Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Delattre moved into an apartment above the store with his wife, Lois (an actress and psychologist), and their two children. He commissioned an artist named Del Lederle to paint the picture in the front window. Bread and Wine was open for business. “Almost immediately, we were jammed with people,” Delattre recalled. “We had about two poetry readings a week, right from the start, and a lot of stuff going on with drumming and dancing and music. And I had a street theater that was performing inside and outside. It was pretty quickly a center.”

  Richard Brautigan wandered into Bread and Wine not long after it opened. He was hanging out with George Stanley, a member of the Spicer group known for his garrulous, argumentative nature. Delattre knew Stanley as part of a gang of unruly poets who called themselves “The Disruptionists.” Once, they smashed a piano to pieces with sledgehammers, “symbolically destroying bourgeois culture.” Another time, a couple of them peed on the floor of the Mission prior to a reading, the ultimate critical put-down.

  Richard and Pierre quickly became friends, in part because Brautigan was so clearly his own man and not a part of any group. Delattre also admired Richard’s poetry. “He was one of the first of the poets in that area to be really caught up in popular cultural mythology,” he recalled. “But rather than using Billy the Kid and other American icons, he was going European, and his big kick at that time was Baudelaire.”

  A reading at Bread and Wine soon followed. Brautigan was featured on a bill with Ebbe Borregaard, Joanne Kyger, and Gary Snyder. After two years abroad in Kyoto, Snyder had returned to the Bay Area in April and moved back to his simple shack on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais. Joanne and Gary met recently at The Place, and their intricate mating dance began. Pierre Delattre grouped Joanne with the Disruptionists. “I don’t know what there was about her,” he recalled. “She would walk into a room, and chaos would break out.” Kyger confessed to being “totally stoned” with nervous exhilaration on the night of the reading.

  Richard Brautigan was also very nervous that night. Delattre remembered how he had to get drunk before he could appear before an audience. “He was very shy, very skittish,” downing a bottle of wine prior to his reading. The poets all read by candlelight, sitting on stools beside another stool supporting a big candelabrum. Afterward, Delattre “passed the hat” among the crowd and divvied up the take. Each of the poets received $5. It was the first time any of them had ever been paid for a reading.

  Brautigan certainly needed the money. He and Ginny saved every penny for a trip they were planning. For almost a year, ever since a friend loaned them a copy of Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiche Maya, they had yearned to travel to Mexico. They had friends living in Oaxaca, and having heard the exchange rate was good, they talked about maybe heading down there. Mexico seemed like an inexpensive and fascinating place to live, plus Ginny spoke some Spanish, so they decided to go south that summer.

  The Brautigans gave away most of their few possessions and packed up the rest of their stuff in the Washington Street apartment. Cleaning out a closet, Richard came across Ron Loewinsohn’s Christmas gift, the medieval manuscript page. He had tossed it in there after their friendship soured. “The last thing we need around is something that asshole gave us,” Brautigan wrote several years later, describing how he in turn gave the manuscript page to a ninety-year-old woman who lived downstairs. Not long after, she moved to the Tenderloin, a single room in the Kit Carson Hotel being all she could afford on her pathetic $70-a-month pension. And that’s how Richard imagined the final resting place of the illuminated manuscript, “stuffed under the bed [. . .] surrounded by the smell of boiling celery root.”

  On June 16, Richard sold another pint of blood, adding twenty bucks to the kitty. They waited for Ginny’s federal income tax return, and when the check finally arrived in early summer the Brautigans headed south. They hitchhiked from San Francisco to Nogales, Arizona. It was excruciatingly hot in the desert, never a pleasant prospect when thumbing a ride. While on the road, Richard stopped shaving, deciding to grow a beard.

  After crossing the border, the young couple boarded a bargain-basement-priced bus, embarking on an arduous journey along the Gulf Coast past Guaymas to Mazatlán, where they stopped at a cheap hotel. Ginny remembered “a kind of night bus trip to forever.” The next leg was much shorter, and they traveled by bus only as far as Tepic, the nondescript capital of the state of Nayarit. They spent the night here. In the morning, another bus took them over the mountains through Guadalajara onto the central plateau toward Mexico City.

  Richard and Ginny rolled into the “ass end” of the Federal District, past “a huge ten-mile slum,” acres and acres of hardscrabble shacks like a tidewater line of poverty washed up against the gates of the city. They caught a cab at the bus station and asked to be taken to an inexpensive hotel. “I don’t know who he thought we were or what he thought we wanted,” Ginny recalled. The driver took them to a whorehouse in the Zona Rosa. Their room reeked of cheap perfume. A garish maroon and yellow satin spread covered the bed. Having no place else to go, they stayed for the night.

  In the morning, Richard and Ginny found a different hotel, “more like a bed and breakfast,” eventually staying in a couple places, wandering around the city, sightseeing for about eight or nine days. One afternoon, Brautigan, sitting by himself in a sidewalk restaurant eating the comida corrida , observed a couple kids moving from table to table, carrying three or four beige puppies. The kids approached and asked if he wanted to buy one. Richard declined, knowing dogs would not be welcome in his hotel room. He thought the puppies were “cute, but doomed.” After the urchins left, Richard reflected on their lives. “The kids had about as much future as the dogs,” he scrawled in his notebook twenty-four years later. “In Mexico, I wouldn’t bet on the future of anything.”

  After a week or so, Richard and Ginny took another, more luxurious bus south to Oaxaca, Oaxaca. Here they entered a world far different from the slums and high-rises of the capital. The population of the state and city of Oaxaca consisted largely of indigenous Zapotecs, and the citizens crowding the narrow streets fronted by stately Spanish colonial architecture were all Indian, their faces innocent of any European stain. At the time, there were only nine Americans living in Oaxaca.

  Richard and Ginny located their friend John from Marin, who together with his wife and young daughter made up one-third of the Oaxacan gringo population. With John’s help, they looked long and hard for a place to live, finally locating a house in the cornfields on the outskirts of town. When it rained, water puddled on the flat roof and the ceiling leaked. For almost all of the three months the Brautigans occupied the little place, several men laid new tile above their heads, a never-ending job. The workmen were always polite, but Ginny thought they were up on the roof “just to observe us.”

  In the marketplace, observant shawl-wrapped onion vendors were considerably less courteous. These were Tehuanas, women from the Gulf of Tehuantepec on the Pacific Coast, noted for their flashy gold jewelry and rude behavior. Ginny remembered how they loved teasing Richard, calling him chivo (goat) because of his new red beard. The Brautigans spent a lot of time sitting in sidewalk cafés fronting the fancy hotels surrounding the Zócalo, Oaxaca’s central plaza. One could nurse a drink, watch the evening pasejar, and listen to brass band music played in the ornate circular bandstand at the center of the square. The price of a Coke or a brandy entitled a customer to use the hotel lobby’s clean tiled bathrooms.

  On the plaza, they befriended a ragged twelve-year-old urchin who hung around, selling Chiclets or shining shoes. He approached Richard and Ginny, wanting to give them a shine. They wore sandals, and this became a big joke, laughter cutting through the language barrier. Richard asked the boy if he ever went to school. The kid explained he was a member of the Union of Unsalaried Workers, which ran a night school for boys like him. Richard and Ginny were greatly amused at the notion of unpaid workers joining a union. Perhaps they paid imaginary dues.

>   The long walk into town often became an ordeal. Rain turned the thick red clay soil of the surrounding cornfields into a nearly impassable gumbo. Staying at home wasn’t a whole lot of fun. Frustrated by his inability to learn more than a few words of Spanish, Richard began drinking more and more. Ginny remembered him hurling his brandy glass against the wall, furious at having almost no one to talk with. Brautigan’s alcohol problem intensified. For the first time in his nascent drinking life, he was able to afford hard liquor. Brandy was very cheap and the local mexicalli, in black ceramic flasks, cheaper still. Distilled from the fermented juice of the agave, rainwater-clear, and potent as liquid fire, mescal was rumored to have hallucinogenic properties.

  Fueled by mescal, Richard wanted to get hold of some peyote. Marijuana was readily available, but Brautigan had no interest in mota. “We were always looking for peyote,” Virginia remembered. “Richard never wanted to smoke marijuana.” The search for the elusive mescaline-rich cactus took them as far afield as the little town of Ixtlan, with its fine old colonial church. (A year later, Brautigan wrote a never-published poem titled “Ixtlan,” in which he reflected on the cobblestones of Calle de Eternidad, “the Street of Eternity,” and drinking mescal “under the century plants.”) As far as the peyote hunt, Ixtlan became just another wild-goose chase in a bizarre and futile quest.

  Trips up to Monte Alban were more satisfying. An ancient ceremonial center located atop the treeless hills southeast of the city of Oaxaca, thirteen hundred feet above the valley floor, Monte Alban is one of the oldest inhabited sites in Mexico, a sacred mountain top first settled as early as 1000 BC. Constructed around 500 BC, about the time Cyrus the Great roared out of Persia and conquered Babylonia, the fabled temple-city endured through many diverse cultures (Olmec, Maya, Zapotec, Mixtec) until the Aztec conquered all in 1469.

  Richard and Ginny explored every inch of the metropolis where ancient architects leveled the mountain top to create a vast central plaza longer than seven football fields. They investigated the restored palaces and frescoed tombs, wandered around the ball court and the observatory, and climbed the looming central temple complex by each of its four monumental stairways. They found numerous obsidian knives. Most of the urban center surrounding the plaza had not been excavated, and quantities of flakes and pottery shards littered the shrub-covered mounds.

  The Brautigans ventured south to Mitla, one of the best-preserved sites in Mexico, about forty kilometers from Oaxaca. Aldous Huxley found Mitla “strangely unlike any of the other pre-Columbian ruins.” He called the geometric patterns on the low temple facades “petrified weaving,” thinking them based on textile designs. Richard and Ginny caught a ride with an amorous dentist who owned a big green Dodge station wagon. The DDS fell in love with Richard’s buxom wife after the poet consulted him about a toothache. He chauffeured the young sightseers down to the “Place of the Dead” in a frenzy of unrequited machismo.

  After a Oaxacan stay lasting more than two months, it was time to head for home. Ginny thought they remained “a little too long. There was way too much alcohol available.” The Brautigans had planned on returning by the same route they had followed down from the border, but when they got to Mexico City they discovered that torrential rains along the Pacific Coast had washed out several bridges and the road was closed in many places. Their only option was to travel up through the interior. Richard and Ginny caught a bus bound for Aguascalientes at midnight.

  Two hot and dusty days later they made it to Ciudad Juárez on the banks of the Rio Grande. It was night when Richard and Ginny crossed the border into El Paso and took a room in a cheap hotel smelling of disinfectant. The next morning, they were on the road again, catching a ride to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where a traveling salesman picked them up and drove them as far as Phoenix, Arizona. The Brautigans figured they would spend the night in a hotel there. Richard decided “to try my luck with my thumb for a few minutes before looking for a place to stay.” After two vehicles passed them by, a truck stopped and drove the couple straight through, “all the way across the Mojave desert in the cool of the night to be in Los Angeles at dawn.”

  Back in San Francisco, Richard and Ginny crashed with friends while looking for a new apartment. Although everything seemed much the same, a lot had changed while they were away. Joanne Kyger and Gary Snyder had become an item. At a Sunday afternoon gathering at George Stanley’s apartment, Snyder read from his remarkable new work, Myths and Texts, sitting underneath a table with Jack Spicer perched cross-legged above. Spicer approved of Snyder’s poetry, remarkable considering his scorn for the Beats, an affiliation not entirely of Snyder’s choosing.

  Literary gossip buzzed about Russell FitzGerald, Jack Spicer’s live-in lover, and his blatant seduction of Bob Kaufman (“I took him to the Colombo Hotel and sucked his big cock”). Kaufman, dead drunk at the time, must have had ambivalent feelings about the whole affair, for he married his wife, Eileen, that same year. “Half-Jew and half-black,” crowed Robert Duncan, recalling the Kaufman incident years later. He knew Spicer’s prejudices and how FitzGerald’s betrayal must have stung.

  Lew Welch had quit his job in advertising, left his wife, and was driving a cab for a living. He and his college buddies Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen formed a circle, centered on Buddhist-inspired poetry, which included Joanne Kyger, who also lived at the East-West House. Both Welch and Snyder read at Bread and Wine that summer. Kyger noted how Welch said, “That’s over,” as he hung his wedding ring on a nail sticking from the wall of Marin-An, Snyder’s Mill Valley shack. Lew started spending time with Joanne and her pal Nemi Frost. “He’s not interested in your poetry,” Snyder told his lover. “He just wants to go to bed with you.”

  Loving Gary Snyder didn’t stifle Joanne Kyger’s ironic take on just about everything. After Viking published Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (in which a fictionalized Gary Snyder is the main character), she and George Stanley formed the Dharma Committee, a mock organization growing out of the weekly Spicer/Duncan poetry meetings devoted to drinking, getting high on Velo inhalers, and having a good deal of hilarious fun. “These are famous times I am sure,” Kyger wrote in her journal.

  That summer, while the Brautigans were away in Mexico, Price Dunn moved up to Oakland from Big Sur. He arrived with a sculptor named Gene Flores and took up residence in the L-shaped corner storefront building Madge Boyd owned on Fifty-fifth Street. They built a big bedroom/ studio supported on telephone poles. Believing that “a man needs space to breathe,” Price always removed all the interior walls with a chainsaw when he rented a new house. In Oakland, Dunn illegally tapped into the PG&E gas line. “I had this big stove with this enormous gas pipe,” Price recalled. “This flame would shoot out.”

  Keith Abbott reported that Dunn held “a firm belief that utility companies had more than enough money and didn’t need his cash.” He was so frequently delinquent on his phone bills that he listed his new numbers under such pseudonyms as Delmer Dibble, Commander Ralph G. Gore, Jesse James, and Rufus Flywheel. For a time, Price was joined in Oakland by painter Frank Curtin, who was trying to “get straight.” They were both broke, taking “slave labor” menial jobs and “playing Captain Garbage, raiding the Safeway garbage Dumpster.” Price summed it all up with a shrug. “I mean, it was grim, grim.” A few months later, he got married.

  After a bit of searching, Richard and Ginny found a seven-room apartment with hardwood floors at 461 Mississippi Street on Potrero Hill in San Francisco. The place was much too big, so their artist friend Kenn Davis offered to share it with them. He had no job, and Ginny resented his inability to contribute much to the household. Kenn’s saving grace was his car, a two-tone blue and white ’55 Chevy, which made the distant Potrero neighborhood seem a lot less isolated from the rest of the city.

  The electricity had not yet been turned on when the trio moved in. That first night, the Brautigans stuck a candle on a saucer for light. The dim flickering illumination gentled the chaos of the recent mov
e and suffused the surrounding disorder with a romantic glow. Richard and Ginny made love among the stacks of unpacked carton boxes and rolled carpets. They muted their passion, trying not to make too much noise and wake Kenn, who lay sleeping in the next room.

  There was no denying that it was a great pad. The Brautigans filled one room completely with plants. Sliding doors divided the two largest rooms. When these were opened the resulting expansion provided a perfect space for impromptu badminton games. Without a net, the three roommates modified the rules. Getting the birdy caught up in the ceiling light fixture resulted in an immediate out. Ditto if someone opened a door to announce a phone call and the birdy flew into the other room. They played in their stocking feet, sliding over the varnished floor, batting the shuttlecock back and forth, back and forth. “That was a fun time,” Ginny recalled.

  Kenn Davis recorded this happy domestic activity in his sketchbook. He drew Richard eating watermelon, reading the morning paper, sitting at his typewriter staring out at the rain, and playing indoor badminton. On two occasions, Kenn attempted to teach Dick to drive in the ’55 Chevy. Once was in a long graveled area down in the Marina District, a wealthy flatland neighborhood of pastel houses built atop landfill rubble from the 1906 earthquake.