Sombrero Fallout. Richard Brautigan

      He was very tired of eating berries.

      He wanted a hamburger.

      HAMBURGERS

      An idea took immediate form in the unemployed man’s mind. The sombrero was still lying in the street. The mayor’s cousin had failed to pick it up. He had jumped back as if he’d been stung by a bee when he tried to pick it up.

      The sombrero lay there.

      Perhaps if the unemployed man picked up the sombrero and handed it to the mayor, the mayor would give him a job and he could stop eating berries and eat a lot of hamburgers instead.

      He looked again at the sombrero lying in the street and his mouth started watering at the imagined taste of hamburgers with lots of onions and catsup on them.

      He would not let this chance go by.

      He might never be employed again if he did not pick up that sombrero and hand it to the mayor.

      What was he going to do when the berry season was over?

      What a terrible thought.

      No more berries.

      Even though he hated berries now, they were better to eat than nothing. What was he going to do when they were gone?

      This sombrero lying in the street might be his last chance.

      CAREER

      ‘I’ll get the sombrero for you, mayor,’ he said and bent over to pick up the sombrero.

      ‘No, I’ll get it,’ the mayor’s cousin said, suddenly realizing that if he didn’t pick up that sombrero he might never be mayor.

      Who was this unemployed bastard who was trying to pick up the sombrero and ruin his bid for public office? Did he want to become mayor himself? Even if the sombrero was frighteningly cold, he wasn’t going to let this son-of-a-bitch pick it up and become mayor of the town.

      Why didn’t I just pick it up in the first place? the cousin thought. Then none of this would be happening. An ice-cold sombrero can’t hurt you. It just surprised him. That was all. He didn’t expect it to be cold, so he had jumped back. Who would have thought that the sombrero would be frozen? Anyone would have been surprised and reacted the way he did.

      Suddenly the cousin hated the sombrero for having made a fool out of him. He had to hand that sombrero to the mayor if he ever wanted to be mayor himself. His whole political career would end right then and there if he didn’t get the sombrero to the mayor.

      God-damn sombrero!

      JOB

      When the unemployed man saw that the mayor’s cousin was suddenly very anxious to pick up the sombrero, he panicked. He knew for certain that he would never get a job again if he didn’t get that sombrero to the mayor.

      Why did the mayor’s cousin want to pick up the sombrero?

      He already had a job.

      His hands weren’t covered with berry stains.

      BROOM

      The heart-broken American humorist of course had no idea what was going on among the torn pieces of paper in his waste-paper basket. He did not know that they now had a life of their own and had gone on without him. He grieved only for his lost Japanese love. He thought about calling her up on the telephone and telling her that he loved her and would do anything in this world to have her back again.

      He looked at the telephone.

      She was only seven numbers away from him.

      All he had to do was dial them.

      Then he would hear her voice.

      It would be very sleepy because he would have awakened her. It would sound as if it were coming from a great distance. Perhaps Kyoto, though she was only a mile away in the Richmond District of San Francisco.

      ‘Hello,’ she said.

      ‘It’s me. Can you talk?’

      ‘No, somebody’s here with me. It’s over between us. Don’t call again. It irritates him when you call.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘The man I’m in love with. He doesn’t like it when you call. So don’t call any more. OK?’

       click

      Then she hung up.

      While she was hanging up in his mind, she slept alone with her cat beside her in bed. She was sound asleep. She had gone to bed with no one since they had broken up a month ago. She hadn’t even gone out on a date with another man. All she did was work at her job, come home and do needlework or read. She was reading Proust. She didn’t know why. Sometimes she visited her brother and his wife and they would all watch television together.

      It had been a very uneventful time for her since she had broken up with the American humorist. She had been thinking a lot about her life while she was doing these other things. She was twenty-six years old and she was trying to put it into perspective. Somewhere during the two years she had gone out with the humorist, she had lost the dimensions of her existence and what she wanted out of life. The humorist had taken an enormous amount of energy from her. She constantly had to feed his insecurity and neurosis with her security and mental stability. After two years of this, she didn’t know who she was any more. In the beginning all she had wanted out of life was to live with him, have children and enjoy a normal existence.

      His basic insanity stopped any of this from becoming a reality.

      After about a year together she realized that loving him was not good for her but it took another year for her to end it and now she was very glad that it was over.

      Sometimes she wondered how she had allowed it to go on for such a long time.

      I will be very careful the next time I fall in love, she told herself. Also, she had made a promise to herself that she intended on keeping. She was never going to go out with another writer: no matter how charming, sensitive, inventive or fun they could be. They weren’t worth it in the long run. They were emotionally too expensive and the upkeep was too complicated. They were like having a vacuum cleaner around that broke all the time and only Einstein could fix it.

      She wanted her next lover to be a broom.

      BAR

      He looked at the clock. It was 10:30. He could not call her on the telephone because he knew that she was with another man: enjoying his body, moaning softly underneath him . . . and loving him.

      A huge sigh hurricaned his body and then he sat down on the couch. He tried to sort it all out. She was a thousand pieces of a puzzle tumbling around in his mind as if they were in a dryer in a Laundromat.

      For a few moments his mind was simultaneously the past, the present and the future, and there was no form to his thoughts about her. Then her hair began to emerge as a dominant theme in his grief. He had always loved her hair. It was somewhat of an obsession with him. Thoughts of her hair, how long and dark and hypnotic it was, began to put pieces of the puzzle together until he was remembering the first time he met her.

      Two years ago, it was raining.

      She didn’t go to bars very often.

      After she finished work that evening she was tired but her two co-workers persuaded her to go with them to a local bar where young people hung out.

      He was there and he was very bored. He was often very bored and he did not think twice about telling other people about his boredom. He bore it with the good humor of a cross.

      When he turned around on his bar stool, very drunk, which was a condition