Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  The San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop performed The Flowerburger many times over the next few years. They took it to the Contemporary Dance Theater on Washington Street and the San Francisco Playhouse on Hyde Street. The performance traveled to UCLA and the International Avant Garde Arts Festival in Vancouver, British Columbia. Closer to home, they danced the piece at San Francisco State University. Ginny Brautigan remembered seeing that performance as well as one by invitation at a private studio seating only fifty at Anna and Lawrence Halprin’s Kentfield home in Marin County. The Halprins frequently invited artists for performance evenings in their home. They featured poets Michael McClure and James Broughton in this way, as well as experimental musician Harry Partch. Six years after their first appearance in Los Angeles, Halprin, Leath, and Graham brought The Flowerburger back to UCLA. “It was performed on tour all over the country,” Halprin recalled.

  Having made some money on Lay the Marble Tea, Carp Press decided to publish a second volume of Brautigan’s work. Richard had written a group of new poems, most appearing in little magazines, and he began to sift through them, thinking about the possibilities of another book. Being at home with a new baby provided the two partners in Carp Press time to plan their next venture. Along with work published in J and Foot, Richard had written enough new poetry to assemble a fresh collection. He and Ginny discussed the project. Having gone through the process once before made it easier the second time around. One of the new poems, “The Octopus Frontier,” gave Brautigan the book’s title as well as an idea for its cover.

  Gui de Angulo, a noted North Beach musician and photographer, daughter of legendary folklorist and anthropologist Jaime de Angulo (who spoke seventeen different Native American languages), was among Richard and Ginny’s group of friends. Ezra Pound called her father “the American Ovid.” Henry Miller, Angulo’s Big Sur Partington Ridge neighbor, wrote that “he had a streak of the devil in him.” Gui’s pictures of the Frisco poetry scene enjoyed a well-deserved reputation for honesty and skill. Her 1958 group portrait of Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, John Wieners, and David Meltzer has been frequently reproduced and often incorrectly attributed.

  Ginny Brautigan described Gui de Angulo as “very shy [. . .] difficult to talk to,” but with “a great sense of humor.” Richard had known her since before his first visit to Price Dunn in Big Sur. “She was pretty much closeted down there,” Ginny remembered. “Isolated.” Life in the city provided a vital contrast. Gui kept busy with her work, interacting with a wide circle of artists and musicians. She visited the Brautigans often on Potrero Hill, taking photographs of Ianthe playing with her mother. When Richard suggested his notion for a book cover, she took to the idea immediately.

  Brautigan knew just what he wanted and served as the “art director” on the project. He bought a huge octopus tentacle, nearly six feet long, from a fishmonger in Chinatown. He and Gui de Angulo carried the grotesque appendage up onto the roof of a building in North Beach, and she photographed Richard’s bare foot in close-up, standing on the tentacle. “It is striking and just misses being sinister,” observed Michael McClure.

  Richard gathered twenty-two recent poems for the new collection. Nearly half the poetry included in this latest chapbook had been previously published in Spicer and Duerden’s little magazines. Brautigan reprinted the poems without any changes, except for reworking the line structure of “1942,” a personal favorite for the rest of his life. By the end of July, finished copies of The Octopus Frontier were ready for sale. The Brautigans raised their price to $1 for the twenty-four-page publication.

  Earlier in the year, Richard Brautigan bought an inexpensive ring-bound three-hole notebook with brown covers. The first entries were several drafts of a new poem, “The Silver Stairs of Ketchikan,” which transformed 2:00 AM baby feeding into a mystical moment. On August 1, Brautigan began another journal in the notebook. After striking out his first two attempts, Richard made a new start: “The idea of this journal is I want to write something other than poems [. . .] I’ve tried to write short stories but I can’t stick with them.”

  He groped to find a personal definition for his work, stating that he was “deeply involved with the motion of reality in poems,” noting his frustration at his “failure to establish adequate movement.” He concluded, “I want the reality in my work to move less obviously and it is very difficult for me. Tomorrow my book of poems The Octopus Frontier will be ready at the printers and I get the copies [. . .]” Unhappy with what he wrote, Richard crossed out the remainder of the passage.

  In the first weeks of August, Ginny set to work writing letters to all booksellers who had received the first Carp Press publishing venture, offering a 33⅓ percent discount on each copy of The Octopus Frontier they sold. The return address, 575 Pennsylvania Street, was printed on the chapbook’s title page, below Brautigan’s crude goggle-eye fish colophon. Richard delivered consignment copies to the local bookshops in North Beach.

  In addition to doing all the family bookkeeping and preparing their tax returns, Ginny also diligently wrote everyone who had ordered single copies of Lay the Marble Tea, informing them of the new collection. Among the many replies, a crudely printed anonymous card arrived in the mail. (“Dear Sirs: I am very much interested in your carp press. I have a great quantity of surplus carp and am considering sending said surplus to various of our hungry brothers over the water.”) Richard recognized Frank Curtin’s handwriting.

  On August 8, Brautigan read from The Octopus Frontier to a full house at the Coffee Gallery on the same bill with Christopher Maclaine, an Oklahoma-born thirty-seven-year-old poet and filmmaker. Maclaine’s four short movies (The End, 1953; The Man Who Invented Gold, 1957; Beat, 1958; and Scotch Hop, 1959) had been well received by the Frisco avant-garde art community.

  Addicted to methedrine, Maclaine imbued his work with frantic speed freak energy. Each of his films grew shorter and shorter (the last ran only five minutes). Maclaine made no more movies and died in an asylum fifteen years later. The Examiner sent a photographer to cover the “beatnik” event, but the pictures were never published.

  Haunted by the strange brandy label he’d seen in Merrill’s Drugstore, Brautigan began entertaining a peculiar fantasy about a future world where the sun shone a different color every day and the people worshipped in a temple called “Ideath.” On a page in his notebook he wrote a possible title over and over: “IN Watermelon SUGAR, IN Watermelon SUGAR, IN Watermelon SUGAR [. . .]” ten times altogether, unable to drive the thought off the page with a new idea.

  For the next several pages, Richard jotted notions for a possible work of fiction. He would call Book One “The Fish of the Sky.” Proposed chapter headings included “Ideath,” “The Priest of Ideath,” “The River of Ideath,” and “Dialogue with a Priest of Ideath.” Among four pages of scattered notes concerning the project, Richard wrote “The setting: torches burning in a circle in the garden with five naked women dancing: their bodies firm enough to be the flesh of trout.”

  Brautigan roughed out a sample chapter in pencil. He called it “A Brief History of the Trout Fly Named the Beautiful Lady of Death.” It began like a fairy tale: “Over a hundred years ago, yes, in the time of tigers, a wise and poetic priest went to the funeral of the most beautiful woman in the land [. . .]” She died at fifteen from a fever that spared her beauty, and she lies in her coffin wearing a dress made from watermelon sugar and holding a statue of Ideath in her cold folded hands. The priest stares at her beautiful corpse “for a long time,” entranced because most of the dead have “been torn to pieces by the tigers,” their bodies concealed by a covering of flowers. Back in the temple of Ideath, he ties a fly, recording “his impressions of her funeral.” The brief chapter ends with a description of the unique fly. “It is the thing we use to catch trout. I fish with the funeral of a beautiful woman. The trout desire it and I take them afterward to the temple of Ideath.”

  Having set down these notions for his wondrous fantasy, Brautig
an went no further with it at the time. Richard knew he would return when he was ready but had other things on his mind. At the top of a fresh notebook page, Brautigan jotted the title for a new story: “Trout Fishing in America.” He began the opening paragraph several times. First he wrote, “It’s come to this [. . .]” A few lines later he started again. “Trout fishing in America has come to this [. . .]” On the third try Brautigan found his rhythm: “Trout fishing in America has come to mean this. I am watching a shoeshine man walking across the grass in a kind of clocklike arch towards the old Italians sitting under the cypress trees.” Richard scrawled in a frenzy, his handwriting often illegible. “I will be old,” he wrote further along, “and listen to the same talk and tears will come to my eyes. I’ll have to be led naked from the park by troops of Boy Scouts dressed in black. And I will make them feel embarrassed.”

  What did this mean? He was free-associating, the words tumbling out with zany manic energy. “The park is filled with old people whose sexual organs lie about them like scraps of paper on the ground,” he concluded in a wild creative burst, “but the shoeshine man shines the shoes of their penises until they are like new organs. Twenty cents a show or listen to me scream.” Reading over what he’d written, Richard didn’t know quite what to make of it. Maybe it didn’t amount to anything. Just another insane experiment leading nowhere. Perhaps he had a short story after all. Only time would tell.

  Not long after The Octopus Frontier was published, Richard Brautigan met Don Carpenter, a man destined to become one of his closest friends. Born in Berkeley in 1931, Carpenter moved to Portland, Oregon, when he was seventeen. He hung out in pool halls and joined a tough street gang, the Broadway Gang, which at one time included Gary Gilmore (the subject of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song) as a member. Carpenter finished high school and started college in Portland in 1949. He soon joined the Air Force and didn’t graduate until the fall of 1959.

  In 1953, back in town on a thirty-day leave, Don Carpenter met Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder. Later, he visited Snyder in San Francisco, and his introduction to the literary scene eventually lured him back for good. In 1960, married and with two kids to support, Don was studying for his MA at San Francisco State when he first ran into Richard at the home of Bob Miller, a mutual friend. Carpenter knew Brautigan by sight. He had heard him read his short story “Coffee” in North Beach. Don was not impressed. “I hated it. I thought it was horrible writing.”

  Bob Miller was a rough customer with a high forehead, milky blue eyes, and an “implacable face.” He’d also been a member of Portland’s Broadway Gang and had done time in San Quentin. A friend of Kerouac’s, Miller worked as a housepainter and had a reputation around North Beach as “this extremely tough, funny guy with a good mind.” Brautigan knew him from the crowd at Gino & Carlo’s.

  At Miller’s Russian Hill apartment, Don got into a game of three-handed poker with Bob and Richard. “I had never run into anything like this in my life,” Carpenter recalled. Brautigan played “surrealist” poker. “His bets and his moves and the cut—the cards he picked and the cards he discarded had no relationship to anything I knew as poker. He plays the way he writes. It never occurred to him that other people had cards, and could defeat his imagination with their cards.” It didn’t take too much skill for Don to win all of Richard’s money that night. He also cleaned out Bob Miller.

  Later, they walked down the hill together to Vesuvio and Richard borrowed back enough coin for a couple drinks. Brautigan captured Don Carpenter’s fancy right from the start. During the poker game, when Richard excused himself to go to the john, he said, “I have to bleed my lizard,” a phrase that stuck with Carpenter for the rest of his life. “I was liking him because he was being charming,” Don remembered. “And when Richard is charming, there’s no charmer in the world like him.” At the bar, all the charm ran out. Brautigan said, “Okay, see you later,” and left Don Carpenter to his own devices. “He picked up a girl, and I was left there alone. I never saw him again for the rest of the year. Really pissed me off.”

  Early one evening in the fall, the Brautigans felt in the mood for ice cream, and Ginny went out to the neighborhood store a few blocks away to pick up a pint of something tasty. While she was away the telephone rang. It was Ginny’s brother calling from Los Angeles. Their father, G.C. Alder, had died that afternoon. His body had been found lying on the floor beside the television in the front room of the rented house in Reseda.

  Richard Brautigan hung up and tried to think of the best way to break the news to his wife. He wanted to spare her as much pain as possible, but as he wrote later, “you cannot camouflage death with words. Always at the end of the words somebody is dead.” This provided the conclusion for the first paragraph of Brautigan’s short story “The World War I Los Angeles Airplane,” which went on to chronicle the life of Ginny’s father in a partially fictionalized outline list of thirty-three short numbered passages. “33. ‘Your father died this afternoon.’”

  Ice cream is a poor balm for sorrow. Perhaps the cold confection provided some comfort when Richard broke the news to Ginny after she returned from the store. The next day, she packed and left for Los Angeles with Ianthe. Brautigan was alone and living like a bachelor again for the first time in more than three years. To forestall loneliness, Richard invited his old buddy Ron Loewinsohn over to stay for a spell. He and Ron had patched things up in the late summer of 1960 and were friends once again.

  Ron married a young woman named Sue Rosen not long after Richard and Ginny got together, and they also had a new baby. Due to straitened financial circumstances, Ron’s wife and boy child, Joe, had gone home to Canton, Ohio, to tide things over. Finding himself another accidental bachelor, Loewinsohn brought his sleeping bag and crashed on the Brautigans’ couch. He had the flu. Richard took care of him, cooking the meals (single-guy things like tuna fish salad) and ignoring his friend’s complaints. Watching Ron wrapped sniffling in his sleeping bag, Brautigan thought he resembled “a Jew polar bear.” (Loewinsohn had been brought up as a Catholic.) Richard jotted down a long poem in his notebook called “We’re here,” describing their odd-couple living arrangement.

  Shortly after Ginny’s return from her father’s funeral in L.A., the isolation of life out on Potrero Hill began to wear on the Brautigans. Although friends came to visit, occasional parties couldn’t dispel the sense of being totally out of the swing of things. “Good god, what do you do out here?” Ginny lamented. “You walk the baby, do the laundry. We got pretty tired of each other’s company.” Also, there was the uneasy sense that delinquents from the nearby Hunters Point Projects were invading the neighborhood. “It just became crazier and crazier to live there.”

  From the moment cabin fever set in, a move back to North Beach was inevitable. Their friends Tom and Shirley were also looking to move away from Potrero Hill. After a bit of searching, Richard and Ginny located a ground-floor apartment at 557 A Greenwich Street on the slope of Telegraph Hill. The Lipsetts and their baby, Cadence, moved into unit B at the same address. The entrance led down a long narrow dark passageway to a small central courtyard. Richard set up the pink electric Royal typewriter Ginny had given him as a wedding present on the glass-framed back porch, surrounded by dime store plants. When he looked up from his work, he could see San Francisco Bay and watch the ships departing for faraway ports. Remembering Mexico, he wrote the poem he called “Ixtlan.”

  Cats always seek distraction when humans are busy doing something else. Jake and Boaz often came to visit while Brautigan tried to work, purring and rubbing against his legs. Quite naturally, he wrote a few, mostly unpublished, poems about his cats. “Spikes” concerned Jake’s teeth. “The Eskimo of My Cat” began in mock classical fashion with the line “O Jake.” Another poem, “The Quail,” written up on Potrero Hill during the autumn of 1960, told of Jake’s abiding interest in three caged quail living next door.

  All this time, Richard Brautigan struggled to write prose. “It was
a matter of learning how to get people from one room into another, getting them to say some small thing and then back out again through the door.” On the sixteenth of September, 1960, Mexican Independence Day, Richard wrote the date on a small piece of paper and tacked it to the wall above his typewriter. It was a date he wanted to remember. “I figured September 16 would mean something other than the date of Mexico’s independence. Perhaps some kind of independence for things inside myself.” This was the day when Richard Brautigan began to write his first novel. He called it Trout Fishing in America.

  eighteen: gone fishing

  KNOWING THERE WAS no money to be made as a poet, Richard Brautigan determined to break into fiction. His first strenuous efforts began up on Potrero Hill. “He tried to make a transition to prose,” Ginny remembered. “He had a desperate time, a desperately difficult time doing that. Most of his short stories kept turning back into poems.” Jack Spicer offered to help, although not himself excited by the possibilities of fiction. He had abandoned “The Tower of Babel,” an attempt at a mystery novel, after 167 pages. Richard read each new story aloud to Jack and Ginny. Writing in his crabbed hand on lined yellow legal tablets, he struggled to make the brief tales longer than a paragraph or two. After every reading, both his audience members agreed, “For god’s sake, take that out. Chop the ending. It’s done.” Richard sat facing them, looking “rather stricken.”

  “It wasn’t easy for him,” Ginny recalled. “Things came to him fully formed.” This remained true all of Brautigan’s life. He’d scratch down poetry in a single burst on the back of a cocktail napkin or in one of the little notebooks he carried everywhere. When he attempted to rework a poem, the effort usually consisted of writing the same lines over and over again with only the most minor alterations. Richard wrote instinctively, in flashes of magic inspiration, truly evoking the notion of “first word, best word,” with none of the accompanying bombast often inflating the work of other Beat poets.