Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Price, the Bible Belt Galahad, stepped up to intercede, and the fight was on. Punching and pummeling, they battled their way out the back door and around the building. Price was not as fast or as skilled but Dennis was drunk, “so that sort of equaled it.” The brawl turned into a pure slugfest lasting nearly an hour. Careening back into the main dining room, Price and Dennis hurtled together through the tall French windows and sprawled on the ground outside, bleeding profusely.

  Price was badly cut. Dennis had shards stuck in his back. The manager came around with a hose and washed them down. Afterward, he drove them to Carmel Convalescent Hospital, where Price needed thirteen stitches in his arm. He also needed a new place to stay. He knew a beautiful young woman who had stopped on her way down to meet Pat Boyd, a painter friend who lived south of Gorda. Someone loaned Price a kayak, and he and the girl set off by sea from the hot springs.

  It was twenty-five miles down the coast to Willow Creek and Gorda. Pat Boyd and his mother, Madge, lived in a big house surrounded by pine trees on about 225 acres of prime Big Sur real estate. They welcomed the young seafaring couple with open arms. Pat Boyd, “a wiry little guy,” had plans to start an artistic community. He and Price went to work together making it real. They dug out an area in the arroyo where a stream flowed, creating a water storage pool. Above this, Price and Pat carved a room-sized space into the sloping hillside. Using telephone poles and plywood, they built a small cabin with a deck overhanging the pond.

  The dugout building stood high above the ocean, with a northern earth wall. The other three were largely glass, providing incredible views. Sliding shoji screens divided the cabin into a kitchen, a bedroom, and a living room. Price built a huge fireplace into the back wall, carrying sea-rounded rocks up from the beach. The cabin was without electricity and boasted only rudimentary gravity-flow plumbing, but its beautiful setting eclipsed any minor discomforts.

  Sometime that spring, Price Dunn found himself at a Telegraph Hill party in hot pursuit of a lovely Jewish girl named Ydra. His long ardent chase lasted until the break of dawn. Everyone else had left the apartment, and the young couple sat together watching the sun come up when they met Ginny Alder, their hostess. She was with the tall blond poet Price had seen the previous summer in City Lights. He introduced himself as Dick. There had been no opportunity to get acquainted during the party, so Price invited everyone to come out for breakfast.

  They went to the Star Café on Kearny Street in North Beach, down by the Hall of Justice. Early in the morning, the place was full of cops catching a bite before starting their shifts. Both Price and Richard “collected” great cheap places to eat, and the Star, where a big breakfast cost fifty-five cents, was high on both their lists. The open grill kitchen stood right behind a counter presided over by a Japanese counterman whose adroit movements put Dunn in mind of a ballet.

  Price took Ydra back down to Big Sur, a place he had already started calling “Boydland,” and they got to know each other a whole lot better for a couple of weeks before she vanished from his life forever. Price returned to the city and “started seeing Richard pretty regularly.” They became drinking buddies, hanging out in North Beach, drawn together by a love of tall tales and preposterous wordplay. By then, Richard and Virginia had married and moved to the apartment on Washington Street. Richard and Price often shared a bottle of cheap wine up on Telegraph Hill. When the talk turned to women, Brautigan always said, “The thing to do is find a woman that will support you.”

  “That’s a great dream,” Price replied, “if you can do it.”

  City life had its attractions, but Price was never able to sit still for long and soon headed south again. In due time, he invited his new friends to come down and join him. When Dick and Ginny arrived in August, bringing along six jugs of wine as a house present, Price put them up in his cabin overlooking the pond and moved into a recently built A-frame across the way. The roof beams were so low by the fireplace that it was impossible to move about without cracking your head into the ceiling. The young newlyweds spread their sleeping bags between the dismembered parts of an old Matchless motorcycle Price intended on restoring someday. “It’s a $400 bike,” he remarked every time Richard complained after tripping over a stray piston. Price made no attempt to reassemble the machine, and it remained a mechanical jigsaw puzzle.

  Richard and Virginia stayed in Big Sur with Price for a month on their first visit, gradually adapting to the comparative tranquility of rural bohemia. Brautigan worked on his poetry and engaged in literary conversation with Price Dunn. They disagreed over French poetry. Richard took the odd position that it wasn’t of any worth because “you can say anything in French and it sounds good.”

  Price felt he was “prejudiced” against the musical nature of the language. He insisted that there was some great French poetry and introduced Richard to the work of Robert Desnos and Charles Baudelaire. Brautigan had a nodding acquaintance with their poetry but only read it again in depth at his friend’s urging. “He just flipped out,” Price said.

  In the evenings after supper, they sat talking around the big fireplace. Price was a natural-born storyteller and regaled his friends with tall tales of his wayward youth. In spite of his Southern birth and upbringing, Price did not have a grandfather who fought for the Confederacy. The story existed only as a family fable, starring Great Uncle John as the “Confederate General.” Price told the legend to Richard, “laughing about it because I knew it was a total myth.”

  Meals at Boydland were simple. Fresh vegetables harvested from the garden, abalone gathered at low tide, small rockfish caught when the sea was calm, hard flat bread Price baked with sacks of grain bought in Monterey, rice and potatoes from the same source, and occasionally quail and doves if Dunn got lucky with the .22. There might have been venison, Price being an eager poacher of the neighborhood deer, but he lacked ammunition for his trusty old 30-40 Krag. The only time he used the empty rifle was to terrify a stranded motorist caught siphoning gas out of his truck one night. “I scared the shit out of that son of a bitch!”

  Some evenings, conversation became impossible. The moment the sun dipped beyond the western horizon, a mighty chorus of infernal croaking erupted from the perimeter of the pond only a few feet from the cabin. An enormous population of tiny frogs had mysteriously appeared, as if by spontaneous generation, and nothing seemed to quiet them down once they began their amorous rek-kek-ka-kekking. Shouting obscenities didn’t work. Nor did firecrackers or hurled stones. Price thought perhaps alligators might do the trick, and Pat Boyd bought one at a pet shop. They introduced it into the pond but to no avail. The frogs disregarded the resident reptile and continued their nightly din. If the alligator ate frogs, he didn’t eat near enough. He lived on happily in the pond until one night, during the course of a wild drunken party, someone spotted the strange beast and stole it.

  A spell of heavy rain greeted the Brautigans’ arrival. Ginny remembered that “it rained incessantly for ten days.” Housebound, the visitors had no escape from the frogs. The little amphibians became a torture and a torment. Banging a broom handle on the plywood deck shut them up for a few moments, but soon, peep-peep-peep, they began again, building to a cacophonous crescendo. For reasons no one could comprehend, the wine Richard and Ginny brought turned out to be sour and remained untouched. Huddled by the fire, with the frogs louder than the rain drumming on the roof, someone suggested maybe wine might shut the frogs up. They rushed outside through the downpour and emptied six gallons of wine into the pond. The frogs croaked on, louder than ever.

  Whenever the raucous frog-roar rose to a racket, reading became the only way to pass the time in the evening. Price Dunn remembered one night when he came into his cabin and found Richard reading by lamplight. It wasn’t French poetry this time but a Gideon Bible Price kept among his library. A closer look revealed his friend taking notes. “What are you doing?” Price asked.

  “I’m checking the punctuation out.”

  Incredul
ous, Price laughed. His friend was not joking, and they entered into a serious discussion regarding the importance of punctuation. “A period put in the right place can pierce the heart,” Richard said, paraphrasing the Russian author Isaak Babel. An early surviving Brautigan notebook preserved his fascination with counting punctuation. Each page was divided into five wobbly vertical columns labeled commas, semicolons, colons, question marks, periods. Richard dutifully recorded the exact number of punctuation marks, page by page, in each of the columns.

  On another evening, sitting at the big fireplace, Price suggested a new way to pass the time in the frog-loud night. “There was always a transient population at Boydland,” Dunn recalled. One of those passing through had been a railroad worker from Berkeley named Al, who went “through a lid of grass in a day.” Upon his departure, he left two or three ounces of marijuana behind. When Price came across this stash that night, he asked, “You guys want to get loaded?”

  Richard didn’t smoke and had never tried marijuana, but he made no objection. Ginny also seemed agreeable, so Price “rolled up some joints.” When he saw his friend “didn’t know how to inhale,” Price instructed him in the proper method. “Now, you’ve got to hold that smoke in,” he said. “Suck the air in with it and hold it.” Virginia had done this before and didn’t need toking lessons from Price. “She got high quicker. Virginia got giggly and laughing.” Richard also got stoned, but “he was sort of like puzzled.” Soon, the room grew very still, and they sat immobilized, listening to the infernal frogs. “We were just sort of quiet zombies there, not much conversation.” That was the only time. Richard and Virginia had no interest in getting high again.

  The oddest occurrence during the Brautigans’ monthlong stay at Boydland owed nothing to the effects of narcotics. Hitching home from a shopping trip to Monterey one day, Price Dunn got a ride from a heavyset balding businessman driving an Aston Martin. He looked to be about fifty and very athletic. Price also thought that he was crazy. “He was just wacked out. Everybody was after him.”

  Upon arriving in Gorda, Price brought the paranoid businessman to the cabin and introduced him to Richard and Ginny. The man kept an expensive leather briefcase tightly clutched under his arm as if it might contain atomic secrets. Enlisting his new companions in his conspiracy, the crazy businessman opened the briefcase and passed it around. It was crammed with cash and stock certificates. Price held the briefcase in awe for just a moment and estimated it contained at least $100,000 in tightly bundled hundreds. The stranger snatched it back before he made a more accurate calculation.

  The sight of so much loot opened up the possibility of exciting new vistas for Price. “I told Richard, ‘I am going to get that money, Goddamnit! If I have to knock that son of a bitch in the head. I never hit anybody, you know, hurt anybody like that. I’m going to be a criminal now. I can see it. My criminal career is starting.’”

  Sensing potential foul play, the businessman went into the kitchen and armed himself with a big butcher knife. Richard and Virginia were plainly frightened by all his crazy talk, the cash-crammed briefcase as menacing as a ticking time bomb. “He was talking totally irrationally,” Ginny remembered, “and I knew we were going to be up all night.” When not waving his knife around, the businessman sat by the fire and held his stock certificates over the flames. Virginia found this gesture “a total yawn.” Go ahead and burn it, she thought, it’s your money. Price had other ideas and urged him not to do anything stupid.

  By morning, the heightened paranoia made the businessman anxious to hide his expensive automobile lest phantom pursuers find it and track him down. Price happily went along with the gag, getting an ax and a machete. The businessman hung on to the knife. They went up to the road and drove the Aston Martin in under the trees. All along, Price schemed how he was going to get his hands on the briefcase. Working together, the two men cut branches and piled them over the car until it was completely concealed. Partway through their camouflaging project, the businessman somehow slipped away unnoticed. “He was real sneaky,” Price said. “I looked around and he’s gone.” As Price had the keys to the Aston Martin in his pocket, he figured all was not lost.

  The businessman had answered the call of nature, venturing down to the “beautiful” outhouse with an ocean view that Price had built into the side of the hill. When he returned, the briefcase was gone. The businessman no longer had it with him.

  “Where’s the briefcase?” Price demanded.

  “Don’t worry,” the stranger said. “I’ve taken care of it.”

  Later, Price sneaked back up the hill and searched the Aston Martin without success. He found no sign of the cash-filled briefcase. The businessman seemed in a jolly mood. He had taken to the bohemian life and wanted to join the commune. Back at home in San Jose he had an old truck, a “really good truck,” which he offered to give to Price. It would be his initiation offering. Price instantly agreed with this plan. If he could keep the guy around, he stood a much better chance of finding the missing briefcase.

  Price and the crazy stranger uncovered the Aston Martin and drove up to San Jose. The Brautigans gratefully stayed behind in Boydland, glad not to be under the same roof with a knife-wielding loony. When the two men arrived at the palatial South Bay home, they found the old truck parked out back. Price helped load it up with “all this shit” his wacky benefactor felt would be useful on a commune. They were just finishing when the businessman’s son arrived, accompanied by a lawyer.

  After cordial introductions, the businessman’s son said, “My father really needs to be under psychiatric care. We appreciate your help. Where do you live? We’ll send you back home.”

  Price agreed. There seemed no other choice. They gave him a lift to the bus station and even bought him a ticket to Monterey. All things considered, it struck him as pretty fair treatment. Price Dunn never saw the wacky businessman again but began searching the hillside around the outhouse for the missing briefcase. He probed under the sagebrush and blackberry thickets, rolled over rocks and rotting logs, searched every nook and cranny large enough to conceal a hundred grand. “I went all over that damn hillside down there searching for that briefcase.” Price never found it.

  Richard and Virginia returned to San Francisco. The journey to Big Sur had been quite a trip. An element of magic adventure imbued the whole experience. It was more than the rustic life. Brautigan had plenty of experience roughing it as a kid. Rural settings also meant little to a country boy who had fled a bucolic environment for the gritty pleasures of the city. Rather, unpredictable Price Dunn provided the magic.

  Who else would put an empty rifle to the head of a suspected gasoline thief or bring home a madman with a briefcase full of money or change his teeth three times a year. Price supplied marijuana and introduced alligators into a frog pond ecology. Price and his manic enthusiasms reacquainted Richard with the wonders of French literature. Not long after returning to the city, Brautigan started working on a serial poem featuring Baudelaire as the central recurring character. The Big Sur trip charged Richard Brautigan’s creative batteries with the purest high-voltage energy. He had just met his very own Neal Cassady.

  sixteen: scorpio rising

  JACK SPICER URGED Richard Brautigan to have his horoscope done, there being no shortage of astrologers in Frisco. The most prominent local stargazer was Gavin Arthur (homosexual grandson of President Chester A. Arthur), who lived in the East-West House, along with his friends Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder. Brautigan could not afford Gavin Arthur’s services. Instead, he had an unknown astrologer draw up his chart, an unattributed horoscope probably completed sometime before July 1963, as the blank form on which it was prepared bears a printed address without a zip code.

  Richard Gary Brautigan was an Aquarian with his moon in Sagittarius. Spicer queried Brautigan on these and other aspects of his horoscope, offering his own personal take on various sidereal alignments, reinterpreting the importance of having Mercury in the Fourth House (an aspect R
ichard shared with the mad dancer Vasily Nijinsky), which can indicate a “Utopian fixation.”

  Peter Miller, who first met Richard in 1969, remembered the writer’s ongoing fascination with astrology. “He was very keen on it and very aware that James Joyce was an Aquarius and that he was an Aquarius and that Aquarians are always being characterized as having two sides, the visionary side and then this very strict side, the saturnine side—Ron Loewinsohn was his saturnine friend—and he was very conservative. He had each sign quite declinated [sic]. For example, he kept saying, ‘All my girlfriends are Aries.’ Very fiery. He didn’t want it to be an intellectual relationship. That just was not his deal. Maybe it was too intimate.”

  Because Richard Brautigan had incorrectly given the hour of his birth as one minute past midnight, the half-hour discrepancy caused his astrologer to mistakenly note a rising sign in Libra. Although not much else changed in his chart, the error resulted in a faulty evaluation of Brautigan’s personality. Both Spicer and the astrologer likely told him that he was relationship-oriented, friendly and sharing in nature, responsive, gregarious.

  In fact, Richard’s actual birth at 12:30 AM made him Scorpio rising. His nature was 180 degrees opposite from what his advisers deduced. Having a rising sign in Scorpio indicated a secretive, cautious, reserved, privately creative personality, a much more accurate assessment of Brautigan’s nature. To whatever degree Richard believed in astrology, he carried this erroneous sense of self to the grave, preserving the misleading star chart among his papers until the day he died.

  seventeen: scaling mount parnassus

  1958, YEAR OF the Edsel and the hula hoop, also marked the birth of Barbie and the Xerox copier. America successfully launched Explorer I, her first satellite, while, closer to Earth, Charlie Starkweather began his murder-spree love-romp across Nebraska. The enormous success of Howl and On the Road focused national attention on the tight-knit North Beach bohemian community. America clamored for lurid tales of the bearded, sandal-shod, pad-dwelling, dope-smoking beatniks.