Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away by Richard Brautigan

outside. It was still dark.
    "Hello," I said.
    "Who invented the revolver?" a man asked.
    Before I could hang the telephone up my own voice escaped me like an anarchist and said, "Samuel Colt."
    "You just won a cord of wood," the man said.
    "Who are you?" I asked.
    "This is a contest," he said. "You just won a cord of wood."
    "I don't have a stove," I said. "I live in a rented room. There's no heat."
    "Is there anything else you would want besides a cord of wood?" he said.
    "Yeah, a fountain pen."
    "Good, we'll send you one. What's the address there?"
    I gave him my address and then I asked him who was sponsoring the contest.
    "Never mind," he said. "The pen will be in the mail tomorrow morning. Oh, yes, is there any particular color you like? I almost forgot."
    "Blue would be fine."
    "We're all out of blue. Any other color? Green? We have a lot of green pens."
    "All right, green, then."
    "It'll be in the mail tomorrow morning," he said.
    It wasn't. It never came.
    The only thing I ever won in my life and actually received was an armored car. When I was a child I had a paper route that went for miles along the rough edge of town.
    I would have to ride my bicycle down a hill, following a road that had fields of grass on both sides and an old plum orchard at the end of the road. They had chopped down part of the trees and built four new houses there.
    Parked in front of one house was an armored car. It was a small town and every day after work the driver took the armored car home with him. He parked it out in front of his house.
    I would pass there before six o'clock in the morning and everybody would be asleep in the houses. When there was light in the morning I could see the armored car from a quarter of a mile or so.
    I liked the armored car and would get off my bicycle and walk over and take a look at it, knock on the heavy metal, look in the bulletproof windows, kick the tires.
    Because everybody was asleep in the morning and I alone out there, after a while I considered the armored car to be mine and treated it as such.
    One morning I got into the armored car and delivered the
rest of my papers from it. It looked kind of strange to see a kid delivering newspapers from an armored car.
    I rather enjoyed it and started doing it regularly.
    "Here comes that kid in the armored car delivering papers," the early risers said. "Yeah, he's a nut."
    That was the only thing I ever won.

The Literary Life in California/1964
1
    I was sitting in a bar last night talking to a friend who was from time to time looking down the bar at his wife. They had been separated for two years: no hope.
    She was palling it up with another man. They looked as if they were having a lot of fun.
    My friend turned and asked me about two books of my poetry. I'm a minor poet, even so, people sometimes ask me questions like that.
    He said he used to have the books but he didn't have them any more. They were gone. I said that one of the books was out of print and copies of the other book were down at City Lights Bookstore.
    He took a look down at his wife. She was laughing at something the other man had said, who was then quite pleased with himself, and so it goes.
    "I have a confession to make," my friend said. "Remember that night I came home from work and found you and my
wife drunk together on sweet vermouth in the kitchen?"
    I remembered the evening, though nothing had happened. We were just sitting there in the kitchen, listening to the phonograph and drunk on sweet vermouth. There were probably thousands like us all across America.
    "Well, when you left I went and got those two books of poetry out of the bookcase and tore them up and threw the pieces on the floor. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't have put those books of poetry back together again."
    "Win a few, lose a few," I said.
    "What?" he said.
    He was a little drunk. There were three empty beer bottles in front of him on the bar. Their labels had been carefully scratched