Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Dick had recently written two “books”: I Watched the World Glide Effortlessly Bye, and The Horse That Had a Flat Tire (both published only after Brautigan’s death), either while in the Salem Hospital or soon after arriving at the Bartons’. Composed in one of the small twenty-five-cent spiral-bound notebooks he favored, the first was dedicated to Edna. In a study in minimalism, Brautigan divided it into “Book One,” with twenty-six “chapters,” and “Book Two,” with fifty-seven, each not longer than a single sentence. Several consisted of only one or two words.

  The finished notebook was a fair copy (an earlier draft titled “Poet in a Cage” also survives in notebook form), the title page meticulously hand-printed, each of the tiny “chapters” laid out precisely, as if to guide a typesetter. In 315 words, Brautigan narrated an intense, poetic vision of his trip to the State Mental Hospital. He fictionalized himself as “Tommy.” The prisoner wearing handcuffs in the backseat became “Jesus Christ,” a favorite recurring character in Brautigan’s later poetry.

  “The Horse That Had a Flat Tire” also was the title of a poem in Brautigan’s 1968 collection, The Pill versus the Springhill Mining Disaster, which referred to New Mexico, a state the poet had not yet visited in 1956. It remained one of the few fragments of his early writing he chose to preserve. Dick planned five more “books.” He hoped to get them all done. If he failed as a writer it would “be because I am no good.”

  Part of Dick’s arrangement with the Bartons included working for them around the farm. They paid him an hourly rate for these chores. A half day at a time, Brautigan cut thistles with a hoe on the edge of their field. Thistles were a noxious weed needing to be controlled. “He also cut the brush along the fence on the right-of-way from the mailbox,” Hal remembered. “For a few days, not long. I don’t think he particularly liked to work. He had his mind on other things. He wanted to get out. He wanted to go to California.”

  In his letter to Gary Stewart, Dick wrote: “I have made a plan for the future of my writing. I think it is a good plan.” Out in the little shack behind the Bartons’ house during his two-or three-month stay, he finished the five “books” he envisioned. “Seven Rooms Each as Big as God,” a poetry collection containing an early version of “The Chinese Checker Players” (a poem based on an early childhood memory eventually published in The Pill) began with a mock introductory dedication: “This undernourished volume is for Richard Brautigan without whose help and encouragement I never could have written it.” The four other notebooks were all dedicated to Edna.

  The undated notebooks were carefully scripted fair copies. The order of composition cannot be determined. The author’s penmanship was notoriously awkward, and these efforts demonstrated his careful labor to achieve legibility with an obvious eye focused on layout and design. “A Love Letter from State Insane Asylum” was veiled autobiography divided into ten brief numbered chapters, each a sentence occupying a single page describing episodes from the life of a three-year-old child named Calvin.

  “ROCK around the CLOCK” was a collection of eight minuscule short stories. Three dealt with death. Two others involved ghosts and hauntings. The title story concerned a boy in a record shop, staring at a fifteen-year-old girl through the glass wall of a listening booth. These were standard features in record stores, allowing customers to sample the music before making a purchase. She selects a record (“Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” sung by the Four Aces) and steps into the adjoining booth. He listens to the number one song of the year, “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and His Comets.

  Would You Like to Saddle Up a Couple of Goldfish and Swim to Alaska?, inspired by Dick’s gift of a pair of goldfish to Linda Webster, was a love fantasy in which the teenage boy and girl lived happily together, hugging and giggling. Divided into five sections, each page again containing only a single sentence or sentence fragment, the notebook provided an intriguing glimpse into Brautigan’s psyche. Grace, the character representing Linda, also has brown hair and blue eyes. The narrator, who described himself as “being the world’s greatest unknown writer,” likes to lie awake, watching Grace as she sleeps.

  “There’s Always Somebody Who Is Enchanted” was a collection of nine extremely short stories. “A Trite Story” contained only six sentences. It described the winter Brautigan spent in Montana when he was a child. The first line changed Great Falls to “Butte” but correctly described Tex Porterfield (who the author calls “my father”) as a cook. This tiny vignette owned an emotional power far in excess of its brevity. The second sentence remains haunting in its ambivalence: “That was after my mother had run off with a man named Frank, or Jack.”

  Sometime early in Brautigan’s stay at the Bartons’, two copies of the poetry quarterly Epos arrived in the mail from Lake Como, Florida. The cover announced the names of fourteen of the contributors above the motto “The Work of Outstanding American and British Poets.” Lilith Lorraine got a mention. Richard Brautigan was one of those included in small print as “and others.” He was in good company. Among the others not listed on the cover were George Garrett, A. R. Ammons, and Clark Ashton Smith, the fantasist and pioneer science fiction writer, whose work influenced a diverse group of writers including Jack London, George Sterling, H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and Harlan Ellison. Largely forgotten today, Smith found literary fame in 1912 at age nineteen, when he published The Star-Treader and Other Poems.

  Perhaps influenced by the brief nonsense plays written by Ring W. Lardner in the 1920s (Clemo Uti—“The Water Lilies,” I. Gaspiri, and Taxidea Americana), Dick turned his hand to drama, writing three short experimental pieces, each less than a single page and to be performed on a bare stage. “Please Let Me Walk” concerned a young woman who reads a poem about “a very beautiful god” breaking the world’s neck, after which she is carried into the wings by four uniformed nurses. In “Everybody and the Rose” an old woman attempts to sell roses to a large group of people standing immobilized on the stage. When no one reacts, she sits down and cries.

  The final piece, “Linda,” exposed the young poet’s emotions like an open wound. A youth pantomimes taking an “imaginary” pistol from a dresser drawer. He puts it to his head, mutters “Linda” softly, and pulls the trigger. A real gunshot is heard. The young man collapses. A laughing couple crosses the stage holding hands. They stop and kiss, oblivious of the body lying at their feet, and exit. Laughter is heard offstage as the curtain falls. Signing himself R. G. Brautigan, he mailed the three little plays (under the collective title Experimental Dreams) to the Drama Department at the University of Oregon.

  Dick ate all his meals in the main house with the Barton family. “Just one of the bunch,” Hal Barton remembered, “which was the way he was.” Lois recalled how “persnickety” Dick acted about food. She baked all the family’s bread, a half-dozen loaves at a time, and always used molasses instead of white sugar in the yeast starter because of its greater nutritional value. “And he could smell that molasses. Two tablespoons of molasses in six loaves of bread, and he could smell that when it came out of the oven. He didn’t like to eat the bread. It didn’t suit him.”

  Lois Barton also did Dick’s laundry. She remembered signs of masturbation, “because there was always that mess in the shorts to be washed when he brought them to me.” When Lois finished the wash, she’d pile Dick’s clean clothes by the back door and tell him to take them down to the cabin. “He’d leave them there for a week or ten days and then they’d be dusty from all the traffic, and he wouldn’t want to wear them until I washed them again.”

  Dick often hung out at the Bartons’, telling stories and reading his poetry aloud. “I remember him sitting right in the middle of this room while I was working,” Lois said, “and reading bits of this and turning the pages in his notebook.” Once, Dick read a poem he had written in Eugene High, which Juliette Gibson criticized as “pornographic material and not suitable for a high school kid to be reading in a classroom.” Lois Barton recalled “he was so
disgusted that she couldn’t see the validity of what he had written.”

  “He told me stories,” Lois said. “He told me about his mother. About one of her earlier mates who took him down onto the street in Seattle in his birthday suit and turned him loose down there for people to tease. And he was petrified because he wasn’t sure how to get home and pretty uncomfortable about being out there bare naked.” Brautigan told Mrs. Barton this story, transporting the actual event, which involved his younger sister Sandi, into the details of his own life story, an early stab at personal mythology.

  Dick Brautigan’s storytelling revealed how much he disliked his mother. He told the Bartons “she always had a bottle at her elbow and was drunk by 4:00 PM.” Lois had a clear impression “that he was aware of her drinking and not very happy about it and that having this succession of male role models had been a rough kind of thing for him.” Although by her own admission Mary Lou enjoyed drinking beer, neither Peter Webster nor Gary Stewart remembered ever seeing her drunk. Still, lines from Brautigan’s ministory “a glass of beer,” (the final entry in “ROCK around the CLOCK”) echoed with an enduring sadness: “Mable was sitting in a chair. There was a stagnant dreamy expression on her face. She was holding a glass of beer in her hand.”

  Toward the end of his stay with the Bartons, Dick began spending more time in Eugene. He wanted to prepare some of his poetry for submission to publishers, and the only available typewriter belonged to Edna Webster. Brautigan timed his visits to coincide with the hours when Linda was away at school. From his many rough-draft notebooks and sheaves of completed work, he compiled four typed manuscripts. The first was “Tiger in a Telephone Booth.”

  The second manuscript, “Why Unknown Poets Stay Unknown,” Brautigan dedicated “For Edna, / and anybody else / who happens / to be around.” He included a brief foreword introducing himself and stating his age (twenty-one). After describing his status as an “unknown poet,” Brautigan ended with a line so purely in the spirit of his unfettered imagination that he might have penned it at any point in his career: “Let us pretend that my mind is a taxi and suddenly (‘What the hell’s coming off!’) you are riding in it.” He mailed the collection to Random House in New York, using 41 Madison Street as his return address.

  The manuscript consisted of fifty-three short poems, forty-three of which were published in a 1999 anthology of Brautigan’s early work, The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings. Released by his official publisher, it was nevertheless a crude effort. In the original manuscript, each poem was allotted a single page and given room to breathe (a practice Brautigan scrupulously followed with all his later published books of poetry). To save space, this collection printed them one above the other like literary wallpaper.

  Several of the notebooks Dick gave to Edna were also included in this collection and accorded even more savage editorial treatment. Instead of following the author’s intentions, where a page often contained only a single word, the little stories were crammed together, a large dot indicating the page breaks. Brautigan, always a stickler for proper layout and design, would have been appalled. His minimalist tales achieved their emotional power by having the reader turn from page to page before finishing a sentence. Printing the individual lines in a single column separated by dots canceled the author’s artistic aims as effectively as hanging a painting upside down.

  The third fair-copy manuscript Richard Brautigan typed at Edna Webster’s house, “The Smallest Book of Poetry in the Whole God-Damn World,” contained only thirteen poems and carried a dedication revealing worlds about the author, who also considered himself a genius and expected to die young: “For James Dean. / An American genius. / Dead at twenty-four.” These thirteen brief poems displayed a greater degree of sophistication than Brautigan’s earlier work. Three of them utilized traditional meter and rhyme, perhaps the only known examples of his poetry to do so. “A Vision of the World” concerned a two-headed sparrow who read The New York Times and had his subscription canceled by a little boy “with a / BB gun.” In “The Happy Poem,” Brautigan wrote of writing a beautiful poem and then burning it. “All things / become nothing, / anyway,” he observed. The final poem, “A Western Ballad,” sang of Brautigan’s desire to find a new life someplace else. “Wander away [. . .]” he wrote. “Never go back.”

  Richard Brautigan mailed the manuscript of “The Smallest Book of Poetry in the Whole God-Damn World” to the editors of New Directions in New York. He was careful to include a SASE (again, using 41 Madison Street) with his submission. The slender selection had been winnowed from dozens of poems Dick left behind with Edna Webster. One of these, “The Flower Picker,” described the agony he still suffered over Linda, whom he called “Libby.” She had recently started dating a ninth-grade classmate, a boy she would eventually marry five years later. “JESUS CHRIST! My soul screams when I / think about somebody else making love to her. / Some little boy,” Brautigan wrote. “I believe his name is Ed.” Other lines lamented, “What I want to know is: why is she 15 and I 21?” and, “I never got to stroke her. / Or kiss her. / Or hold her hand. / Even.” And, “I want to walk into a / dark house, her body, and turn on all the lights.”

  “Little Children Should Not Wear Beards,” a forty-seven-page poetry collection, was the final fair copy manuscript that Dick typed at Edna’s house, intending it as a submission to Scribner’s, the venerable New York publisher on Fifth Avenue. A self-addressed manila envelope survives, with 41 Madison Street as the return destination, but the writing is not in Brautigan’s hand. It was written by Edna Webster, who never mailed the poems to Scribner’s. The postage stamps on the envelope (twenty-seven cents’ worth) were not canceled. The manuscript remained in Edna’s possession until she eventually sold it. Along with her other Brautigan papers, it ended up at the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, several years after Richard Brautigan died.

  Early in May (1956), two disappointing bits of news arrived in the mail. The first came on the eighth to the Bartons’ rural route address from Horace W. Robinson of the Speech and Dramatic Arts Departments at the U of O. He enclosed a program of five short plays performed three days earlier in the University Theatre under the billing “Theatre Excitement No. 7.” One was a scene from Shakespeare; another, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Aria da Capo (not all that exciting in an age of Genet, Ionesco, and Beckett). Professor Robinson thanked Mr. Brautigan “for the opportunity of examining your experimental dramas,” saying that he had circulated the three short plays among the other directors on the staff and “they have indicated that they are interesting.” The department used “such material” to instruct young actors or for student performances. Having raised Dick’s hopes, Professor Robinson concluded: “Your plays are so brief and devoid of character development that they probably would not be useful in either of these categories.”

  The second letter arrived at 41 Madison Street from The Macmillan Company. It contained Brautigan’s manuscript Linda. In his brief accompanying letter, Assistant Editor-in-Chief R. L. DeWilton politely rejected the poetry and thanked the author for sending it. Richard took it all in stride. He was already long accustomed to receiving what his idol Ernest Hemingway once called “the sternest of all reprimands.”

  Around this time, Dick paid his last visit to the Folston home on Hayes Street. Mary Lou was out working in her vegetable garden, wearing her husband’s old size 52 mackinaw. “Put the shovel in one hand,” she laughed, “and the hoe in the other.” Years later, she recalled that her son was furious at what he perceived as a gross indignity. Mary Lou said Brautigan confronted Bill Folston, raging, “You took my mother, a lovely lady, and you made a darn old Indian squaw out of her.” Richard detested prejudice in any form, and it’s unlikely he ever used these exact words. In any event, Folston, an amiable, good-natured man, never took the bait or replied in kind. Soon after, Dick stormed off, pursued by his angry demons. He had just departed from their lives forever.

  It was Hal Barton’s understanding when
he signed Richard Brautigan out of the mental hospital in Salem that the young man was not to leave the state of Oregon without official permission. Even so, Hal made no effort to block Dick’s planned departure. “He just wanted to go,” he said. “Be out from under here and get into a new environment where he thought he’d be more accepted.” One day in June of 1956, the young poet packed his few belongings in a couple cardboard boxes, each no larger than a case of beer. He didn’t have many clothes, although Lois Barton remembered “a half a dozen or more sets of underwear.” Much of his writing had been left with Edna Webster, but certain manuscripts and works in progress went along with him. He never returned home to collect any of his things, not even a suitcase. “His nice stuff he left here,” Mary Lou said. “He just disappeared, you know.”

  At dawn, five thirty the next morning, with the sun rising over Three-Fingered Jack Mountain, Lois Barton drove Dick Brautigan and his makeshift luggage downtown. He wore his favorite brown suede jacket. Lois dropped him at the bus station. She didn’t buy his ticket or wait to see him off. The Bartons never heard from their resident poet again. He never wrote them a letter or a postcard. “He was just gone and out of the picture,” Lois said.

  Richard Brautigan did not buy a ticket or board the bus that day. He might have killed time with a couple cups of coffee and a cheap breakfast. When it no longer seemed too early, he picked up his boxes and walked over to the Stewarts’ house on Tyler Street. Gary’s mom later wrote that Dick “just showed up at the door. He was down and out and wanted to go to San Francisco.” Milo Stewart’s sister lived in South San Francisco, and he agreed to drive Dick to the city the very next day. Mary Lou later heard a story that her son worked for the Stewarts, helping them paint their house.