IN SEARCH OF RICHARD BRAUTIGAN BY David Fewster
“Is that you?”
asked the little 3rd grade girl
in the school playground where
I had taken my 2 year-old daughter.
She pointed to the cover of
Trout Fishing In America, which I was reading
While Hannah threw gravel at the monkey bars.
It must have been my hair
And the felt hat I was wearing.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Yes, it is.”
And went home famous.
******************
I had my vasectomy done the weekend before I moved to Tacoma, which set the tone
for the entire venture. Not to mention my entire life thereafter.
The topic of my vasectomy had been in the air for several months, the frequency and
intensity of the conversations increasing after my wife’s periods began after the birth of
our daughter. To spare Hannah’s feelings in the womb, I never referred to an “unplanned
pregnancy”, but rather to “our planned on a subliminal/subconscious level pregnancy.”
After a traumatic IUD experience, my wife had for the past decade relied on no birth
control method other than an intimate knowledge of her life cycles. Amazingly, this
method had only failed one other time, resulting in the birth five years previously of a
son. The boy’s father was born and raised in Rochester, New York, which was also the
place of my birth and upbringing. I enjoyed pondering this fact like a dog worrying a
chew toy, although I was never able to draw any solid conclusions from the coincidence.
Anyhow, two months after Hannah’s arrival (September 19, 1995), menstruation commenced, which was
quite disappointing because the doctor had implied a longer time frame before the danger
of unprotected sex would rear its ugly head. Like most men, I was perturbed at the turn
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our birth control discussions seemed to have taken, feeling that my request that the matter
be handled with a simple pill to be a reasonable alternative to irreversible martyrdom
under the blade. To this line of discourse, however, I was treated to a veritable barrage
straight from the Harvard Medical Journal regarding the chemical pillage inflicted on the
female biosystem by the pill, along with side arguments about world population and my
faith in our long-term relationship. Finally, in January (by which time Hannah was four
months old), I agreed to make an appointment at the Country Doctor, a sliding-scale
clinic on Capitol Hill where I had once had my chronic eczema treated.
The first step was to take the pre-operative interview as required by state law. The
doctor with the ponytail grimaced when he saw my scrotum.
“Hm, how long have you had this varicosity?” he asked, fingering my left testicle
which, to the uninitiated, feels all the world like a myriad of copulating earthworms
engaged in a primordial orgy. “Sometimes these veins get wrapped around the sperm duct
and it’s hard to tell what’s what. If we can’t find it, we’ll have to call a specialist.”
Specialist? What’s he trying to say? My dick is being sliced open by amateurs? What
the hell am I doing in the Capitol Hill clinic anyway? If these freaks were so good, why
aren’t they working in real hospitals? I don’t care if the Stranger ad did say they’d do the
job for $10—it’s all part of Dan Savage’s sadistic plot against breeders. Visions of Dr.
Benway dance in my head as I imagine the operating scene, the surgeon popping amyls
and screaming “Nurse! I can’t see worth shit through this muck—it’s like a fucking
rainforest in there—“ while my cock, balls, appendix, prostate gland are lopped off and
thrown, sliding in bloody trails down office walls. “It’s gotta be here somewhere…”
3.
Winter passed into spring which passed into summer. Fights about my reticence
regarding the slice-and-dice thing were interspersed with screams of rage regarding our
landlords, the Blausteins. We were living in a nice neighborhood in West Seattle in what
was euphemistically called a “carriage house”, i.e. a shack in the alley behind the main
house where indentured servants from Sweden must have been herded like cattle a
hundred years ago. 100 years was also the last time the roof on the deathtrap was patched,
as evidenced by the rivulets of brown water that coursed down the walls into the electric
socket by the baby’s crib every time it rained more than two minutes. This, however, did
not constitute an immediate hazard according to the county building inspector, who
informed us my notion that water and electricity don’t mix was unscientific superstition.
Our tragic, late-night demise from a fire started by a wiring short was miraculously
averted, however, with the news of my wife’s surprise inheritance from her recently-
deceased step-grandmother, a woman she hadn’t seen since the 70’s. The 20 grand
involved was our ticket out of Squalorville, the only question being “Where to?”
“Tacoma, of course,” replied my wife. After the first wave of horror had passed, I
realized there was a certain logic to this response. True, Tacoma was to Seattle what
Oakland was to San Francisco, a crime-ridden cesspool whose gateway was a row of
porn shops housed in crumbling brick ruins that hadn’t seen better days since Coolidge
was president. But, and this was a big ‘but,’ you could buy a house there for under
$100,000. And, and this was a bigger ‘and,’ you could actually get owner-financing in the
event you couldn’t qualify for a bank loan. (And who the hell would live in Tacoma if
they could qualify for a bank loan?) In fact, to the old codgers who owned the property
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my wife wanted to buy, my $22K job at a telecommunications firm made me the epitome
of a white-collar career guy.
The drawback of the plan was the fear that if we missed a payment by a day we
would, like the slaughterhouse worker in The Jungle, be thrown screaming into the gang-
ridden streets. On the other hand, there was the comforting knowledge that my wife’s
best friend Michelle lived there. They had met when Michelle was a wild hippie girl
living on Vashon. Then, she moved to Bremerton to live with the co-owner of a tattoo
parlor who cheated on her. Now she was married to a fellow who hooked up cable tv and
owned a house on S. 17th and Prospect, which was far enough away from the Hilltop that
you had to really strain your ears to actually hear the gunfire. The point was, things
seemed to be looking up for Michelle, and there was no reason to believe that they
wouldn’t for us, too.
In the midst of the excitement of dealing with slumlords, realtors, and estate attorneys,
however, the problem of my sterilization was not ignored. My wife, in an empathetic
moment, sensed my squeamish attitude of having my scrotum slashed by a pimply-faced
intern even if it did only cost the equivalent of a night out at Burger King, and went to the
trouble to find the veritable Rolls-Royce dealership of vasectomy clinics. It was run by a
legend, a man who was apparently the Einstein of gonad surgeons, a doctor so famous
that other doctors had to take a course from him at the University of Washington just to
be able to purchase the equipment used in his revolutionary new technique. My wife had
generously (albeit not completely altruistically) offered to pay for this procedure, but it
turned out my company insurance would cover it. (This created something of a personal
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milestone, as this was the first time I’d ever been able to combine a medical emergency
with gainful employment.)
Unfortunately, this also entailed another series of “Why I Want a Vasectomy”
interviews, the first with a bored GP in West Seattle who was required by my insurance
provider as a referring physician, the second by the office manager at the clinic in
University Village. While the intellectual part of these sessions was easy enough (“Yes,
one child is enough for me, thank you, it’ll be a goddamn miracle if I can keep her
growing girlhood supplied with hot dogs and spaghetti-o’s as it is without any further
complications”), there was always that unvoiced, nagging doubt (“Gee, what if Winona
Ryder wanted me to father her love child and then spurned me when she finds out I only
shoot blanks…) The office manager turned out to be an attractive woman in her late
forties, the only female bureaucrat I was required to tell my tale of woe. I scanned her
eyes for a sympathetic reaction to my noble sacrifice, figuring my experience may make
me one of those appealing, sensitive 90’s guys that Cosmo is always telling us are hits
with the babes.
Oddly enough, the question of potency didn’t constitute one of my fears. I knew
enough about the procedure to realize the likelihood of the entire works being chopped
off was remote (particularly since my upgrade from the public health ghetto) and, not
being Norman Mailer, the fact that the possibility of impregnation did not exist with
every act of intercourse did not present a reason for the permanent abdication of my
libido. And I never even attempted to use the line “Because I never expect to ever have a
partner other than my wife for the rest of my life” in the fear that, after the laughter died
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down, my inquisitor would mark me ineligible for the operation due to reason of insanity.
(Also, with one divorce each on our own scoreboards, our own marital record was not
one to inspire confidence in most statisticians.)
At long last, the big day arrived. In a masterpiece of good life planning, I arranged for
my vasectomy, a yard sale, and the packing, loading and transporting of all my worldly
goods to an entirely different city to occur on the same weekend, so I wouldn’t have to
miss any work. My first assignment, bright and early Saturday morning, was to skip
breakfast (per orders) and get down to the clinic, where I would be the first customer of
the day.
“Do you want to watch?” asked the Great Doctor, easer of pain for thousands of men a
year. How could I refuse? And what kind of case would I have in a malpractice suit if I
didn’t, for that matter? As it turned out, I had nothing at all to worry about from that end-
-the entire operation was a veritable work of art performed by one who seemed more
magician than scientist.
Instead of using two incisions, placed on either side of the scrotum just above where
the sperm ducts meet the testes, Dr. Wilson does the just with just one, an incision so
miniscule that it doesn’t even require stitches. After injecting a shot of Novocain in my
balls and waiting a couple minutes for it to take effect, he whipped out what looked like a
tiny paper hole-puncher and punched a small hole in the middle of my scrotum. Taking
out a thin, longish pair of tweezers, he reached through the hole, went down one side, and
brought the tweezers back bearing what looked like the skinniest strand of angel hair
pasta in the universe. Pulling out a good two inches of this fleshy filament, he cut a chunk
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off with a pair of scissors, cauterized the loose ends remaining with something out of an
old wood-burning kit, and stuffed the mutilated works back into its sac faster than you
could say “How in the love of Satan did he manage to find the right one so fast, what
with all those other veins and tubes and shit down there?” The morning dew hadn’t even
dried from the parking lot when I got back in my car, bearing a plastic canister for a
follow-up sample, a handful of Advil, and the admonitions to take it easy and not use my
dick for anything fun for five days. In retrospect, I couldn’t even remember seeing any
blood.
My wife, not being quite sure how much the ordeal was going to take out of me, had
arranged for me to spend a day at a cheap hotel where I could recuperate under more
restful conditions than those provided by a yard sale presided over by an over-excited
six-year old boy and his nine-month old sister. I helped move a couple of the heavier
items out onto the cement driveway for the sale, and went in the house to lie down
between the half-packed boxes until it was time to check in. The shot was starting to wear
off, but the discomfort wasn’t too extreme, not much worse than the feeling that lingers
about an hour after you’ve been hit in the balls with a hockey stick. The plan was for me
to hang out in the rented room until early evening, come back to West Seattle to help put
away any unsold stuff, and drive the whole family back to the hotel for the night.
Out of a perverse nostalgia, I had decided to stay at the Thunderbird Hotel, a fleabag
on Aurora Avenue in Fremont that had also been my accommodations on my very first
visit to Seattle a decade before. Standing on the second-floor balcony, I smoked a
cigarette and admired the view of the city as it loomed over the bridge, trying to
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remember which skyscrapers made their appearance after 1986 and wondering what
would have been more unrecognizable—the present skyline or my new life? Tiring of
profundity, I went inside and fell asleep over an old Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis movie. Ah,
cable tv, once again your comforting bosom provides comfort from our afflications…
Around six, I was tooling down 99 to pick up the clan. If anything, my nap had only
made me groggy. The pain seemed about the same, although my mindset veered from its
original clinical observation, which tended to be fascinated by the novelty of my new
sensations, into a maudlin self-pity. Before we’d even pulled into the parking lot of the
Thunderbird, I’d managed to get into a screaming argument with my wife. Maybe I
thought she was being insufficiently grateful for the gift of my sterilization. Maybe I
wanted Chinese take-out instead of pizza. Whatever the reason, it was enough to make
me storm off and jump on a bus, black clouds of justified rage trailing behind me along
with the exhaust fumes.
Hours later, I sat on the floor of the darkened, West Seattle house, pondering what my
Existence had become. “My God, I’m the Anti-Matter Richard Brautigan!” I realized.
Charting the trajectory of my life, I found it ran in a mirror-image of the hippie novelist’s,
almost as if viewed from one of those alternative universes Stephen Hawking was
always typing about. Instead of leaving a squalid Pacific Northwest and facing the
pressures of being an unprepared family man in the big city only to emerge as the literary
beacon of the post-beat generation, I was taking the entire trip backwards to end up in the
very same Tacoma surroundings that informed Brautigan’s ominous, early childhood
memories in the stories from Revenge of the Lawn. The most noticeable difference being,
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of course, the ‘literary beacon’ analogy as applied to my own San Francisco years, where
‘drunken little slacker poseur’ would have been more accurate. Still, had not a poem of
mine appeared in an obscure anthology alongside that of a certified Beat Legend who
probably didn’t get paid, either? Regardless of whatever might happen, they would never
take that away from me, and the theme music from “Gone With the Wind” blasted
through my head as I curled up on an old laundry sack to sleep the good sleep of the
Perfect Martyr.
*****************************
CODA
Of course, my wife called then, we made up and I was back at the motel a mere six
hours after my initial departure. I have blocked out the events of the subsequent days in
all but a vague way, sort of like what happens to women after childbirth (because
otherwise they would never go through the experience ever again and the human race
would have died out in its earliest stage.) On my first trip with the moving van to the new
house, however, I had a strange epiphany. Once, when I was a college student in upstate
New York, I was walking one twilight through an older, residential neighborhood
between my campus and downtown Syracuse when I was gripped by the notion that if I
kept on walking I would somehow be able to go back into time until I ended up at my
grandparent’s house on Bancroft Avenue. Driving over the ravine to the Sprague exit, I
had the same feeling of being transported back to that tree-lined working-class suburb
that had never left my three year-old psyche. The golden light from the setting sun gave
the very soot an enchanted air, and our new street was lined with old-fashioned street
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lamps that must have dated from the turn of the century and were unceremoniously torn
down a year after our arrival. That night, I tested my equipment to see if it still worked. It
did.
The next morning, my wife and I dropped the dryer four feet off the back of the van,
missing the ramp entirely and having the top come flying off like a defective jack-in-the-
box. And, a few weeks later, I learned from the pages of the National Enquirer that
Anthony Quinn, aged 81, had knocked up his secretary and was expecting his 687th
illegitimate child, while Tony Randall, 77, was expecting his first.
Sometimes, the portents just come too fast to make any sense of them at all.
END
David Fewster
fivewillowsliteraryreview.blog 