Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  When the poet Lew Welch moved to San Francisco in October of 1957 he still wrote newspaper ad copy for Montgomery Ward. According to local legend, during his brief advertising career Welch penned the immortal line “Raid Kills Bugs Dead.” In a letter to Philip Whalen, Lew recorded his immediate reaction to the excesses of the current scene. “Telegraph Hill with its children-type Bohemes was a real shock. Saw one 20 year old in a black greatcoat, pointed patent leather button shoes, black stockings, spiky umbrella, and shaved skull [. . .] it is sad to see that fine section ruined and expensive.”

  The following summer, a wave of tourists flooded the Beach and roamed upper Grant Avenue in search of bohemian highjinks. In their wake sprang up numerous pottery shops, bead stringers, and sandal makers. The moment Miss Smith’s Tea Room closed its doors forever in ’58, the Coffee Gallery took its place at the same address, offering poetry, jazz, and the singular talents of Lord Buckley. In May 1958, the Examiner began a three-part series on the Beats, which aroused the interest of both curious hangers-on and the local police. Kerouac again unwittingly fueled the frenzy, publishing both The Subterraneans and The Dharma Bums in 1958, further padding the passenger lists of the North Beach tour buses even as his buddy Neal Cassady was busted for possessing three joints and sentenced to five years to life at San Quentin.

  Undercover police nailed Lenny Bruce for obscenity after laughing through his performance at the hungry i. The same bluecoat bluenose attitude compelled Leo Krikorian to take down a Robert LaVigne nude hanging in The Place. “The city fathers decided they didn’t want any more lifestyles like those being displayed in the Beach,” recalled alto saxophonist Norwood “Pony” Poindexter, who played at both the Jazz Cellar and the Coffee Gallery.

  Earlier in the year, Richard Brautigan caught Lenny Bruce’s act at Ann’s 440 Club during the comedian’s first major multiweek performance, when much of the material released on his second album was recorded. Located at 440 Broadway, down the block from the recently opened Enrico’s Sidewalk Café, the place was owned by Ann Dee, a cabaret singer whose vocal chords had given out. Formerly Mona’s Club 440, Frisco’s first lesbian bar, which closed in 1948, Ann’s 440 was the spot where a nineteen-year-old singer named Johnny Mathis got his first break.

  Robert Briggs described Ann’s 440 Club as “a very hard number [. . .] very hard drug scene. Very hard prostitute scene. Very hard criminal scene. Very hard god-knows-what scene.” Briggs worked nearby at the Jazz Workshop (474 Broadway) checking IDs. He remembered Brautigan’s initial reaction to Lenny Bruce. “Richard was fractured,” he said. “Richard was stunned. He was a bit lost for words.” Knowing Brautigan to be “very critical with himself and with everything,” Briggs recalled that Richard, who might ordinarily have rejected the comedian’s act for its raw profanity, “always thought highly of Bruce.”

  Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, and Jack Kerouac’s classic twenty-six-minute Beat film, Pull My Daisy, came out in 1959. That same year, MGM released The Beat Generation, a Cinemascope B movie, while a popular television series, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, introduced a bongo-playing, goatee-wearing character named Maynard G. Krebs to a mainstream audience. Ever-larger hordes of curious beatnik watchers crowded into Greenwich Village and North Beach. By January 1960, The Place closed its doors forever. “I got rid of The Place because the scene had changed,” Leo Krikorian remarked. “Everything in the Beach changed, and I didn’t dig the scene anymore.”

  For Richard Brautigan, the decline of North Beach was not a cause for deep mourning. In an unpublished short story (“Going Home to the Locust”) he described beatniks as “those grunion of Grant Avenue who throw themselves up onto the cement.” Having come to Frisco seeking his future as a writer, Brautigan observed the social intercourse of Hube the Cube, Red Fred, Mad Marie, Badtalking Charlie, and Gene the Scrounge with the dispassionate distance of a lepidopterist studying butterfly migrations. Richard was a regular at The Place, yet when the bar went out of business he followed Jack Spicer and his crowd to Gino & Carlo’s on Green Street and did his drinking elsewhere.

  Gino & Carlo’s was an Italian workingman’s place, long, narrow, and nondescript, with the old bar to the left of the entrance. Two tables (one called the “poet’s table”), stood up front, flanked by the jukebox and a cigarette machine. A couple pool tables occupied the back room. A black metal mailbox hung on the wall up front, waiting to receive contributions for the many mimeographed publications of the era. Some people called Gino & Carlo’s “Jack Spicer’s living room,” but Don Carpenter remembered it differently. “The bar is a very tough place and it’s a very macho place,” he said. “When you go into Gino & Carlo’s you leave your delicacy behind.”

  Around this time, Robert Creeley rolled back into Frisco from New Mexico, where he was teaching at a boy’s school. One night in a North Beach bar, Ron Loewinsohn introduced him to Brautigan. They hit it off right away. Richard had always been fascinated with World War II, and Bob’s wild tales of interrupting his Harvard education to serve in Burma and India in the American Field Service from 1944 to 1945 struck a vivid chord in his imagination. Brautigan and Creeley wandered through the watering holes of North Beach, talking the night away, an echo of the energy Creeley felt on an earlier visit to Frisco in ’55, when Ed Dorn, his friend from Black Mountain, met him at the Greyhound bus station (Ed worked at the baggage depot) and they sat up until dawn with Allen Ginsberg, drinking and talking at Dorn’s place.

  At some point during this later evening, Creeley recalled going up to Richard Brautigan’s apartment. Because she had a day job, Ginny was fast asleep. “We sort of drifted in, checked, and then drifted out,” Creeley recalled. “And we went classically back to the bar” and “started roaming around from there.” Just another poets’ lost evening on the town. “I can well understand why their marriage didn’t work out,” Creeley said in retrospect.

  His wife, Bobbie, recalled Richard telling her of another episode that indicated his marriage was not made in heaven. The Brautigans were having a dinner party. It was spaghetti as usual. Upset about something, Ginny nagged at Richard as the bowl of pasta made its way around the table from guest to guest. “She won’t leave him alone,” Bobbie Creeley remembered. At a certain point, Brautigan had enough of his wife’s harangue. He reached over, grabbed the bowl of spaghetti, and upended it over his head. Richard put the empty bowl back on the table without saying a word. “He’s sitting there quietly continuing to eat with his head covered with spaghetti. It was dripping down his face and onto his shoulders like a wig.” Richard laughed out loud when he told this story to Bobbie. “That shut her up!” he howled.

  Brautigan continued to see his work appear in print. Early in 1957, the first issue of a quarterly called Danse Macabre was published out of a small office in Manhattan Beach, California. Volume 1, number 1, contained poetry by Carl Larsen, Lilith Lorraine, Judson Crews, and on page 18, two poems by Richard Brautigan.”

  In the fall of 1957, Hearse: A Vehicle Used to Convey the Dead, a little fifty-cent magazine, began publication in Eureka, California. E. V. Griffith, the editor, prefaced his hand-sewn quarterly with “carrying poetry, prose, artwork and incidental cadaver [sic] to the Great Cemetery of the American Intellect [. . .]” The second issue of Hearse came out early in 1958, and “Coroner’s Report” on the inside back cover reprinted one of Richard Brautigan’s poems from Danse Macabre.

  Kenn Davis spent a lot of time with Richard and Ginny, sketch pad always close at hand. He drew them together at Mike’s Pool Hall and captured Richard eating pork buns (his favorites, bought by the sack at Sam Wo’s) in Washington Square. Davis sketched Brautigan reading at The Place on Blabbermouth Night and on the walks they took together through Chinatown, Richard staring in the shop windows, fascinated by the chickens and ducks hanging on display, his poet’s eye drawn to the stacked slabs of smoked fish, iridescent gold and silver like some mysterious Asian treasure.

  Many of Kenn’s sketches were quick thumb
nails. He worked them up later into finished drawings. Davis accompanied the Brautigans on several trips to Big Sur, from time to time, he and Richard flew handmade kites down at the Marina Green. Kenn sketched this and the fishing expeditions he and Dick and Ginny took in the spring over to Sausalito, where they dangled their lines off the end of a pier, hoping “for sunfish and such.”

  Kenn Davis lived in an apartment on Francisco Street. “It had a back porch with marvelous north light.” This prompted the artist to ask his friend Dick if he could paint his portrait. Brautigan responded with enthusiasm and sat for Davis “two or three times, an hour or so each,” while Kenn painted in oils on stretched linen. Richard posed without his glasses, and his penetrating eyes burned with a mournful gaze. As Davis worked, Brautigan watched over his shoulder from time to time, making encouraging comments. “That’s interesting,” he said. “That’s good.”

  The painting was shown in the Cellini Gallery as part of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s “little extravaganza” called “The Rolling Renaissance.” Brautigan hung the portrait in his North Beach apartment, taking it with him from move to move. It eventually went along to the apartment on Geary Street in 1966. When fame followed the publication of Trout Fishing, a year or so later, Richard gave the painting back to Kenn, saying “it was not the way he looked anymore.” Brautigan had grown his distinctive mustache and had much longer hair. The portrait no longer resembled the public image he had carefully created. There was talk of having Kenn paint a new likeness, but nothing ever came of it.

  In February 1958, Richard completed an ambitious nine-part surrealistic poem he called “The Galilee Hitch-Hiker.” Always a lapidary writer by inclination, Brautigan skillfully crafted elements of his personal biography with a unique abstract vision. The poem’s nine sections were bound together by the recurring character of French poet Charles Baudelaire, whose Les Fleurs du Mal explored the discovery of hidden “correspondences” between beauty and vice and was deemed immoral when first published in 1857.

  In Part 1, Baudelaire, “driving a Model A,” picks up Jesus Christ, hitchhiking in Galilee. The Savior is on his way to Golgotha, where he has a concession “at the carnival.” Part 3, entitled “1939,” recalled Brautigan’s childhood “in the slums / of Tacoma.” His mother lets him turn the crank of the coffee grinder, and he makes believe it is a hurdy-gurdy. Baudelaire, the ghostly spectator, pretends to be a monkey, “hopping up and down / and holding out / a tin cup.” Part 4, “The Flowerburgers,” has Baudelaire running a hamburger stand in San Francisco. Instead of meat, the dead French poet places flowers between the halved buns. When customers demand a burger with onions, “Baudelaire would give them / a flowerburger / instead [. . .]”

  Part 8, “Insane Asylum,” speaks directly from the heart of Brautigan’s painful personal experience and describes Baudelaire going “to the insane asylum / disguised as a / psychiatrist.” He stays for two months, the same length of time that Brautigan spent at the Salem Hospital. When Baudelaire leaves the asylum, it “loved him so much” it “followed / him all over / California,” rubbing “up against his / leg like a / strange cat.” Part 9, “My Insect Funeral,” ends the poem on a melancholy note, recalling the tiny cemetery the poet maintained as a child, when he dug little graves under the rosebush with a spoon, burying insects in matchboxes and dead birds wrapped in red cloth.

  Later that February, Richard and Ginny returned to Big Sur for another zany visit with their unpredictable friend Price Dunn. Whenever there was a break in the near-continuous Pacific storms, Richard set out to explore the fishing possibilities. After being cabin-bound for five rainy days, he and Price and Ginny wandered far up narrow, rushing Gorda Creek. They scrambled under the manzanita for a mile or so along the mountain side. The deluge had transformed the creek into a rain-swollen torrent. For reasons beyond logic, they elected to cross over.

  Sliding down the muddy slope with reckless élan, Price jumped straight into the raging current. Ginny followed, injuring her left knee on an underwater boulder. The water was chest-high and “running really fast.” Unable to swim, Richard remained on the bank, clutching his fishing pole, of no help to his wife and best pal. “He was running back and forth on the top of the ridge like a madman.” Ginny and Price decided to wade downstream around the tangle of manzanita, where a crossing might be possible. They struggled on, floundering in the rushing torrent. “We just hung on and climbed back out,” Virginia recalled. “It was scary.”

  The winter weather remained wet and cold, rain pelting down against the makeshift dugout. They met Pat Boyd’s companion, the granddaughter of Aimee Semple McPherson. Price claimed she had once worked as a part-time prostitute in L.A. Pregnant and recently returned from New Mexico, she called herself Alicia Tree. A couple months later, Price delivered her baby. They all spent a good deal of time gathered by the fireplace, drinking tea. Richard kept busy with his notebook. Among the poems he wrote during the stay was “The Castle of the Cormorants,” a mournful, evocative piece in which Hamlet, carrying a cormorant, marries a wet drowned Ophelia.

  March 1958 saw the publication of Hearse number 3 with two poems by Richard Brautigan, both from the Leslie Woolf Hedley collection Four New Poets. The spring issue of Epos (vol. 9, no. 3) appeared early in 1958, with Brautigan’s poem “Kingdom Come.” It was never collected or reprinted elsewhere. The featured poet was Miller Williams, a professor at the University of Arkansas and the father of future singer/songwriter Lucinda Williams.

  That same spring, Ron Loewinsohn published his first book of poetry, Watermelons. He and Richard Brautigan had fallen out (the first of many schisms between them) and were no longer speaking. When Richard saw a copy of Ron’s book he leafed through the pages until he came to a poem once dedicated to him, “beautifully minus a dedication.” He smiled and said “Shit,” tossing the book aside. Years later, Brautigan eliminated previous dedications whenever former friends offended him.

  In May, with Jack Spicer’s encouragement, Joe Dunn and the White Rabbit Press published The Galilee Hitch-Hiker in an edition of two hundred copies. Richard asked Kenn Davis to design the cover art. “So I showed him some ideas that I had,” Kenn recalled, “and he thought this one would work. I did another little rough in pencil and said, let me expand this a little bit.” Davis went off for a day or so and came back with a preliminary ink drawing, “kind of semifinished,” thinking to do “a more polished version” once he had Brautigan’s approval. “But he liked that one just fine. He says, ‘Don’t touch it. That’s great. We’ll just go with that.’”

  The wispy ink sketch portrays a nearly deserted carnival midway where hot dog vendors and balloon salesmen wander aimlessly beneath a deserted Ferris wheel. Looming ominously in the background, a dark cross towers above Calvary, the ghostly framework of a roller coaster swirling around it in the crosshatched sky. All in all, a handsome little book for a quarter.

  Because White Rabbit Press lacked binding equipment, the printed pages and red cover wraps were delivered to Brautigan unbound. Richard, Ginny, and Kenn Davis sat around the Brautigans’ kitchen table hand-stitching the little sixteen-page chapbook together with needles and thread, “drinking wine and yakking.” When all two hundred were finished, they tackled the problem of distribution. City Lights could be counted on to take a few, but the rest had to be placed in other bookstores through pounding the pavement and knocking on doors. By June, copies of The Galilee Hitch-Hiker had been distributed to all the local booksellers.

  While making book delivery rounds in North Beach, Richard discovered an intriguing new hangout on the corner of Greenwich and Grant had opened earlier in the month. No sign outside nor any descriptive lettering on the show windows identified the place. Only an oil painting hanging in the window on the Grant Avenue side provided a clue. It portrayed a multiracial group standing around a table, which held a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine. The street people called the place “Bread and Wine.”

  It appeared to be a c
offeehouse. The high-ceilinged thirty-by-forty-foot storefront contained an odd assortment of tables and chairs, crowded bookshelves, and a long counter with a five-gallon coffee urn next to a tall pyramid of inverted mugs. The look was European, clean, functional, entirely secular. Nothing suggested any religious affiliation although the place had been sponsored by the Congregational Church. It wasn’t long before poet Bob Kaufman, “the Black American Rimbaud,” dubbed it the “Bread and Wine Mission.” His offhand quip stuck. Soon, everyone on the Beach called the corner spot “The Mission.”

  The pastor of this unorthodox sanctuary was Pierre Delattre, a blond, blue-eyed, twenty-eight-year-old graduate of the University of Chicago Divinity School. Interested in “the history of religion as it applied to literature,” Delattre had never intended to become a minister. He wanted to be a writer. Always casually dressed in old tennis shoes, bleached blue jeans, and a hooded white sweatshirt with a large pectoral cross hanging around his neck on a black cord, Pierre Delattre held an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Pennsylvania. He’d also worked construction in Puerto Rico, unloaded a lacquering oven at a tin can factory, and “following in Kerouac’s footsteps,” toiled as a switchman for the Southern Pacific.

  Delattre had come to believe that the true center of spiritual life was not in churches but “out in the streets among musicians and poets.” He gave a speech at a large Congregational church in Oakland about how “the institutional church was the greatest impediment to religious life in America.” He was approached afterward by Reverend Robert W. Spike, head of the Congregational Board of Home Missions. Spike, murdered a few years later, had been the pastor of Judson Memorial Church in New York’s Greenwich Village from 1949 to 1955. He asked Delattre, “What if we found you a place where you could just be present and encourage the spiritual dimension of what’s going on in poetry and jazz and the arts in general?” Pierre thought this was a great idea, and the ecumenical coffeehouse was born. The Missions Board rented an empty storefront in North Beach. Delattre was ordained into the Congregational Church. The young minister told his benefactors, “Don’t expect me to be trying to convert anybody to Christianity. I want to be equally responsive to Judaism and Buddhism and Hinduism and so forth.”