Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Teams of volunteers, including Keith Abbott, spent the afternoon preparing for the three-day marathon happening. Emmett Grogan trucked over “tons of shredded plastic” he’d scored from a local factory and filled a downstairs corridor waist-deep with the stuff. Rumors spread like mononucleosis. Pig Pen of the Dead was scheduled to play the organ in the chapel, and word went out that Big Brother and the Holding Company would make an appearance. In his Friday “On the Town” column in the Chronicle, Ralph Gleason devoted two long paragraphs to The Invisible Circus, stating that Big Brother “will sing and play ‘Amazing Grace’ at the 11 a.m. regular Sunday services.” More talk concerned a “Slo-Mo Destruction Derby” with “junker cars” colliding head-on at low speed in the church parking lot next door. A guy showed up in the afternoon with a bucket full of oysters. Richard Brautigan had sent him out to Point Reyes earlier in the day to buy several dozen from the oyster farms on Tomales Bay. Keith Abbott asked Richard what he intended to do with the mollusks. He received only a sly mysterious smile in reply.

  The festivities got under way at 8:00 PM Friday the twenty-fourth, when the Orkustra started jamming in the Fellowship Room. An elevator at the Taylor Street entrance carried visitors up to the Sanctuary and second-floor offices or down to the basement level, where the throb of rock music beckoned. Even as the early arrivals struggled through a hallway filled with clinging plastic shreds, the John Dillinger Computer’s first publication rattled off the Gestetners and was distributed to the gathering crowd.

  “I Ching Flash One,” the first of more than seventy-five broadsides issued that night, reported that the hexagram for the moment from the I Ching was “Breakthrough to the Creative.” Those who managed to break through the shredded plastic found themselves in a cramped rec room whose low ceiling and close proximity to the boiler made it “sweltering hot.” Emmett Grogan described how the Orkustra’s amplified music (“blustering with outrageous noise”) reached a decibel level so intense that many listeners were brought to tears.

  Upstairs, Chester Anderson typed the latest news and rumors onto a stencil. Reporters from the John Dillinger Computer roamed the hallways and brought back stories of what they had seen out among the throng. At 8:27 PM, “Flash Two” was distributed to anyone wanting a copy. In it, Anderson passed along a “usually reliable rumor” that doses of LSD were being given away to “groovy-looking people of all genders” and stated that journalists from the Chronicle were on the premises “in a dazed condition. Give them all the help they can use & more.”

  Anderson mentioned live music “in what I think is the game room,” lights and electronic music in the Sanctuary, food in the dining room downstairs, and a UFO “spotted hovering over the bell tower.” The Flash declared that “the John Dillinger Computer loves you” and welcomed “all manuscripts, bits of paper, rumors, outrages,” promising that readings from the I Ching “will be made & distributed as the occasion seemeth to warrant.” And on a line all to itself, Anderson wrote: “Emmett Grogan is wandering through the halls. Hail him.”

  By 9:00 PM, the Orkustra had moved on and Peter Berg presided over a conference “On the meaning of Obscenity” in the Fellowship Room. Sitting with him on the panel at a long table were a minister, a lawyer, and a policeman specializing in community relations. Hundreds of spectators looked on, and a “free pulpit” had been provided for the audience to talk back to the panel. A proclamation from the John Dillinger Computer stated the real obscenity was war and urged the panel to disrobe. After an hour, the conference came to an end when a naked lovemaking couple was carried in on a canopied mattress borne aloft by four sturdy young men as rock music roared and a film of NASA rockets flared onto a paper screen dividing the room. A dozen writhing belly dancers tore through it to the tom-tom beat of drums, a bare-breasted blond in the lead, dancing around the lovemakers.

  By 10:00 PM, things started getting out of hand. The crowd in the church had grown so large it was difficult to move from room to room. Keith Abbott described the press in the hallways as “a subway train of human flesh.” An effort was made to maintain some semblance of order amid the chaos. Michael McClure and Lenore Kandel read their poetry in the Sanctuary, crowded with stoned participants lighting incense sticks and candles, dripping wax over the rugs and pews. Kandel had taken a break from her room where she deciphered the soles of peoples’ feet.

  Through it all, the John Dillinger Computer distributed a steady stream of Flash reports: fragments of stoned conversation recorded in the hallways minutes earlier, instant poetry, I Ching readings, hallucinatory artwork, and never-ending announcements about everything from a funeral for dead flowers to an argument recorded in a Tenderloin bar across the street. As the Gestetner whirled, Freewheelin’ Frank “sat in the corner and painstakingly wrote a poem in the midst of the chaos.” One handout declared, “Emmett Grogan has disappeared. So what?”

  When the Diggers made an attempt to feed the masses at eleven it proved impossible. A tidal assault of humanity crammed into the dining room. The crowd no longer comprised just the Haight-Ashbury community. By Keith Abbott’s account, the swarm included “Tenderloin winos, sailors on leave, escaped mental patients, cruising transvestites, karmic basket cases, tourists and local street trade.” Emmett Grogan reported “an old, white-haired, bearded man” in the Sanctuary who “announced he was god and loudly accused the overflow congregation of having taken his name in vain.” In Keith Abbott’s opinion, “This was not fun.”

  Around the same time, Richard Brautigan took a break downstairs in a conference room converted into a temporary coffee shop by a group thinking it groovy to run such an establishment. Weary from his efforts with The John Dillinger Computer, Richard shared a cup of joe with an equally exhausted member of the Glide church board. As they sipped their java, a blurred antique pornographic film flickered over and over on a bedsheet hung at one end of the room. The original plan called for each room to change management after an allotted time had passed. The general crush slowed this process, making it difficult to move things around, and the coffee shop had overstayed its assigned tenure.

  “The movie was boring,” Richard Brautigan recalled, “the people were ugly, and what they were doing was ugly. The two of us drank our coffee and discussed how the craziness was going to end. That was when I noticed that the coffee shop people were packing up their goods and leaving. Just as they left, and the porno movie ended, the sheet split, and out came two strippers with a band blasting bump-and-grind music behind them.” The church official told Brautigan he’d had enough. “He was abandoning ship.”

  Scheduled to read his poetry in the Sanctuary at midnight, Richard determined to go down with the ship. By the time Brautigan arrived, total anarchy had taken hold. To the throb of a dozen conga drums, naked couples copulated on the altar while other nude crazies raced up and down the aisles on bicycles. A statue of Christ was splashed with the blood of an overeager celebrant who “got his head cracked during a scuffle.” Thick clouds of incense hung in the high domed ceiling. A pair of frantic doves whirled overhead as dozens of chanting dancers stripped off each other’s clothing. Holding candles aloft, they pranced between the rows, dripping hot wax everywhere. A group of Hells Angels got it on in the back pews with a woman wearing a nun’s habit who called out, “More! More!” One stoned individual sat cross-legged before the altar, coloring the carved marble tracery with a set of Magic Markers.

  Richard Brautigan stepped into this bedlam carrying his bucket of oysters. A moment of unexpected quiet greeted him as he approached the lectern. Setting the pail down, Richard announced he was dedicating his reading to oysters, and all hell broke loose once again. He made a valiant attempt to read a couple poems. Even though he was amplified over a PA system, the mob drowned him out. Bedlam reigned. Brautigan gave up and headed back upstairs to the John Dillinger Computer where he found all the Gestetners broken down from overuse. Only a single mimeo still ran, operated by a speed freak “who was busy cranking out gibberish.” />
  For Keith Abbott, the pandemonium seemed a microcosm of life in the Haight. “What started as an improvised, multi-layered theater experience was soon overrun by a lemming tide of people, most of whom were looney.” Emmett Grogan thought the scene “was like the set of an incredible Fellini wet dream.” He reveled in the hedonistic carnival, loving the “one big happy prickly pussy crab-lice moment of eternity.” Richard Brautigan held himself back from the chaos yet found it amusing nonetheless. More than five thousand pleasure seekers swarmed through Glide Memorial during the first eight hours of The Invisible Circus. Around four in the morning, when the crowd dwindled, church officials pulled the plug. They’d had enough. Around five hundred of those still conscious followed Michael McClure and his autoharp out to Ocean Beach, where they beat on drums and garbage cans until sunup.

  As the head of the John Dillinger Computer, Richard Brautigan attended the final meeting when the Lion Priests said enough was enough. Richard told Keith all about it the next day. “Everything had gotten so crazy by that time [. . .] One of the Diggers had selected some speed freak as his representative. Between each speech by the church members, this guy would spew out a rap. It was like counterpoint. Everyone was trying to figure out some way to get the mob out of the church without calling the police and starting a riot.” Brautigan recalled a board member who seemed to be in a trance, repeating over and over to himself, “The one thing we agreed upon was no naked bodies on the altar and what did we get? Naked bodies on the altar.”

  Richard left before dawn. He took the brown paper John Dillinger Computer poster home with him to Geary Street and pinned it in a place of honor on his living room wall. A couple years later, he moved it to the entrance hallway, his poster gallery. Brautigan maintained a close working relationship with The Communication Company after The Invisible Circus. He liked the idea of guerrilla publishing. The Digger practice of giving things away as a form of public theater inspired him to take the stage himself and hand out free poetry on street corners.

  Richard began spending time with Claude and H’lane at the Duboce Avenue apartment. H’lane remembered once going to the Fillmore Auditorium with Brautigan. Richard tended to sit it out once the music started, but he actually danced with her that night. The refrigerator in the Hayward kitchen bore a sign reading DIGGERS WELCOME. One evening, Brautigan dropped by when the fridge was empty, and there were six mouths to feed. “No food,” H’lane said. Richard had about six bucks in his pocket. He went out, “bought a chicken and some veggies,” and returned to cook dinner for everyone.

  In mid-March, com/co published “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” the first of the poems Richard Brautigan brought to them. In a letter to Susan Morgan, Richard claimed the recently written piece was “being made up into a poster.” It was issued as a broadside in two different single-sheet formats, ephemeral handouts intended for free distribution. The next com/co flyer featuring Richard Brautigan’s work was “The Beautiful Poem,” which came off the Gestetners in April. Brautigan wrote “Flowers for Those You Love” on the last day of March. Com/co also published it early in April. The straightforward cautionary poem warned about venereal disease. San Francisco owned the fourth-highest infection rate for syphilis of any city in the nation. By early June, Dr. David Smith opened the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic at the corner of Clayton and Haight to treat VD and the bad drug trips plaguing the impoverished young runaway street people.

  Com/co did not publish everything Brautigan submitted to them. A poem entitled “The Peacock Song” ended up, along with work by Ron Loewinsohn, Keith Abbott, Allen Cohen, and David Bromige, in a manila folder labeled “mss—free poems—unprinted.” It remains unpublished to this day. Many of the single-sheet broadsides the Communication Company printed for Richard bore the cryptic initials UPS, standing for the Underground Press Syndicate. Emmett Grogan missed seeing Brautigan’s initial com/co publications. Plagued by the bad vibes created by Hinckle’s essay in Ramparts, Grogan reverted to anonymity.

  When reporters showed up at The Trip Without a Ticket, the Diggers told them Emmett Grogan was an invented name. Like George Metevsky, it was a red herring they had cooked up to feed to a voracious press. Emmett Grogan lived only in myth. “Hey, you wanna be Emmett Grogan? Okay, you’re Emmett Grogan. Maybe I’m Emmett Grogan, or what about that guy over there in the corner? Or . . .” He was nowhere and everywhere. Stories involving him were nothing but jive, just another shuck. Meanwhile, the real Emmett Grogan borrowed $300 from a black dealer named Super Spade and, a week or so after the Invisible Circus, carrying five hundred tabs of LSD as “emergency funds,” hopped a flight to New York using a stranger’s student ID.

  On Sunday, March 5, the Communication Company staged “Bedrock One,” a benefit for itself, at California Hall on Polk Street. Billed as the first in a series of three directed by Chester Anderson and produced by The Experimental Theatre Co-op, LAMF, the event was hosted by Warren Hinckle III, of all people. Perhaps he was thanking Anderson for all the underpaid research. Hinckle got one of his Ramparts staff, a young cartoonist named Robert Crumb, to design a poster, one of only two “rock” posters the artist ever drew. It pictured the typical R. Crumb character, a grinning moon-faced idiot with huge feet and a lightbulb screwed into the top of his head.

  The lineup for Bedrock One was a grab bag of talent: music by the Steve Miller Blues Band, Dino Valenti, and the Orkustra; light show by the Lysergic Power & Light Company; “happenings” were the purview of the Diggers, the Mime Troupe, Allen Dienstag & the Pack, and the San Francisco Sexual Freedom League. Richard Brautigan & the Caped Crusaders (whoever they might have been) read poetry with a flair inherent in their billing. Admission to the benefit was $2.50. No liquor was served, and minors were welcome (also “CIA agents,” according to a com/co flyer, which promised “surprises”). The evening began with a chanting ceremony by devotees from the Radha Krishna Temple, the Diggers’ former next-door neighbors with whom they had often quarreled.

  Since meeting her in January, Brautigan wrote several letters to Susan Morgan. While still in contact with his muse, Michaela, Richard told Erik Weber that Susan was a “muse from Sacramento.” Since the ancient Greeks worshipped nine muses, in an age espousing free love, Brautigan didn’t want to get short-changed in the muse department. Susan remembered coming up to visit Richard from Santa Barbara “maybe two or three times. He took me around and introduced me to exciting people.” She met Lenore Kandel, Michael McClure, Freewheelin’ Frank, and Ferlinghetti. At least once, they went to a concert at the Fillmore. On another occasion, Richard brought her to Lyle Tuttle’s tattoo parlor, where Morgan had a small ankh, the ancient Egyptian life sign, inked onto her abdomen.

  One afternoon, Susan and Richard found a pile of black folders lying in the gutter. They enclosed pictures of fancy bathroom fixtures. Susan picked one up. “At that time in my life I was not adverse to touching things lying in the gutter,” she recalled. On the upper right-hand corner of the cover it said “Albion” in small white printed letters. That night, before having sex, Susan asked Richard to write a poem about Albion. The next morning, while Morgan was out at the store shopping for eggs and bacon, Brautigan wrote “Albion Breakfast” as a surprise. He typed up a copy dedicated “For Susan,” signed it, and added the date, March 24, 1967.

  “I was never in love with Richard,” Morgan wrote Keith Abbott in 1989, “but enjoyed his gawky, sweet ways.” It was his acceptance and enjoyment of other people’s eccentricities that pleased her most. When Richard told Susan he was looking for a photo to grace the cover of his next book, she happily complied with his request to pose. Brautigan asked Erik Weber to drop by with his camera and took Susan to a thrift shop, where he bought her a lavender satin dressing gown for $1.45. At the time, she thought the garment overpriced, but wore it for years afterward. The night before the shoot, they had dinner over in Berkeley with Ron and Kitty Loewinsohn. A great deal of red wine was consumed. Unaccustomed to drinking, S
usan suffered from a slight hangover the next day.

  Brautigan stage-managed the event, instructing Susan not to smile. Erik found Morgan a “long pretty” brunette and shot a roll of film, capturing her coy gamine look. Brautigan posed her standing next to the John Dillinger Computer poster and seated in a deep Salvation Army wicker chair. Richard perched in a proprietary manner on the arm. The pictures possessed a studied formality. Susan found them “not very flattering.” For Richard, they were strictly business, possible cover shots for one of the planned Coyote Press books.

  During this period, Bruce Conner grew much closer to Brautigan. Conner taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, one class of his choice and title each semester. The first course Conner described as “a life drawing class.” His caveat was that only women students were allowed to register. “The concept was to see what would happen to an art class that was restricted to one sex,” Conner recalled. “And of course, me being a male teaching [it].” Conner had a budget to hire nude models. Once, he hired a good-looking male model and the students were instructed either to draw him or draw on him. “That was very popular,” the artist observed.

  Richard Brautigan modeled for Conner’s first or second class. He did not disrobe. Instead, the session became a reading, a Brautigan performance piece. Bruce Conner can’t remember any of the students actually drawing. “This was a weird theater they had all come into.”

  The event had been previously announced, and one young student asked if her mother might attend. “Obviously, she disapproved of Richard,” Conner drily observed. “Her daughter was taken out of the class shortly afterwards.” The students didn’t know what to make of Brautigan. His reading was greeted with “dead silence.” Richard commented later to Bruce “that usually when he reads his good poems he gets laughter and stuff.” Not this time. “It was a dead response.”