Attack of the Giant Rose People.
It is a film about a mad gardener and the results of his handiwork in the greenhouse working with experimental fertilizers.
    She thinks the giant rose people are a bore. "They look like a bunch of funky valentines," she recently told her father.
    "Why don't you go fuck yourself?" had been his reply.
    That afternoon he would have lunch with Paine Knickerbocker of the
Chronicle
and later on in the afternoon he would be interviewed by Eichelbaum of the
Examiner
and a few days later her father's same old line of bullshit would appear in the papers.
    Last night he rented a suite at the Fairmont but she wanted to stay at a motel on Lombard.
    "Are you crazy? This is San Francisco!" he'd said.
    She likes motels a lot better than she does hotels, but she doesn't know why. Maybe it's the light in the morning. That probably has something to do with it. The light in motel
rooms is more natural. It's not as if the maid had put it there.
    She got out of bed. She wanted to see who her father was sleeping with. It was a little game of hers. She liked to see if she could guess who her father was in bed with, but it was a kind of silly game and she knew it because the women that her father went to bed with always looked just like her.
    She wondered where her father kept finding them.
    Some of his friends and other people liked to make little jokes about it. They liked to say that his lovers and his daughter always looked like sisters. Sometimes she felt as if she were the member of a strange and changing family of sisters.
    She was 5-7, had