Excerpt from TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA by RICHARD BRAUTIGAN

A HALF-SUNDAY HOMAGE TO A
WHOLE LEONARDO DA VINCI

On this funky winter day in rainy San Francisco I've had a
vision of Leonardo da Vinci.  My woman's out slaving away,
no day off, working on Sunday.  She left here at eight o'clock
this morning for Powell and California.  I've been sitting here
ever since like a toad on a log dreaming about Leonardo da
Vinci.

I dreamt he was on the South Bend Tackle Company pay-
roll, but of course, he was wearing different clothes and
speaking with a different accent and possessor of a different
childhood, perhaps an American childhood spent in a town
like Lordsburg, New Mexico, or Winchester, Virginia.

I saw him inventing a new spinning lure for trout fishing
in America.  I saw him first of all working with his imagina-
tion, then with metal and color and hooks, trying a little of
this and a little of that, and then adding motion and then tak-
ing it away and then coming back again with a different motion,
and in the end the lure was invented.

He called his bosses in.  They looked at the lure and all
fainted.  Alone, standing over their bodies, he held the lure
in his hand and gave it a name.  He called it "The Last Supper."
Then he went about waking up his bosses.

In a matter of months that trout fishing lure was the sen-
sation of the twentieth century, far outstripping such shallow
accomplishments as Hiroshima or Mahatma Gandhi.  Millions
of "The Last Supper" were sold in America.  The Vatican or-
dered ten thousand and they didn't even have any trout there.

Testimonials poured in.  Thirty-four ex-presidents of the
United States all said, "I caught my limit on 'The last Supper.'"