24. The construction company laid him off. They said he was too old to take care of the books. ‘It’s time for you to go out to pasture,’ they joked. He was fifty-nine.

25. They rented the same house they lived in for twenty-five years, though they could have bought it at one time with no down payment and monthly payments of fifty dollars.

26. When his daughter was going to high school he was working there as the school janitor. She saw him in the halls. His working as a janitor was a subject that was very seldom discussed at home.

27. Her mother would make lunches for both of them.

28. He retired when he was sixty-five and became a very careful sweet wine alcoholic. He liked to drink whiskey but they couldn’t afford to keep him in it. He stayed in the house most of the time and started drinking about ten o’clock, a few hours after his wife had gone off to work at the grocery store.

29. He would get quietly drunk during the course of the day. He always kept his wine bottles hidden in a kitchen cabinet and would secretly drink from them, though he was alone. He very seldom made any bad scenes and the house was always clean when his wife got home from work. He did though after a while take on that meticulous manner of walking that alcoholics have when they are trying very carefully to act as if they aren’t drunk.

30. He used sweet wine in place of life because he didn’t have any more life to use.

31. He watched afternoon television.

32. Once he had been followed by a rainbow across the skies of France while flying a World War I aeroplane carrying bombs and machine guns.

33. ‘Your father died this afternoon.’

Revenge of the Lawn

RICHARD BRAUTICAN was born in 1935 in Tacoma, Washington where he spent most of his childhood and teenage years. Sometime in the mid-Fifties Brautigan moved to San Francisco where he published his first volume of poetry and became involved with other writers of the Beat Movement.

It was during the Sixties that Brautigan became one of the most prominent and prolific writers of the flourishing counter-culture. This was when he wrote some of his most famous novels such as Trout Fishing in America, Sombrero Fallout, A Confederate General from Big Sur and In Watermelon Sugar.

As well as six other novels and the collection of short fiction, Revenge of the Lawn, Brautigan was an accomplished poet who had nine volumes of poetry published as well as many other short experimental works. Brautigan’s last novel, So the Wind Won’t Blow it All Away was published in 1982 and will soon be available as a Rebel Inc Classic. An Unfortunate Woman, a lost Brautigan novel which has never before been published, is now available from Rebel Inc.

Copyright

This book is for Don Carpenter

First published in Great Britain in 1972
by Jonathan Cape Ltd