Chewing Gum - Thanks Richard...

It's Brautigan so semi-insane, but it's chewing gum....

Richard Brautigan - Halloween In Denver

She didn't think that she would get any trick or treaters, so she didn't
buy anything for them. That seems simple enough, doesn't it? Well, let's
see what can happen with that. It might be interesting.

We'll start off with me reacting to her diagnosis of the situation by
saying, "Hell, get something for the kids. After all, you're living on
Telegraph Hill and there are a lot of kids in the neighborhood and some
of them are certain to stop here."

I said it in such a way that she went down to the store and came back a
few minutes later with a carton of gum. The gum was in little boxes
called Chiclets and there were a lot of them in the carton.

"Satisfied?" she said.
She's an Aires.
"Yes," I said.
I'm an Aquarius.
We also had two pumpkins: both Scorpios.

So I sat there at the kitchen table and carved a pumpkin. It was the
first pumpkin that I had carved in many years. It was kind of fun. My
pumpkin had one round eye and one triangular eye and a not-very-bright
witchy smile.

She cooked a wonderful dinner of sweet red cabbage and sausages and had
some apples baking in the oven.

Then she carved her pumpkin while dinner was cooking beautifully away.
Her pumpkin looked very modernistic when she was through. It looked more
like an appliance than a jack-o'-lantern.

All the time that we were carving pumpkins the door bell did not ring
once. It was completely empty of trick or treaters, but I did not panic,
though there were an awful lot of Chiclets waiting anxiously in a large
bowl.

We had dinner at 7:30 and it was so good. Then the meal was eaten and
there were still no trick or treaters and it was after eight and things
were starting to look bad. I was getting nervous.

I began to think that it was every day except Halloween.

She of course looked beatifically down upon the scene with an aura of
Buddhistic innocence and carefully did not mention the fact that no
trick or treaters had darkened the door.

That did not make things any better.

At nine o'clock we went in and lay down upon her bed and we were talking
about this and that and I was in a kind of outrage because we had been
forsaken by all trick or treaters, and I said something like, "Where are
those little bastards?"

I had moved the bowl of Chiclets into the bedroom, so I could get to the
trick or treaters faster when the door bell rang. The bowl sat there
despondently on a table beside the bed. It was a very lonely sight.

At 9:30 we started fucking.

About fifty-four seconds later we heard a band of kids come running up
the stairs accompanied by a cyclone of Halloween shrieking and mad door
bell ringing.

I looked down at her and she looked up at me and our eyes met in
laughter, but it wasn't too loud because suddenly we weren't at home.

We were in Denver, holding hands at a street corner, waiting for the
light to change.

from Revenge of the Lawn 1971