Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  “That was a lot of money back then,” Barbara recalled. She started doing the dishes every night. At first, she collected her two bits like clockwork every Friday. Before long, Dick got behind on his payments. Eventually, his debt totaled over $9. Barbara was furious. Her dark curls framed her anger like a thunder cloud when she demanded her money. Dick said he’d pay her tomorrow. He returned from work the next day carrying a heavy paper sack. “Here’s your $9 and change that I owe you,” he said without a trace of a smile as he poured nearly two hundred nickels out onto the kitchen table.

  Before Sandra was born, Mary Lou bought an old wicker baby carriage for $5. It had wood spoke wheels and a hood. In So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away, this “baby buggy” was used to collect beer bottles along the highway. Barbara remembered pushing Sandi as an infant in the wicker carriage. The family wheeled it out once again for baby David. Dick appropriated the buggy for gathering discarded deposit bottles and “pretended that it was a covered wagon for a while and pulled my sisters and other kids around in it.” With his mother’s permission, he also used it to haul his gardening tools all the way across town to Mrs. Manerude’s house.

  Mrs. Manerude liked the pale-haired boy and gave him plants culled from her garden. He carted them home to his mother in the wicker baby buggy. Mary Lou was proud of her extensive flower garden and grateful for all the contributions from Mrs. Manerude. Her son was on to a good thing. “She just adored him. He was perfect. And because I was his mother she’d call me on the phone and talk sometimes for an hour or two if she’d get lonely.”

  During his high school years, Dick Porterfield’s babysitting responsibilities assumed a level of vigilance more in keeping with his approaching manhood. When Sandi was a little girl, the mean-spirited sons of an itinerant preacher stripped off all her clothing and sent her home naked, “crying so hard that she had blood spots on her face.” The preacher lived nearby on West Twelfth. “Mother, you stay out of this,” Dick said when he heard of the outrageous abuse. “I’ll handle it.”

  Dick Porterfield marched straight over to the shabby house on West Twelfth. The preacher and his kids were inside with the door locked. When Dick knocked, they wouldn’t let him in. He kicked the front door off its hinges, demanding to know what they had done to his little sister. “They said they didn’t do nothing to her,” Mary Lou recounted. When her son returned home, “he said, ‘Mom, I could have wrung their grizzly necks.’” Shortly thereafter, the preacher and his family packed up their stuff and vanished in the middle of the night.

  On another occasion, Sandi came home from school one wet winter day “all covered in green slime.” She had been accosted by a neighborhood “half-wit” on a shortcut across Amazon Creek and pushed into the shallow slough. Her pretty new red wool coat had been ruined. The brutal kid (“a big oaf and mean”) lived just up the street from the Folstons. Sandi easily identified him. When he heard about it, Dick Porterfield headed over to the oaf’s house to settle the score. “He was very firm and very direct when something was wrong,” Mary Lou said. “We never saw that kid again.”

  In the fall of 1952, at the beginning of Dick’s senior year, Mary Lou dropped a bombshell on him and B.J. Their last name wasn’t really Porterfield. “Richard was getting ready to graduate from high school,” Barbara recalled, “and I was getting ready to graduate from junior high, and my mother said to Richard, ‘Well, you might as well go by your real name. Better have your real name put on your diploma.’ And I looked at him, and he looked at me. ‘Real name? That is our name!’ Because that’s what we thought it was. So, she told him his name was Brautigan and then he started going by that.” There was no fuss made about his new identity. It was no big deal. Dick Porterfield slipped out of his old name with as little regret as a snake shedding its skin.

  Not long after his eighteenth birthday on January 30, 1953, the young man who reported to his draft board for a preinduction physical registered as Richard Brautigan. A group of draft-age boys were bused together to Portland from Eugene and put up at a hotel close by the Selective Service induction center for three days of testing and medical examination. A rough sergeant harangued the young men for hours, telling them it was time to straighten out, they soon would be pulled from their loving homes and never see their families again. Dick Brautigan seemed changed somehow when he came home that Sunday evening. “Richard was shook up,” Mary Lou recounted. “He says, ‘Mother, I’ll never put a gun in my hands to kill another man.’” Dick at first was classified 1A but that designation changed to 4F because of his scoliosis.

  On his permanent high school record, Dick had been listed as “Porterfield, Richard Gary.” His new last name, “Brautigan,” was typed in just above the previous one. His father remained recorded as “Robert Porterfield,” profession: “laborer, cook.” Brautigan once boasted to Keith Abbott of getting “straight As” for a semester on a whim and then abandoning the experiment “because he couldn’t find any reason to continue.” Like many tall tales he told of his youth, this was pure fiction. Richard Brautigan graduated with a grade point average of 2.093, standing number 230 in a class of 287.

  As graduation approached, Dick participated in all the usual rites of passage. He had appeared in the 1951 annual as “R. Porterfield,” as always towering a head above his classmates in the group photograph. In 1952, he skipped the photo session entirely and was not mentioned in the Eugenean under any name at all. He sat for his formal portrait in 1953 (perhaps the only picture ever taken of Richard Brautigan wearing a necktie) and appeared alphabetically, a sly smile on his face, with his classmates in the yearbook. His first prescription for eyeglasses had already been filled, but Dick didn’t wear his new cheaters in front of the camera. As he had joined no clubs, participated in no activities, and played no sport other than intramural basketball, his picture does not appear anywhere else in the 162-page volume.

  When the annuals were passed out on the last day of school, Dick grabbed Pete Webster’s copy, although he knew the varsity letterman only slightly. He scrawled a quick inscription and handed it back with his Cheshire cat grin. Pete read, “To my good friend, Peter Webster, drop dead!” It was signed, “Dick Brautigan.”

  “What’d you do that for?” Pete asked.

  “Well,” Dick shrugged, “what are friends for?”

  The final issue of the high school paper came out on June 5. In the 1953 Class Will, “Dick Brautigan wills his science fiction books to Marsha Meyers.” A certain editorial desperation clings to this entry. What do you say about a guy nobody knows? None of his family members nor his closest friends remembered any science fiction books.

  At the last minute, Dick Brautigan announced his plans to skip the graduation ceremony, telling his mother, “I’m not going to graduate with those slobs.”

  “God, he’s sick in the head,” Mary Lou thought. “Those are the boys he grew up with, his friends, the Hiebert twins and all of that.”

  Dick told the authorities to mail his diploma to the house on Hayes. “The principal called me up and he was really upset,” Mary Lou remembered. “I said, ‘You take that kid in your office and you measure him for a cap and gown!’ And he did. And Richard brought home this big old blue gown, and it took me three hours to press the wrinkles out of the thing. And I had a picture taken of him in it, eight by ten in color.”

  Dick dutifully wore his mortarboard and the flapping blue gown. At 8:00 PM, on June 9, 1953, he marched in with his class for the baccalaureate ceremony at McArthur Court, a large auditorium used for basketball, cultural, and civic activities on the University of Oregon campus. Bill and Mary Lou Folston arrived in their Sunday best. B.J. did not attend. She was already working for Guistina’s and living away from home. Mary Lou cried when the high school band played Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance.

  Mark O. Hatfield, dean of students at Willamette University and not yet embarked on his long political career, delivered the commencement address, choosing an optimistic theme, “The Golden
Age,” as his subject. The principal of Eugene High School presented the Class of 1953 to the gathered friends, relatives, and dignitaries, and the young men and women filed forward to receive their diplomas. Richard Gary Brautigan marched up in the front ranks, between Nellie Leah Brainard and Ronald Milton Bray. After the new graduates joined in singing their alma mater, a brief benediction followed, and the band played the recessional as they paraded out into the rest of their lives.

  Backstage, the mood seemed jubilant. Mary Lou had her arms around Dick and Gary. The kids were off to a party that would last thirty-six hours. All except Dick Brautigan. “He came home,” his mother remembered. “He said nuts with it.” Dick didn’t drink and had no desire to hang out with a bunch of puking drunks for the next day and a half. “He just came home, took off his clothes, and he went to bed or read or something.” An apocryphal story circulating after Brautigan’s suicide described a high school diploma leaning against the half-empty bottle by his body. Only another myth, cobwebs blown into the moonlight by a ghostly wind.

  six: midnight driver’s ed

  THE FOLSTON FAMILY owned a ’38 Chevy with no backseat. More than ten years old when they bought it, the shabby vehicle was all the car they could afford. Mary Lou never liked the original tan color. One summer day, she painted it black, using cans of house paint and a flat three-inch brush. Every Fourth of July, they’d drive north for a picnic at Uncle Larry’s in Halsey, Oregon. David, the youngest and smallest, got to ride on the narrow shelf below the rear window. The other three kids rode in the trunk. Mary Lou folded a blanket in back to provide some comfort. Bill propped up the lid so they wouldn’t smother to death. This was also how they traveled on family trips up the McKenzie to Fall Creek. Most of the time, the old heap rusted in the curving driveway in front of their home on Hayes Street.

  In the early 1950s, public schools in Eugene did not offer driver’s education and the more auto-motively adventurous youngsters improvised their learning experience. Chuck and Art Wical went joy-riding in their parents’ car late at night when the old folks were asleep. The twins enlisted Dick Porterfield into their nocturnal driving scheme, not wanting to risk stealing their family auto one more time. They all waited in the darkness until the lights went out in the Folston household, letting another half hour go by “because people usually don’t fall asleep that quickly,” Art explained. When they thought the coast was clear, Dick sneaked back into the house, returning right away.

  “Do you have them?” the twins whispered.

  “Yeah.” Dick Porterfield held up the keys. “Should I put them in the car?”

  “No,” they told him, “just unlock the door and roll down the window so we can steer it.” Dick helped the brothers push the car toward the street. “There was quite a long driveway,” Art recalled. “It was not a paved driveway. There were two tire-recessed areas, where they would drive in.” It was sixty or seventy feet to the street and they had a difficult time maneuvering the old junker over an indentation in the drive.

  Once they got the car on the street, they pushed it for another block and a half. This was standard operating procedure for the Wical brothers. “We didn’t want to take it out where the lights were.” At this point, Dick Porterfield climbed in, turned on the ignition, and put it in gear. “It was a stick shift, and we pushed it and had a heck of a time getting it started.” As it happened, the battery was low, although they weren’t aware of it at the time. When the engine turned over, they all piled in, driving slowly away down Hayes and turning left onto West Eleventh, heading out into the open countryside. None of them really knew how to drive.

  After a mile or so, the headlights grew dimmer and dimmer. Worried, the Wicals instructed Dick to slow down and turn around. Dick swung the wheel but it was too late. The engine died, and they couldn’t get the car going again. “We tried to push it, and still it wouldn’t start,” Art remembered. In the end, they had to push the old Chevy back down Eleventh, grunting and sweating for more than a mile as they rolled the heavy car every foot of the way to Dick’s house.

  This misadventure was not Dick Porterfield’s first automotive mishap. Walking home from a recent midnight ramble, he encountered a stranger lugging a five-gallon gas can up by the Moose Lodge. “Can I help you with that?” Dick inquired politely. He assisted the fellow with his heavy load, carrying the can all the way to where his car was parked on Chambers Street. The next morning when Bill Folston got up to drive to work, there wasn’t any gas in his tank. The mysterious stranger had stolen every drop.

  Their epic endeavor with the Folston car cured the Wical twins of their illicit midnight driving lessons. For Dick Porterfield, the experience led to a lifelong abhorrence of the automobile. Richard Brautigan never really learned how to drive. “I just don’t have a love affair with the car,” he wrote in People magazine in 1981. “I started to learn how to drive when I was a teenager, but I lost interest quickly.”

  seven: pounding at the gates of american literature

  IN THE SHORT story “⅓, ⅓, ⅓,”, Richard Brautigan’s narrator “lived in a cardboard-lined shack of my own building.” In 1952, Dick Porterfield was seventeen, and the “shack” was his makeshift bedroom in the lean-to garage. Brautigan’s description of the neighborhood fits Thirteenth and Hayes. “We lived in a poor part of town where the streets weren’t paved. The street was nothing more than a big mud puddle that you had to walk around.” Dick Porterfield pounded on his typewriter late into the night, chasing his dreams in the tar paper shack. His fictional counterpart also typed the night away. “I was made a ⅓ partner because I had the typewriter.”

  Richard Brautigan’s portrait of the artist as Dick Porterfield rings true. The teenager began his writing career in the tar paper bedroom on Hayes Street. Crazy comic-book-inspired fantasies and ghost stories improvised to amuse his sisters were warm-up exercises for the all-nighters at the typewriter. “I started writing poetry when I was 17-years old,” Brautigan scrawled in a notebook dating from 1955. “At the age of twenty, I’m through writing poetry. Why does a poet stop writing poetry? I guess for the same reason the wind goes down in the evening.”

  Brautigan never stopped writing poetry. Everything he wrote remained essentially poetic, even when labeled short stories or novels. Dick Porterfield’s first written composition achieving any sort of recognition came at the end of his sophomore year, in 1951. He and Gary Stewart were in the same Social Living class “and [Dick] wrote a piece that a stand-up comedian would do.” Gary suggested that he read Dick’s monologue aloud to the other students on the last day of school. Dick was too shy to face the class on his own.

  Gary Stewart received permission from their teacher, Caroline Wood, to read Dick Porterfield’s satiric piece on the dubious educational benefits of forcing kids to study such boring literary “classics” as Silas Marner. “It got laughs all the way through,” Gary remembered, “and applause afterwards.” The author, he recalled, “was very pleased.” At sixteen, Dick Porterfield had already determined to make writing his life’s work.

  Like many other teenage boys who dreamed of becoming writers in the early 1950s, Dick’s idol was Ernest Hemingway. Papa’s rough-and-tumble enthusiasms (his irresistible grin serene amid the carnage of bullrings, African safaris, and Gulf Stream blue-water fishing) had erased any lingering public notion that writers were sissies. Twain, London, and Crane had earlier blazed their own adventurous trails for boys of Hemingway’s generation to follow. Peter Webster recalled, “Richard talked about [Hemingway] all the time.”

  One of the earliest surviving Brautigan typescripts (original title, “A Refugee”) dates from 1955 or before. “Somebody from Hemingway Land” is a two-hundred-word short story. It concerned the breakup of an interracial couple, an unusual theme for a young man living in the Pacific Northwest in the midfifties. The quirky humor of having a black woman interrupt hard-boiled dialogue with “Don’t start talking like somebody from Hemingway Land,” sets this brief vignette apart from
other high school Hemingway imitations. In “Argument,” an early poem from this same period, Brautigan wrote that he had met Hemingway in a dream and had a “terrible argument” with the older writer because he “thought that he was / a better writer / than I am.” His family and friends didn’t remember the story or the poem but agreed Ernest Hemingway was Dick’s favorite writer.

  Young writers need mentors even as they search for heroic models. In the fall of his senior year at Eugene High, Dick Brautigan enrolled in a creative writing class taught by Juliette Claire Gibson, a native New Yorker who had originated the course years before. A remarkable, flamboyant woman, Miss Gibson began teaching at the school in 1926 and had been there long enough to have guided the parents of many of her current students through the mysteries of syntax. In 1930, she wrote “A Tribute,” the high school’s alma mater. (“Stately she stands, our Alma Mater/Bright with the sunlight of youth . . .”) The young writer was drawn to his teacher. Like Brautigan, Miss Gibson was no ordinary individual. Many students considered her to be “weird,” the same pejorative they hung on her prize student.

  Beneath Juliette Gibson’s makeup and lingering perfume, her extravagant scarves and gaudy costume jewelry, beat a heart forged of steel. She had been tempered by the fires of adventure, wounded in action while serving with the Army Nursing Corps in the trenches of the First World War. Rumors abounded that her fiancé had been killed overseas, one of ten million fatalities in the bloody carnage of the European conflict. Juliette Gibson never married, living the rest of her life with Mildred Pearl Snow, another nurse, whom she met in France.