Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Chet Helms and the Family Dog hosted more than fifty dances (two bits a head) at 1090 Page Street. The house band called themselves Big Brother and the Holding Company. Their chick singer was Helms’s old lady Janis before she split back to Texas. Even as the year ended with a photo-documentation of a fading era, the Age of Aquarius loomed on the horizon, casting a new light on older bohemian trends and energizing the unexpected birth of the San Francisco rock dance culture.

  It was definitely party time in Frisco. On New Year’s Eve, the Merry Pranksters paraded down Montgomery Street, taking advantage of a traditional end-of-the-year office workers’ celebration when shredded out-of-date calendars were thrown from high-rise windows. “Realize that you are in a parade,” the Pranksters preached, “and you’ll be as beautiful as what you do.” Their medicine show came with a pitch for an upcoming mega-event three weeks hence at the Longshoreman’s Hall. Bill Graham had signed on to coordinate something truly mind-blowing: the Pranksters’ first “Trips Festival.” Richard and Janice lived at the center of this festive world. The growing rift between them made participating in the parade impossible.

  Alternating with the Family Dog, Bill Graham’s Fillmore held weekly concerts where all barriers dissolved, the dancers and the musicians meeting as equals. In mid-April 1966, Chet Helms moved his operation to the Avalon Ballroom on Sutter Street just off Van Ness in Polk Gulch, another upstairs dance hall with a balcony, once a home for swing orchestras. Here the motto was “May the baby Jesus shut your mouth and open your mind.” The house band was once again Big Brother and the Holding Company. In June, Helms invited Janis Joplin back up from Texas to return as the group’s lead singer. Two psychedelic pleasure temples now beckoned the faithful. In six short months, a wild dervishing frenzy had taken hold of the collective unconscious of Frisco youth.

  Buoyed by distant praise and the promise of income, Brautigan made it through the holiday minefield. He worked on a new short story/chapter for the novel about his grandmother while pursuing other literary activities. Like jigsaw puzzles found in summer houses, life’s little odd pieces tend to go missing. Just so, the emotional circumstances of Richard and Janice’s second Christmas together have been lost to time. One enigmatic clue survived. Brautigan sent Don Allen a greeting card with a photo of a near-naked blond seen from the rear. Her legs were wrapped in a Nazi flag, the swastika prominent below her buttocks. The tattoo on her left cheek read, “Property of Satan’s Slaves.” Inside, Richard wrote “Merry California Christmas!” and signed both names, “Richard and Janice,” in a tiny pinched hand.

  Ken Kesey was found guilty of marijuana possession (the La Honda beef) and sentenced to three years deferred with six months’ probation. A more prudent man might have considered modifying his lifestyle, but Captain Trips was not one to let the threat of jail stand in his way. Three days later he was busted again for smoking weed with a minor named Mountain Girl on Stewart Brand’s North Beach rooftop.

  Kesey skipped the February bail hearing for his two drug arrests, and the following Sunday, police investigators found an abandoned bus along the highway near Eureka, California. Painted in gaudy colors, the vehicle carried a sign reading “Intrepid Traveler.” A rambling suicide note signed by Kesey lay on the front seat. In part, it read, “Ocean, ocean, ocean, I’ll beat you in the end [. . .] I’ll go through with my heels your hungry ribs.” The note turned out to be a hoax, a fact coming to light soon afterward, when Kesey showed up alive in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. The novelist was soon joined south of the border by several Pranksters and a large contingent of the Family Dog.

  Valentine’s Day 1966 provided an ironic backdrop when yet another poisoned barb from Cupid’s quiver pierced the troubled heart of Janice and Richard’s relationship. The occasion was Joanne Kyger’s wedding to Jack Boyce and the festive reception afterward at the Greenwich Street home of John and Margot Patterson Doss. Getting married on a holiday dedicated to love seemed auspicious to a bride walking down the aisle for the second time. James Koller recalled “a party that included champagne without end and dancing—at one point a circle dance ended with all falling to the floor.”

  Everyone agreed that the trouble between Richard and Janice began with a spilled drink. Janice, looking lovely in “a spangly dress,” danced up a storm and in the frenzy collided with a glass of wine. From this point on, conflicting stories veered widely astray. Joanne Kyger remembered going down to the basement with Janice and helping her wash and iron the dress. Margot Doss, who thought Janice “very raunchy,” recalled things differently. In her version, it was the Dosses’ oldest son, Rick, who volunteered to assist in the dress cleaning. He “took her downstairs, and they wound up screwing in the bathtub.” Kyger disputed this. “Margot thinks her sons are the biggest studs in the world,” she said. “I was down there with the dress. I thought she was always faithful.”

  The actual truth turned out to have less import than what Brautigan believed to be true. When Richard asked, “Where’s Janice?” he was told she was off getting it on with Rick Doss. Drunk and infuriated, the solid weight of a shot glass clenched in his fist, Richard Brautigan set out to seek retribution just as Dr. John Doss returned home from his shift at the hospital. “He comes tearing down the stairs,” Margot recalled, “yelling, ‘I’ll coldcock that boy!’ John came in and grabbed him by the arm and said, ‘Richard, you’ll have to deal with the old man first.’ And so, he calmed Richard down.”

  Brautigan’s method of dealing with emotional adversity always involved immersing himself in work. Although the monthly payments from Grove began in January, Richard did not immediately start writing a new novel. Instead, he continued with the series of stories that had preoccupied him for many months. One was “⅓, ⅓, ⅓,” a work of fiction Don Carpenter later called “a two-million-ton short story. It says everything there is to say about writing. In about four pages.”

  In its own way, Brautigan’s association with the distant worlds of publishing remained as curious as the peculiar three-way writing partnership he had described in his new short story. Seymour Krim (now serving as a book scout for Hill & Wang in addition to his work at the New York Herald Tribune) offered to show In Watermelon Sugar to Arthur Wang, but in the end the publisher rejected it with a cursory note. Over in England, the American writer Stephen Schneck, whose first novel, The Nightclerk, had won the fabled Formentor Prize in 1965, told Barley Alison, a director at the publishing firm Weidenfeld & Nicolson, about Richard’s new fiction, and she wrote asking to have a look.

  The notion of a having a British publisher intrigued Brautigan (Confederate General was under contract to Rizzoli in Italy, his first foreign edition, but had not yet found a home in the U.K.) and he sent Ms. Alison the manuscript of In Watermelon Sugar after Hill & Wang returned it. In the end, although she enjoyed reading Brautigan’s work, Barley Alison also took a pass. “It is just not our kind of book. Fantasy is quite ‘difficult’ in England any way and we just don’t do this kind of book at all.”

  Brautigan had better luck with little magazines. TriQuarterly (no. 5) appeared that winter, featuring two of Richard’s stories (“Revenge of the Lawn” and “A Short History of Religion in California”). He liked the issue very much, “especially the poems of Takahashi and the play by Isaac Babel,” and showed it to many of his friends in San Francisco.

  “A Study in California Flowers,” a one-page story, was published early in 1966 in Coyote’s Journal (no. 5–6), an infrequent magazine founded in Eugene, Oregon, two years earlier when the U of O suspended publication of the Northwest Review “because of extreme reaction to an issue which contained work by Whalen, Antonin Artaud, and an interview with Fidel Castro.” The editor, Ed Van Aelstyn, along with Will Wroth and James Koller, the poetry editor, took the offending material and started Coyote’s Journal. They had sufficient submissions for the first four issues and “branched almost immediately into book publication.”

  Jim Koller had been introduced to Richard Brautigan by
Don Allen after a reading in 1960 on his first trip to Frisco from the Midwest. He met Bill Brown around the time Joanne Kyger returned from Japan. By 1966, Brown had signed on as an editor of Coyote’s Journal. “What we had created then was a super problem for the magazine,” Koller recalled, “because no one could agree on anything.” Wroth and Van Aelstyn went their separate ways, leaving Brown and Koller at the helm. Many years later, Jim Koller married Bill Brown’s daughter, Maggie, who was the same age as her childhood playmate, Ianthe Brautigan.

  Around the end of February, Richard received a phone call from Sue Green, who worked for Art Voices, a magazine starting up in New York. She had read The Octopus Frontier and wondered if Brautigan had any stories he might send her. Two days later, he mailed off a batch of five, including “The Kool-Aid Wino,” to the office on East Fifty-seventh Street. Richard had no way of knowing the precarious status of his submissions. The publisher of Art Voices was undecided on whether to buy Art and Literature, another magazine that had recently folded, or begin his own “from scratch.”

  Sue Green returned four of Brautigan’s stories, keeping only “Kitty Genovese-by-the-Sea,” a five-page piece about a pilot named Charles Redgrave marooned on an island with seventeen palm trees eighty miles southwest of Hawaii. Redgrave seals a note in a bottle, setting it adrift on the tide. The bottle is found by a couple walking on a California beach. They think it’s a joke and ignore Redgrave’s plea for help. Green felt especially fond of this story and wanted to see it in print. Yet, she wrote, “at this point the whole undertaking is out of my control so I cannot promise anyone anything.” Art Voices went out of business later that summer, and the story was never published, lost like Charles Redgrave’s bottled note in a vast ocean of forgotten manuscripts.

  Brautigan got the bad news from Sue Green right after his tax returns were due. This time, Richard didn’t owe the government any money. His gross income for 1965 (including his Esquire kill fee, a $75 reading payment, and twelve bucks from the sale of his poetry chapbooks) came to $940.45. After he carefully itemized his writing business deductions (postage, telephone, and a percentage of his rent and utilities), Brautigan’s adjusted income was forty-five cents shy of reaching $400. Facing the financial music of the 1040 form convinced Richard it was time to get to work on his new novel. He had just received his third monthly payment from Grove. His guaranteed income had already reached the halfway mark.

  Earlier in March, Richard told Andy Hoyem that he wanted “to go to Vancouver or Pacific Grove” with the money still to come from his publisher. He made no mention of bringing Janice along. In the end, Brautigan stayed put and traveled only into the far distance of his imagination. He had a plan in mind to develop “The American Experience,” his unfinished story about an abortion begun eighteen months earlier, into a full-length novel. Reaching back for a painful memory in his youth, he determined to call his heroine “Vida” after the little settlement on the McKenzie River near where Linda Webster once spurned his advances on the covered bridge.

  Brautigan actually knew very little about the process of obtaining an abortion. At the time, the operation was illegal in America and many women in California wishing to terminate a pregnancy went across the border to Tijuana for the procedure. Several Mexican clinics competed for their business in a town famous for its bullring and numerous bordellos. As part of his research for the project, Richard embarked on a second trip to Mexico. This time, he did not have to hitchhike. On March 26, 1966, he flew from San Francisco to San Diego on Pacific Southwest Airlines, paying $20.84 apiece for two one-way tickets.

  PSA Flight 840 departed at 8:15 AM. Brautigan was up at six in the morning. “Light and gray outside.” He brought along his notebook and jotted down everything that he observed on the way to the airport. “I saw a sign with a chicken holding a gigactic [sic] egg. Strange.” The sign made it into the book, as did Benny Bufano’s statue of “Peace” at San Francisco International “towering above us like a giant bullet.” Richard even drew a little crude sketch of the gleaming metal artwork.

  Scrupulous as a foreign correspondent recording each detail of a battlefield, Brautigan described it all: the terrazzo floors of the terminal, the Formica countertop in the coffee shop, the pattern of familiar California landmarks (“Hollywood, Coit Tower, the Mount Palomar telescope, a California mission, the Golden Gate Bridge [. . .]”) on the interior walls of the aircraft, the brief stopover in Burbank, stewardesses in their short-skirted uniforms, a large stain like a coffee ring on the gently trembling riveted wing. It was Richard Brautigan’s first flight, and he found the minutiae of the trip fascinating.

  Brautigan landed in San Diego at 9:45 AM and took a Yellow Cab into the city. He walked around the downtown, jotting constant notes. A Greyhound bus left every fifteen minutes for Tijuana, and Richard eventually boarded one, paying sixty cents for his fare. Richard’s notes during the bus ride made constant reference to “Vida,” as if he was really traveling with an imaginary fictional companion. (“I guess he thought that because Vida looked so pure and bautiufl [sic] that she must be decanant [sic].” Having already seen Nogales and Juarez, Brautigan knew what to expect of border towns. He found them unpleasant. “They bring out the worst in both countries, and everything that is American stands out like a neon sore [. . .]”

  Richard wandered the tourist-clogged streets of downtown Tijuana, a new notebook in hand. Having filled the first, Brautigan scribbled notes in a little three-by-five spiral-bound, which fit more easily in his hand while wandering through the crowd. He described the “heroic” welcoming arch, the Government Tourist Building, and a “big modern Woolworth’s.” The presence of an American five-and-dime in Mexico fascinated Brautigan, and he recorded many impressions of the store.

  The one location he didn’t describe in his notes was an abortion clinic. Not a single word about what was ostensibly his main objective. Brautigan returned to San Diego that same day, in time to catch PSA Flight 631 home to Frisco at 6:25 PM. Get in, get out, and get the job done with no wasted motion had long been his work motto. The daylong jaunt south of the border had not been intended as a pleasure trip.

  Back in the apartment on California Street, Brautigan transcribed his notes into twenty-one detail-packed typewritten pages. He used virtually every observation made on the Tijuana trip in writing his novel. Richard’s obsession with accuracy and detail served to counterbalance the extravagant fantasy that he used at the start of the book. The notion of a library housing only unpublished manuscripts stands out as one of Brautigan’s most appealing conceits.

  At the time, he must have been amused by the notion that only in such an institution would his own rejected work ever find a repository. Richard used the Presidio branch of the San Francisco Public Library as the archetype for this fictional creation, even including the address (3150 Sacramento Street) in his text. For years after The Abortion was eventually published, this small neighborhood branch library received numerous letters from true-believing readers who inquired about bringing in their rejected manuscripts. Five and a half years after Richard’s death, life imitated art in Burlington, Vermont, when Todd Lockwood founded the Brautigan Library, a repository devoted to archiving unpublished works.

  In the novel, the first-person narrator had no name but bore a distinct resemblance to Richard Brautigan. Like the author, he was thirty-one years old and didn’t know how to drive. He had worked in “canneries, sawmills, factories” and was “not at home in the world.” He had never before been to Tijuana but had visited Guadalajara “five or six years” before. His poverty afforded only instant coffee. In one notable way, Brautigan deliberately distanced himself from his main character. “I felt like having a drink,” he wrote, “a very unusual thing for me [. . .]” The narrator lived alone in his strange library for almost three years before Vida Kramar moved in with him.

  In many ways, Janice Meissner served as a model for Vida. Richard gave his heroine black hair (“like bat lightning”), but otherwise
her physical beauty mirrored Janice’s delicately chiseled good looks. Vida and Janice shared a curvaceous figure (37-19-36). “She was almost painful to gaze upon,” Brautigan wrote of Vida. “Her beauty, like a creature unto itself, was quite ruthless in its own way.” Descriptions of Vida’s powerful effect on other men, how they stared at her, awestruck and drooling, and how she brushed off their advances “like flies,” had the clarion ring of personal experience. Writing this at a time when things were going so wrong with Janice can’t have been easy for Richard. It’s hard to lose the most beautiful woman you’ve ever known. In Brautigan’s new novel, the narrator got to keep the girl.

  Like Alfred Hitchcock seen in an elevator or buying a newspaper at the start of one of his films, Richard Brautigan had a walk-on part in The Abortion. Book 1 (“Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight?”) was divided into four sections. The third of these, “The 23,” concerned the total number of unpublished books the library had received that day. Always the enumerator and list maker, Brautigan described each in turn, listing every make-believe title and its fictional author.

  The ninth of the twenty-three writers to submit manuscripts was Richard Brautigan. Richard described himself this way: “The author was tall and blond and had a long yellow mustache that gave him an anachronistic appearance. He looked as if he’d be more at home in another era.” The novel Brautigan brought in was called MOOSE. “‘Just another book,’ he said.”

  While working on The Abortion, Brautigan plugged away at a task he found distasteful, sending out letters of inquiry to editors and agents. “Falling stars,” he called these mercenary missives. Don Carpenter, whose first novel, Hard Rain Falling, was published by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1966, had recommended Richard to his Hollywood agent, the legendary H. N. Swanson. Known to everyone as “Swanee,” the cultured ten-percenter numbered Hemingway, Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, J. R. R. Tolkien, Ross Macdonald, and Agatha Christie among his many illustrious clients. Once, when asked what form of writing was the most profitable, Swanson replied, “Ransom notes.”