Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Brautigan’s other near-appearance in a North Beach motion picture came in 1968, when he had a brief part in James Broughton’s The Bed, an art project much discussed within the bohemian community. Broughton’s film showed numbers of (mostly naked) local personalities, one after the other, sitting or lying on the same bed. Brautigan was among those filmed on the bed. “Richard was thrilled about it,” Michael McClure wrote. “He was genuinely excited to be recognized as an art-celebrity by a world-known filmmaker like Broughton.” Richard Brautigan ended on the cutting room floor, an omission he complained about bitterly to his friends. “For a long time Richard went around with damp eyes, lashing his tail,” McClure observed.

  Charles Newman finally got back to Brautigan early in July, asking to see his recent work. Richard sent five short stories (including “Revenge of the Lawn”) off to TriQuarterly four days later. Brautigan’s only recent publication had been in the second issue of Now Now (a small San Francisco magazine edited by writer Charles Plymell), which ran “Banners of My Own Choosing,” a short prose piece written the year before.

  Wild Dog 18, a mimeographed magazine published at 39 Downey Street (down the block from Mike McClure’s place), appeared for sale in July. Joanne Kyger and Ed Dorn were among the editors. Along with work by Dorn, Kyger, Gilbert Sorrentino, Harold Dull, Lewis Warsh, and Ron Loewinsohn, two new poems (never reprinted) by Richard Brautigan appeared on page 19. “The Busses” and “Period Piece” (a charming bit of magical nostalgia involving an unemployed dragon cutter: “and I remember great green chunks of dragon / sliced and stacked in the ice wagons”) accompanied “At Sea,” Brautigan’s amusing “review” of Ghost Tantras, Michael McClure’s new book of poetry.

  Michael McClure wrote that Brautigan’s notice of Ghost Tantras in Wild Dog “was one of the few reviews that book ever had [. . .] Richard really knocked himself out to please people he liked or loved [. . .] [He] believed in my work the way I believed in his.” Always generous with friends and fellow artists, Brautigan had written in April to Donald Hutter, his editorial connection at Scribner’s, recommending The Mad Club, Michael McClure’s newly completed novel.

  While Richard Brautigan’s star ascended, life became an ever-accelerating downhill slide for Jack Spicer. Recent poems were rejected by The Nation and Poetry, evoking more amusement than regret from Jack. His drinking increased, and he seemed to subsist on a single peanut butter sandwich (washed down with brandy and milk) each day. Fran Herndon noted the shabbiness of his clothing, observing “a pretty rapid decline [. . .] In the end, in his drunken state [. . .] he was so drunk he could barely lift the bottle [. . .] Jack would just not stop drinking.” Lewis Warsh, back for the Berkeley Poetry Conference that summer, recalled seeing Spicer at Aquatic Park one afternoon, “and he couldn’t get up. He put his hand on my shoulder and pulled himself up.”

  The Berkeley Conference was the big poetry game in town all throughout July. Dozens of readings and lectures had been scheduled at the University of California. The list of the invited included Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, Gary Snyder, and Jack Spicer. When Leroi Jones had to cancel, Ed Dorn was enlisted as a replacement. Spicer gave a talk called “Poetry and Politics” and later read The Holy Grail, his book from the year before.

  Aside from these two appearances, Spicer mostly boycotted the conference, hanging out at Gino & Carlo’s across the Bay, waiting for his acolytes to bring all the gossip and tales of poetic in-fighting. The notion of fame both intrigued and repulsed Jack Spicer. His final poems dealt with being caught between the siren song of celebrity and the honest dignity of anonymous toil. In one of his lectures, Spicer said, “I don’t think that messages are for the poet any more than the radio program is for the radio set. And I think that the radio set doesn’t really worry about whether anyone’s listening to it or not, and neither does the poet.” According to Graham Mackintosh, “Jack was amused by chance.”

  That summer, Spicer’s closest friends all sensed his health was seriously declining. Robin Blaser observed, “It was a very quick downhill path.” Jack Thibeau recalled stopping by Aquatic Park around one o’clock on a sunny afternoon in the last week of July and finding that Spicer had not shown up for his regular outdoor salon. Nemi Frost came by with a “bagful of aspirins and all kinds of store-bought painkillers.” Nemi tossed the bag down on the grass and said, “If anyone sees Jack, give him this stuff.”

  Thibeau lived just around the corner from Spicer’s one-room apartment on Polk Street and volunteered to deliver the bag. “I went up and banged on his door about five in the afternoon. The room was matted with wet dried newspapers all over the floor. It was like a collage, the entire room. And it was just the bed in there and nothing else. And he was laid out on this bed. I said, ‘Nemi asked me to bring this by for you.’

  “He says, ‘I’m dying.’

  “I said, ‘Oh, okay.’” Thibeau also brought Spicer a little taste. “A pint of brandy, which was his favorite drink. I left that and the aspirin. He was so ill he couldn’t even talk. And so I left and he said, ‘I’ll see you at the bar tonight.’ Which meant Gino’s. And I didn’t go down to the bar.” A couple days later, Jack Thibeau heard the bad news.

  Drunk at the end of a long hot afternoon at Aquatic Park (July 31, 1965), Jack Spicer staggered home munching a chicken sandwich dinner. He collapsed in the elevator of his building and lay there for hours, befouled by shit and vomit, his half-eaten sandwich still clutched in his hand. A fellow tenant discovered the sodden body, and the landlady phoned for help. Spicer had no identification in his shabby suit, and the ambulance crew, thinking him just another nameless drunken bum, hauled the poet off to the poverty ward of San Francisco General Hospital in the Mission District.

  Spicer lay in a coma for days. When he didn’t show up at his usual table at Gino & Carlo’s, his friends started wondering, “Where’s Jack?” Robin Blaser began searching in earnest and determined that the unknown man lying unconscious over at General was his old friend. The diagnosis was not good. Spicer had pneumonia, jaundice, critical hepatitis, and intestinal bleeding. Blaser hurried across town. After a furious argument with the young doctor in charge, he succeeded in having Spicer moved to a nicer room.

  Jack Spicer lingered for three weeks, lapsing in and out of consciousness. During that period numerous friends came to visit. The Gino & Carlo’s crowd all stopped by, as did the Herndons and the Tallmans. Robin Blaser was there almost every day. Spicer was often unable to speak. Paul Alexander recalled “he looked radiant—when he would recognize a visitor his smile glowed.” Jack Thibeau passed by Spicer’s bedside and introduced himself. Spicer’s “lips moved, and he was sort of in a coma, and he said, ‘Real people . . .’”

  Nemi Frost was another he recognized, and he asked her for the all the latest “glossip,” struggling to pronounce “gossip.” Joanne Kyger remembered Spicer’s splinted arm, bristling with tubes, rising up reflexively. She feared he was about to hit her. Get-well cards and flowers crowded the nightstand. The nurses posted Herb Caen’s column wishing the stricken poet well up where he might see it had he the strength to look. Everyone understood that Jack was dying.

  All through the beginning of August, the waiting room remained crowded with visiting poets and writers. Larry Kearney was there twice a week. Finding it “too painful,” Graham Mackintosh showed up only once, as did Robert Duncan. “Duncan came to the door of the hospital common room, but didn’t come in,” Robin Blaser remembered. “He was not good at handling the illness of others.” Stan Persky, Deneen Peckinpah (novelist niece of film director Sam Peckinpah), Bill Brodecky, and Kate Mulholland (Spicer’s only serious heterosexual partner) all paid their respects at one time or another.

  No one remembered seeing Richard Brautigan at the hospital. He had already said goodbye to Jack Spicer the previous summer. Toward the end, Spicer’s attempts at speech grew increasingly garbled. “He was desperately trying to speak what had happened,”
Robin Blaser recalled. “It was that the extreme of the alcoholic condition separated his mind from his vocal cords.” Making an enormous effort, crapping in his hospital diaper from the struggle, Jack Spicer spoke his final discernible words to Blaser. “My vocabulary did this to me,” he whispered. “Your love will let you go on.”

  Spicer died at 3:00 AM on August 17, 1965. He was forty years old. Two days later, the poet and printer Andrew Hoyem dropped by Richard and Janice’s apartment on California Street and read Brautigan’s short story “Revenge of the Lawn,” which Richard still called the first chapter in his “novel about his grandmother.” TriQuarterly had accepted it for publication, along with a story called “A Short History of Religion in California” (about meeting a group of Christians while on a camping trip with his three-and-a-half-year-old daughter). The two poets talked about the death of Jack Spicer, agreeing that his friends “were quite resigned to his fate.”

  A day or so later, Robin Blaser hosted a memorial evening for Spicer at his Allen Street apartment. Over two hundred people, including Jack’s mother and brother, showed up for this “little wake.” Many brought bits of memorabilia, gifts, drawings, and flowers: “Roses just lined the hallway.” Larry Kearney remembered the evening as “an extremely drunken event.” Robert Duncan came without Jess and proceeded to make out with a stranger in the kitchen. Blaser ignored such excesses, preferring to think of the event as “quite magical.”

  Richard Brautigan had not been “specifically invited” to Spicer’s wake. Don Allen called Joanne Kyger about it, and she in turn phoned Richard. Brautigan told her “he had been thinking about life and death.” He had gone down into his backyard and picked “a perfect rose.” Richard asked Joanne if she would deliver the flower to Mrs. Spicer if he brought it over in an envelope. Kyger refused. “If you want to do this,” she said, “you have to do it yourself.” Brautigan never took the rose to Spicer’s mother, nor did he put in an appearance at his mentor’s memorial.

  Brautigan had published a book with a respected New York firm, something Jack Spicer had never attempted and might well have disdained, but it did almost nothing to improve his financial situation. During the five years Richard worked as a part-time laboratory assistant for Pacific Chemical, his income averaged $1,400 per year. Since quitting to devote all his energies to writing, he suffered a pay cut. By the end of August, his income for 1965 totaled only $637.

  At the urging of his friends, Richard decided to apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship. In August he wrote to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, requesting application forms. Knowing he would need four references who could offer “expert judgment” about his “abilities,” he wrote the next day to novelist William Eastlake and to John Ciardi, asking for their help. The connection to Eastlake, whose singular modern-day “cowboy and Indian” novels set in the desert Southwest (Go in Beauty, The Bronc People, and Portrait of an Artist with 26 Horses) earned him a unique place among contemporary authors, came through Donald Allen. Eastlake had published several pieces of short fiction in Evergreen Review.

  Shortly after William Eastlake returned from Hollywood, where he’d been working on a screenplay based on his latest novel, Castle Keep, Brautigan’s letter reached him at his remote New Mexico ranch, near the tiny town of Cuba on the edge of the Jicarilla Apache Reservation. Asking for the older writer’s assistance, Richard mentioned a “lack of security” in his life. Agreeing to help with the Guggenheim, Eastlake offered a few words of advice on the subject of security. “Certainly you must realize you are born with all you’ll ever get. Money won’t help. Success won’t help. Red Lewis and Ernie [Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway] were about the most insecure people who ever lived.”

  Soon after this, Brautigan got in touch with Michael McClure and wrote to Tom Parkinson (currently living in Paris) to solicit their assistance with his application. McClure was teaching English at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Ironically, this academic position gave his judgment more implied weight with the fellowship committee than his reputation as a poet. Michael immediately agreed to do anything he possibly could to help.

  Late in August 26, Richard wrote Bob Sherrill, asking if Esquire had come to any decision on his submissions. Four days later, the editor returned “Homage to Rudi Gernreich,” with regrets, continuing to dangle the golden carrot. “Close but not quite. Keep trying.” About the same time, Tom Parkinson wrote from London (with a Paris return address) saying he’d be happy to write something in support of Richard’s Guggenheim application. “I’ve had some luck in writing for people, but not so much as I’ll hope.” Both letters arrived at California Street when Richard was down in Monterey staying with Price Dunn. His old buddy operated a hauling business called Blue Whale Movers with his brother Bruce, and Brautigan needed a job. Anything to help pay the bills. As usual, Richard and Price spent their first night together getting drunk.

  Brautigan returned to San Francisco in mid-September, having earned a few bucks helping Price with manual labor. He’d managed to get some writing done, continuing to work on the short stories he hoped would develop into a novel. He missed Janice and had written her three letters while he was away, including one just after arriving that he never mailed, perhaps because he’d made a joke out of tying one on with Price. A letter from John Ciardi came during his absence, apologizing for the delay (“I have been off on a ‘round-the-world trip’”). He said he’d be happy to provide some words of support on the Guggenheim form.

  Richard wasted no time in replying. He wrote three quick letters on the same day. One to Ciardi, thanking him for his offer of help; another went off to Barney Rosset at Grove; and the third, to Esquire, nudged Bob Sherrill to make a decision about the Christmas tree story. The next day, he sent several short stories to his old friend Jory Sherman, now an editor at Broadside, a men’s magazine published out of North Hollywood, California. Sherman read the work immediately and wrote back the next day to say he was sorry he had to turn them down. He enjoyed “The Wild Birds of Heaven,” but it and the others weren’t right for his publication, “which is pretty much sex-oriented.” Sherman asked to see “anything else on hand that might come closer to the mark.”

  Having received the rejection letter from Broadside the day before, Brautigan quickly mailed another new short story to Jory Sherman (“The Rug,” based on a Bill Brown anecdote). Brautigan’s next order of business was getting his Guggenheim application form in the mail. His responses on the questionnaire were as concise as his poetry. Asked for a statement of his project, Richard replied, “I would like to write a novel dealing with the legend of America and its influence upon myself and these times.”

  Brautigan’s other answers were equally terse. Under marital status, he listed “Divorced” although he and Ginny had not yet filed any paperwork and were not even legally separated. Asked about previous grants and fellowships, Brautigan replied: “I have never received any outside help in my writing.” Under educational background, Richard wrote: “I have no education that can be listed here. My ‘education’ has been obtained by other means.” Asked about foreign language proficiency, he replied, “English is the only language I know.” His answer to the query “List the learned, scientific or artistic societies of which you are a member” was brief: “I have never been a member of any organization.”

  Brautigan’s paragraph-long project statement concluded: “I would like to write another novel about the fiber and mythology of this country. The locale of the novel would be the Pacific Northwest.” Richard’s career statement ran somewhat longer, filling an entire page. “I was a little disappointed over a critical reaction that tended to associate [Confederate General ] with the work of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, etc. I did not write my novel in an effort to imitate those writers. Their values and goals are of course valid and have illuminated areas of the Twentieth Century experience, but they are not my values and goals [. . .] As a novelist I am deeply interested in achieving a maximum amount of ef
fect using a minimum of space, and I am also very interested in structure and language.” As required, Richard made twelve copies of the three supplementary statements and mailed off his completed application.

  Things were not turning out the way Brautigan had hoped when his novel was published at the start of the year. Two months after submitting In Watermelon Sugar to Grove, he had not heard back from them. Nor had his publisher come to any decision regarding Trout Fishing in America. Adding to his woes, Jory Sherman wrote back from Broadside rejecting “The Rug” (later published as “Winter Rug” in Revenge of the Lawn). “As it stands, then, there is no way in hell I can buy this,” Sherman wrote. “What you have here is more of a slice of life with very little point as it turns out.” A letter from Lew Ellingham in New York six days later, soliciting work for a new magazine (eponymously named Magazine) didn’t do much to help. The little publication was distributed for free (“the two San Francisco outlets are City Lights and Gino & Carlo’s.”), which meant no payment. Richard sent off a card promising to contribute something.

  Seeking serious representation, Brautigan wrote to Elizabeth McKee, a celebrated New York literary agent (her clients included William Styron, John Irving [at the beginning of his career], Charles Webb [McKee had recently sold his first novel, The Graduate, to Hollywood], and Flannery O’Connor). Her firm, McIntosh, McKee & Dodds, had been acquired that August by the Harold Matson Company. Richard mentioned his confused relationship with Grove Press, stressing his chief complaint: “Unfortunately, [Confederate General ] was falsely labeled as a “Beat” novel which is about as good for one as a ten-mile wide hole in the head.”