Witch's Garbage

One of the many roommates in my life (I stopped counting at 26) was a young woman named Teri. Teri was one of my college roommates and she was a terrific role model. She, too, was majoring in English and was a creative writer, so we had much in common. I owe Teri for introducing me to author Richard Brautigan and his witch's garbage. The year was 1980.

The book Teri handed to me was a slim, lime green paperback with a black and white photo on the front. It was called Revenge of the Lawn. I remember exactly where we were standing in our room when I first took the book into my hands as she then turned the pages to number 19: a short-short story called "1692 Cotton Mather Newsreel."

I gave Teri a questioning look, and she said, "Just read." So I did. After the first two sentences, I sank down onto my bed. And I kept reading.

This is how the story begins. "O 1939 Tacoma Washington witch, where are you now that I am growing toward you? Once my body occupied a child's space and doors had a large meaning to them and were almost human. Opening a door meant something in 1939 and the children used to make fun of you because you were crazy and lived by yourself in an attic across the street from where we sat in the gutter like two slum sparrows. We were four years old."

The premise of the story is a familiar one. One child dares another child to go up to the witch's attic apartment and wave down at him from the window.

"'You've got guts,' my friend said. I can't remember his name now. The decades have filed it off my memory, leaving a small empty place where his name should be.

"There were some garbage cans at the bottom of the stairs. I wondered what garbage can was the witch's. I lifted up one garbage can lid and looked inside to see if there was any witch's garbage in the can. There wasn't."

He then went on to look in the other two cans; all the garbage looked alike.

When he opens the door to the witch's house and looks around, his heart beats faster. "Her garbage had lied to me."

You'll have to read the story. But here are a few random sentences from other stories in the book:

"I spent the rest of the day not making coffee. It was a comfort."

"The bathroom sink, even though the water was off, broke out into tears."

"I let the old woman get on first and trailed behind in classic medieval tradition with castle floors following me onto the bus."

"Do ghosts burn wood? I guess it's up to them, but the wood was the color of years."

Teri and Richard changed the way I thought about writing, they changed my reading tastes, and they changed my writing style. The bar had been raised.

Brautigan had a tragic life. He was raised in abject poverty, and he was a paranoid schizophrenic with clinical depression. He had electroconvulsive therapy a dozen times. He shot himself to death in September of 1984 and was found about a month later. He's remembered for inventive metaphors and a remarkable imagination.

Soon after I dropped out of college in 1980, I lost track of Teri. I know she married a man named Randy and moved to Chico, California, but I can't remember Randy's last name. I'd love to find Teri again. I was in awe of her and her creative talent. And she was a genuine friend.

Teri, I remember you.

And Richard Brautigan, sir, I remember you.