Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  The founding editors of Beatitude comprised an intriguing cross-section of North Beach eccentricity. New Orleans–born Kaufman, one of thirteen children of a German Orthodox Jewish father and a black Catholic mother from Martinique, lived a life that Kerouac described as being “written on mirrors in smoke.” He settled in San Francisco after twenty years as a merchant seaman, a career including four shipwrecks, and his life seemed to veer from one disaster to the next.

  Pierre Delattre remembered John Kelly as “one of a gang of heroin addicts.” Their main man was Hube the Cube, a regular at The Place whose real name was Hubert Leslie and who remained perpetually stoned courtesy of the University of California Medical Center as a $200-a-month drug-testing guinea pig. William J. Margolis was “the epitome of the outsider,” according to Delattre. A flamboyant motorcycle-riding anarchist, Margolis had published a magazine called the Miscellaneous Man when he lived over in Berkeley, and his spacious old house had been the gathering place of students, poets, leftist longshoremen, Wobblies, and folk musicians.

  To keep costs down, these three unorthodox characters planned to print Beatitude on a mimeograph machine, a street publication in every way. They placed Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky on the masthead of the first issue as members of the “bored of directors.” This gave rise to the fiction that Ginsberg had been one of the founders of the magazine, when he was not even in San Francisco during the spring of 1959, arriving only later that summer to take part in Gregory Bateson’s LSD experiments at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto.

  Published out of a tiny office at 14 Bannam Alley, Beatitude no. 1 hit the streets on May 9, priced at two bits a copy. The first issue contained contributions by Allen Ginsberg, Pierre Delattre, and Bob Kaufman and included “The Whorehouse at the Top of Mount Rainier,” a poem by Richard Brautigan. Bob Kaufman lived in the apartment next door to Delattre and spent a lot of time hanging out in his kitchen after the first few issues. He approached the young minister to ask if they might start using the Bread and Wine mimeograph machine to print the magazine. Delattre agreed without a moment’s hesitation, and Beatitude moved permanently to the Mission. Starting with number 8, until the end of its brief one-year run, the little magazine was published at Bread and Wine with Pierre Delattre serving as its de facto editor. In his memoir, Episodes, Delattre recalled the ease of collecting material for the magazine: “I had only to walk down the street and gather poems in my shirt.”

  Richard Brautigan published four new poems in Beatitude no. 4 (May 30, 1959). He also had a poem (“Psalm”) printed that same spring in vol. 1, no.2, of San Francisco Review. George Hitchcock (poet, actor, and later the publisher of Kayak Books) worked at the magazine and recalled meeting Richard at the home of a mutual friend who was a Chronicle copy editor. The “lean slender long-faced blond young man” introduced himself as being from the Northwest. Hitchcock remembered “a hungry look,” and that Brautigan “had a lot of bottled-up hostility.”

  He also thought that Richard “kept dropping around to peoples’ houses around dinnertime because he needed some attention.” In George Hitchcock’s opinion, “Psalm” was “a slight poem” that “didn’t amount to a hell of a lot.”

  Donald Allen was back in Frisco that spring, gathering material for his upcoming, much-talked-about poetry anthology. Richard Brautigan met him at this time. Allen was a friend of Jack Spicer, whose writing he admired. The word was out, and North Beach poets cornered the editor, touting their work. Lew Welch, then driving a cab and with only one poem published in Contact 2, met with Allen and showed him the manuscript of his planned collection, Wobbly Rock. Allen marked those poems that interested him and asked Welch to send copies to New York. He made no such request regarding Brautigan’s poetry.

  Sometime early in June, Ginny Brautigan discovered she was pregnant. It did not come as a complete surprise, as she and Richard had decided some months earlier to have a child. In retrospect, they decided the baby was conceived by candlelight the first night they spent together in the Mississippi Street apartment. At first, nothing much changed in their lives. The impromptu badminton games continued in the big drawing room. Richard fixed breakfast before Ginny walked down the hill to catch a bus to her job in the Financial District. Only now, she would often stop and be sick on the way. Ginny’s morning sickness provided a wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee realization. They were going to be a real family in the not-too-distant future and needed to find a place of their own.

  After looking around, the Brautigans located a tiny ground floor apartment at 575 Pennsylvania Street on Potrero Hill. The rent was $25 a month. Richard and Ginny had saved a little nest egg and paid for several months in advance, moving in by the end of June. Kenn Davis took a job at the Chronicle as a vacation replacement and moved to his own place. Richard and Ginny painted their new apartment: white walls and bright orange floors. Their secondhand furniture received a coat of black as a finishing touch.

  The Brautigans added a pair of sleek black cats, Jake and Boaz, to the Halloween color scheme. “Great cats,” Ginny remembered. Jake, the favorite, “was really extra smart.” In an experimental botanical mood, Richard bought a cobra lily at the local Woolworth’s. He replanted the exotic carnivorous plant in an empty Metrecal can and set it on a sunny window ledge, hoping to see it catch and devour houseflies within its hairy honeyed hood. Fate decreed otherwise. It was an election year (1960), and when the cobra lily died, Brautigan stuck a red, white, and blue Nixon button into the dry brown plant as an ironic funeral wreath. He kept this decaying political statement on his desk for many months.

  What with marriage, his North Beach poetry life, and the trip to Mexico, it had been a while since Brautigan spent any time on a trout stream. Pierre Delattre owned a station wagon, and his father-in-law had a cabin at Three Rivers in the mountains just below Sequoia National Park. Brautigan and Delattre took four trips together that summer. They stayed at the Three Rivers cabin and fished the water around Kings Canyon National Park next to Sequoia. Delattre remembered Brautigan’s conversation as being “tied in with imaginary scenarios built around whatever we happened to be seeing at the time.” Once, lost in heavy fog driving through the Tulare Valley, Brautigan fabricated an elaborate fiction “about who we were and what was going on. It was pure invention, not a lot of sentimentality about the past.” Richard never talked about his past.

  On another trip to the Russian River, Brautigan waded out and caught his limit while Delattre still fumbled with his gear on the tailgate of the station wagon. Richard divided his catch with Pierre so he could continue fishing. Later the same day, they came across a group of picnickers splashing in the river. Brautigan bet he could catch a trout right where the kids were swimming. With a few deft casts, he accomplished this feat. To Delattre’s amazement, the swimmers never even noticed. Richard taught Pierre how to fish the riffles. “That was the only place he ever fished. He had all these wonderful mysteries about him. He was very mystical about fishing.”

  Kenn Davis recalled going fishing with Richard three or four times, mostly up to Yosemite. They camped out, sleeping without tents (“Freezing our butts off!”) in surplus bags several degrees beyond inadequate. Once, they set up camp in a snowstorm. “The fishing was terrible,” although they saw many trout holding in a clear pool directly below them. When the blue-and-white Chevy languished, inoperable, they hitchhiked up to the North Fork of the Yuba River. Kenn brought along his .38 caliber revolver. Richard objected. “He didn’t like handguns at that time,” Davis recalled.

  A shared rural small-town background meant a mutual familiarity with shotguns and rifles. “I got into one of my modern design modes with Richard.” Because he was a Korean War vet, Kenn’s affection for firearms carried a certain weight. He was “trying to explain some guns have this wonderful sculptural quality, the precision of the engineering. The balance. And just the look of the thing.” Davis’s rhapsodic handgun description struck a chord with Brautigan, and years later, Richard ech
oed his old friend whenever he showed off his sidearms.

  By fall, when Ginny’s pregnancy began to show, the law firm where she worked dismissed her. It was no big deal. She kept busy with Carp Press correspondence, sending follow-up letters to the many bookstores who had been sent consignment copies of Lay the Marble Tea. Terms for sales varied. Most booksellers received a 40 percent discount, while others asked for a one-third markdown. Ginny’s diligence in pursuing these matters often paid off. Money kept trickling in, often in very small amounts.

  In October, Lay the Marble Tea received a favorable review in the little Hollywood magazine Coastline 13. Quotes from the poems prompted a reader in San Diego to mail a check for seventy-five cents, requesting a copy the very day his magazine arrived. In the end, the Brautigans actually made some money on the project. “A seedy little profit,” Ginny recalled. Their first publishing venture was a success. Carp Press was off and running.

  By midsummer, after the first seven issues, Beatitude had evolved from an aspiring weekly into a regular monthly publication. Beatitude 9, the second issue published at Bread and Wine, came out in September and contained a poem (“Swan Dragons”) by Richard Brautigan. A photograph from that time shows William Margolis laboring with a rag on the Mission mimeograph machine while Bob and Eileen Kaufman proofread a newly printed page.

  Margolis lived with his girlfriend in a second-floor apartment on Gerke Alley, an obscure cul-de-sac off Grant Avenue. They got into a fight, and she stormed out onto the street. Stoned, Margolis began hurling dishes out the window at his girlfriend, who danced and dodged, screaming abuse, as crockery shattered on the pavement around her. With nothing left to throw, Margolis, higher than a kite and insane with rage, pantomimed dragging himself by the collar and hurtled through the window.

  He landed at the feet of his horrified girlfriend, severely injuring his spine. She called an ambulance. His friends were afraid he was going to die. When Bill Margolis was released from the hospital a paraplegic, Pierre Delattre organized a benefit to raise money for Margolis’s medical expenses. The event was held at Garibaldi Hall. Richard Brautigan read his poetry, as did Bob Kaufman and Corso and Ferlinghetti, along with participation by numerous other performers and musicians.

  In the midst of the festivities, Delattre got word a motorcycle gang was on its way to “beat the shit out of all these beatniks.” He ran outside and there they were. Pierre spotted the gang leader and faced off with him. “I’m so glad you came,” he improvised. “We’re in real trouble. There’s this black motorcycle gang from the Fillmore, and they’re coming here to bust up this whole scene!” Pierre told them the benefit was for their buddy, who’d been smoking dope when a bunch of guys made fun of his tattoos and someone threw him out the window. Now he had a broken back and would never ride his hog again.

  The outlaw bikers were much impressed. “Don’t worry, man,” their leader told the beatnik priest. “Everything is cool. We’ll take care of those bastards!”

  Delattre remembered the episode as the “the greatest coup I ever pulled [. . .] They spent the entire time of our production guarding us against themselves.”

  Richard Brautigan incorporated a fictionalized version of the unhappy Margolis accident into his own personal myth-making during a visit to the office of Inferno Press. Leslie Woolf Hedley had become a de facto “father confessor” for Brautigan, a role the older man “didn’t want to play.” Hedley found Brautigan “embarrassing,” but felt he needed “someone outside of that milieu [North Beach]” to confide in. “I always got the impression that he was an innocent.”

  Richard told Hedley about drinking cheap port wine and smoking marijuana. “He kind of laughed about it.” Brautigan regaled Leslie Woolf Hedley with tales of sex. “I think his love life began at that time,” the editor observed. Without mentioning any names, Richard implied that he and “his woman” had been involved in a variety of group sex, “threesomes and foursomes.” On one visit to the Inferno office, Brautigan told a story Hedley never forgot. This time, he mentioned someone they both knew. William Margolis was a friend of Leslie Woolf Hedley’s. According to Richard, “he was involved in this party with this one girl and Margolis, [who] was insulted by something she said and jumped out of the window.”

  Richard’s part-time work at Pacific Chemical Laboratory left him with ample opportunity for visiting Hedley’s office and hanging out with other underemployed poets. He made several new friends in North Beach. Albert Saijo was a nisei, an American born in Los Angeles in 1926 to Japanese immigrant parents. He had been confined in a California internment camp during World War II. His liberation from this unjust indignity came in the form of a draft notice, and Saijo later fought with the Army in Italy. Saijo was “a very swinging but repressed little Jap, really beautiful,” according to Lew Welch. Saijo lived at the East-West House at 2273 California Street. Welch and Philip Whalen were his roommates.

  Other residents of the “Hyphen House” (as the place was sometimes called) were John Montgomery, Lenore Kandel, and Joanne Kyger. Whenever Richard came over to hang out with Albert, he spent time with the others as well. Saijo, a Buddhist who had often sat zazen at Marin-An with Gary Snyder, was further described by Welch as “a saint,” who “builds beautiful things out of old lumber.”

  In November 1959, Welch and Saijo drove Jack Kerouac back to New York, taking Route 66 to Chicago in “Willy,” Welch’s battered Jeep. They improvised collaborative haiku about derelict Aermotor windmills and lonely grain elevators all along the way. In Lighting the Corners, Michael McClure maintained that, according to Shig Murao, Albert Saijo “got Richard the job testing meat samples that he had in the early sixties.” Brautigan remained reticent regarding his job at the chemical laboratory.

  Poet Jory Sherman moved to Frisco in 1959, gaining immediate local fame by being arrested for having eight hundred outstanding parking tickets. Sherman’s first book of poetry, So Many Rooms, was published on the same day he appeared in court, accompanied by his pregnant wife. The presiding judge had little sympathy for Sherman’s alibi (the tickets “blew away in the wind”) and told him to “Give up being a poet and get a real job digging ditches or something.” Sherman was sentenced to spend fourteen weekends in jail.

  The local newspapers picked up the story. “Herb Caen went ape shit!” Sherman recalled. Prominent San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli took the case pro bono and got the poet off after only his second weekend in the slammer. Jory Sherman became a local hero in North Beach. “I never had to buy a drink after that.” Pierre Delattre “grabbed” him right away, and he gave his very first public reading at Bread and Wine. “Everybody was there,” and the event “launched” him.

  Jory Sherman no longer remembers when he first met Richard Brautigan. “Richard was so quiet, and I don’t think hardly anybody knew him,” Sherman recalled. “We were both outsiders.” They would meet at Vesuvio on Columbus, always sitting in the back under the balcony. “I liked talking to him. He was different. He was very serious, but he also just had a different path that he was taking.” The two poets felt drawn together “because we were just incompatible with everything else.” When Richard Brautigan gave Jory Sherman a copy of Lay the Marble Tea, he was touched by the gesture.

  It was a good time to be a young poet in North Beach. Jory Sherman thought it the most exciting time of his life because of all the “creative ferment.” Life was easy. There were readings every night at the Mission, the Fox and Hound, or the Old Spaghetti Factory. Some of these gigs actually paid. Brautigan earned twenty-five bucks each turn from the Coffee Gallery. At the hungry i, Eric “Big Daddy” Nord’s bar and nightclub located in the basement of the green-patinated copper-clad 1907 Sentinel Building (now known as Columbus Tower), a poet could always get a free sandwich and a glass of beer. “You didn’t have to pay anything in that place.” City Lights provided another refuge. Poor poets like Brautigan and Sherman often spent the day there, reading books and magazines without making a purchase. “It was
like a library.”

  Richard made another new friend that summer who seemed to have come from a distant world. In a notebook from the period, Brautigan jotted these words: “Lou Embree: soldier, printer & newspaperman.” His spare three-word synopsis only hinted at Embree’s exotic history. Born in British Nigeria, Lou moved with his “Okie parents” to the Pacific Northwest at the age of two. After serving as a machine-gunner in France and Germany during the Second World War and rising to the rank of sergeant, Embree attended college in Idaho, returning to Europe to live the existentialist life in Paris after graduation. Back at home, he worked on tugboats in San Francisco Bay, in a railroad roundhouse in Filer, Idaho, and as a newspaper reporter and editor in Arizona before settling into a career as a linotype operator and printer for a Bay Area avant-garde press.

  In the fall, while Ginny kept busy typing follow-up letters tracking consignment copies of the first Carp Press chapbook, Richard’s poetry continued to find new publishers. A letter arrived from E. V. Griffith, editor of Hearse, saying how much he’d enjoyed Lay the Marble Tea. Brautigan struck Griffith as “among the very best and most exciting of the new younger poets.” The editor found the poems “sharply beautiful” and “magically alive,” inviting Richard to submit new work to his magazine, making no mention of the poetry Hearse had reprinted without payment in two earlier issues. Brautigan immediately mailed a batch of poems up to Griffith in Eureka.

  September 1959 saw the first appearance of Foot, a new magazine edited by San Francisco–born poet Richard Duerden, in his spacious two-story Haight-Ashbury apartment on Rivoli Street. A handsome production, Foot boasted clean-set type, sewn signatures, and orange wrappers with a cover design of paired feet by Robert Duncan. The first issue contained five poems by Richard Brautigan, as well as work by Duerden, Philip Whalen, Ebbe Borregaard, and Robert Duncan.