i hereby confess that the silly little phrase is all that remains of the abandoned opening of a novel about a disillusioned and delusional young man , the heir to a fruit processing plant in tucson , with a plot as disjointed and scattered as the spine of a long-dead rattlesnake , and i am still not certain if i envisioned the red-haired horse-faced young man who was doing the couching at his couch atop a guava crate and then couched against another guava crate one or if he was just on concrete and more importantly i did not know all of the other things that he felt , the meals and meetings of his life , after this uncomfortable couch in the warehouse , and better yet the way he might have leapt off the pages of the rest of this abandoned wreck of a novel that i never worked out , even in my mind , although i revisited it several times with the same sense of viewing a useless artifact .