A Confederate General From Big Sur. Richard Brautigan
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any tools there, only the blue overalls hanging on a hook.
He put the overalls on just to collect the rent. They were his uniform. Perhaps he had been a soldier at one time or another.
We showed him where the rain came from and the long puddle leading splash, splash down the hall to the community kitchen in the rear, but he refused to be moved by it.
‘There it is,’ he said philosophically and went away peacefully to take off his overalls and hang them in his ‘tool room.’
After all it was his building. He had pulled thousands of teeth to get the place. He obviously liked the puddle right where it was, and we could not argue with his cheap rent.
2
Even before Lee Mellon made the old place his official San Francisco headquarters in the spring of years ago, the building was already occupied by an interesting group of tenants. I lived alone in the attic.
There was a sixty-one-year-old retired music teacher who lived in the room right underneath the attic. He was Spanish and about him like a weather-vane whirled the traditions and attitudes of the Old World.
And he was in his own way, the manager. He had appropriated the job like one would find some old clothes lying outside in the rain, and decide that they were the right size and after they had dried out, they would look quite fashionable.
The day after I moved into the attic, he came upstairs and told me that the noise was driving him crazy. He told me to pack my things quickly and go. He told me that he’d had no idea I had such heavy feet when he rented the place to me. He looked down at my feet and said, ‘They’re too heavy. They’ll have to go.’
I had no idea either when I rented the attic from the old fart. It seems that the attic had been vacant for years. With all those years of peace and quiet, he probably thought that there was a meadow up there with a warm, gentle wind blowing through the wild flowers, and a bird getting hung up above the trees along the creek.
I bribed his hearing with a phonograph record of Mozart, something with horns, and that took care of him. ‘I love Mozart,’ he said, instantly reducing my burden of life.
I could feel my feet beginning to weigh less and less as he smiled at the phonograph record. It smiled back. I now weighed a trifle over seventeen pounds and danced like a giant dandelion in his meadow.
The week after Mozart, he left for a vacation in Spain. He said that he was only going to be gone for three months, but my feet must continue their paths of silence. He said he had ways of knowing, even when he wasn’t there. It sounded pretty mysterious.
But his vacation turned out to be longer than he had anticipated because he died on his return to New York. He died on the gangplank, just a few feet away from America. He didn’t quite make it. His hat did though. It rolled off his head and down the gang-plank and landed, plop, on America.
Poor devil. I heard that it was his heart, but the way the Chinese dentist described the business, it could have been his teeth.
Though his physical appearance was months away, Lee Mellon’s San Francisco headquarters were now secure. They took the old man’s things away and the room was empty.
3
There were two other rooms on the second floor. One of them was occupied by a Montgomery Street secretary. She left early in the morning and returned late at night. You never saw her on the weekends.
I believe she was a member of a small acting group and spent most of her spare time rehearsing and performing. One might as well believe that as anything else because there was no way of knowing. She had long ingenue legs, so I’ll go on believing she was an actress.
We all shared a bathroom on the second floor, but during the months I lived there, she passed.
4
The other room on the second floor was occupied by a man who always said hello in the morning and good evening at night. It was nice of him. One day in February he went down to the community kitchen and roasted a turkey.
He spent hours basting the bird and preparing a grand meal. Many chestnuts and mushrooms were in evidence. After he was finished he took the bird upstairs with him and never used the kitchen again.
Shortly after that, I believe it was Tuesday, he stopped saying hello in the morning and good evening at night.
5
The bottom floor had one room in the front of the house. Its windows opened on the street and the shades were always drawn. An old woman lived in that room. She was eighty-four and lived quite comfortably on a government pension of thirty-five cents a month.
She looked so old that she reminded me of a comic book hero of my childhood: The Heap. It was a World War I German pilot who was shot down and lay wounded for months in a bog and was slowly changed by mysterious juices into a ⅞ plant and ⅛ human thing.
The Heap walked around like a mound of moldy hay and performed good deeds, and of course bullets had no effect on it. The Heap killed the comic book villains by giving them a great big hug, then instead of riding classically away into the sunset like a Western, The Heap lumbered off into the bog. That’s the way the old woman looked.
After she paid her rent out of the generous thirty-five-cent-a-month government pension, there was just enough money left over for her to buy bread, tea and celery roots, which were her main sustenance.
One day out of curiosity I looked up celery roots in a book called Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit, by that goddess of American grub, Adelle Davis, to see how you could keep alive on them. You can’t.
One hundred grams of celery root contains no vitamins except 2 mg. of Vitamin C. For minerals, it contains 47 mg. of calcium, 71 mg. of phosphorous and 0.8 mg. of iron. It would take a lot of celery roots to make a battleship.
One hundred grams of celery root has for its grand finale, in Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit, three grams of protein and the dramatic total of 38 calories.
The old woman had a little hotplate in her room. She did all her ‘cooking’ in there and never used the community kitchen. A hotplate in a little room is the secret flower of millions of old people in this country. There’s a poem by Jules Laforgue about the Luxembourg Gardens. The old woman’s hotplate was not that poem.
But her father had been a wealthy doctor in the 19th century and had the first franchise in Italy and France for some wondrous American electrical device.
She could not remember what electrical device it was, but her father had been very proud of getting the franchise and watching the crates being unloaded off a ship.
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