A Confederate General From Big Sur. Richard Brautigan

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A Confederate General From Big Sur - Richard Brautigan

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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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