Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  At the Festival of Growing Things, a rock concert on Mount Tamalpais on July 1, the promoters gave away free flower seed packets to all who attended. If Brautigan wasn’t there, he certainly heard about it. Billy “Batman” Jahrmarkt’s wife, Joan, went into labor four days later with Richard in attendance. Kirby Doyle, “a mad Irish poet,” documented the birth. His novel, Happiness Bastard, had been published by com/co. Doyle wrote of Richard walking “through the rooms, tall, slightly stooping like a gentle spider standing up.”

  Claude Hayward drove Dr. John Doss in from Bolinas (“John Doss, way over 6 foot, a tower of a man with those huge gentle hands [. . .]”), and after twenty-four hours of labor, he and H’lane and Doyle witnessed the delivery, along with a crowd of devoted Digger women and the three Bat children, Jade, Hassan, and Caledonia. The baby boy was named Digger by his father. “At the instant Billy Batman called his child by their name the Diggers knew it was given away,” Emmett Grogan wrote five years later. “They never used it to refer to themselves again.” From that moment on, the Diggers were called the Free City Collective. Kirby Doyle’s account of Digger Batman’s birth eventually became an anonymous part of The Digger Papers.

  It is not known when in early July Richard Brautigan first met Marcia Pacaud of Montreal, Canada, but on the twelfth, he wrote a couple of unpublished poems in her sun-bright Sausalito apartment (number 5) at 14 Princess Lane. Both “A Place Where the Wind Doesn’t Live” and “The Planted Egg, the Harvested Birds” were dedicated to Marcia, a tall intelligent woman who parted her shoulder-length blond hair straight down the middle. The Pacaud family hailed from Sandstead, Quebec, near the Vermont border, where they lived in a house built in 1867.

  Marcia Pacaud had an affinity for poets. She worked at the Tides Bookstore in Sausalito and had been a friend of the Canadian poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen. Richard instinctively understood the path to Marcia’s heart was paved with poetry. He told Keith Abbott that she possessed “an inner acceleration.” On a single day in mid-July, staying again on Princess Lane in Sausalito, Brautigan wrote five more poems for Pacaud.

  These included “Map Shower,” a paean to her long blond hair and, finding even her idiosyncrasies adorable, “The Shenevertakesherwatchoff Poem” after noticing that Marcia wore her leather-strapped wristwatch even to bed. Brautigan was enchanted with Pacaud’s golden hair, and most of the poems he wrote for or about her made mention of her “long blond beauty.” “Richard and his blonds,” a friend once commented. Michael McClure observed, “Blond or brunette didn’t matter.” In McClure’s opinion, Brautigan’s “sex appeal bloomed with his fame.”

  Brautigan’s shyness had long caused him to be somewhat awkward around women, and when exotic creatures like Cass Finley showed up on his doorstep in the middle of the night it came as a revelation. Magda Cregg told a story illustrative of Richard’s ambivalent attitude regarding his sex appeal. One afternoon in the mid- to late sixties, she and Lew Welch and Brautigan were walking down Haight Street, “and Richard tries to pick up a girl, and she refuses him, just in passing, and he goes, ‘I wouldn’t go to bed with anything I could pick up.’”

  The paucity of Brautigan’s correspondence during the Summer of Love speaks volumes about the initial intensity of his relationship with Marcia Pacaud. The eloquence of silence, broken only by a mid-August letter to Marcia. One hint of the degree of Richard’s passion for his new blond flame came from Don Carpenter, who had met Marcia and found her “a good head, very intelligent woman.” Don asked Marcia why, when things had been going so well with Richard, they broke up two weeks after moving in together. She told him “that once Richard knows you love him, he worships you and he drives you absolutely fucking crazy. He gets down on his knees to you.”

  At age seven, Ianthe had no interest in worshiping Marcia Pacaud. The Canadian woman was always nice to the little girl, but whenever Ianthe came to visit and Richard left her alone with Marcia, she would draw close and whisper, “You’re not my mother—go home.” This upset Pacaud a great deal, occasionally reducing her to tears. Richard never got angry with his daughter about such behavior. All she had to do was “smile sweetly up at him.”

  Sometime in July, Richard introduced Marcia to the Webers. Like Americans everywhere, they gathered in the kitchen. Erik got out his camera and started shooting pictures. Richard sat in a wooden chair wearing love beads and his familiar hat and vest, holding his long fingers steepled together. Marcia sprawled at his feet on the geometrically patterned linoleum, a Cheshire cat smile masking her true feelings. She stood up, long and lithe in snug-fitting blue jeans. Erik climbed onto a chair, taking his last shots focusing down into Pacaud’s wide-eyed upturned face. Brautigan appeared reduced and diminished, almost lost in the background.

  Richard wrote “Horse Child Breakfast” for Marcia Pacaud and her “long blond hair.” Michael McClure envisioned the woman in the poem as “a filly [. . .] probably she has a long palomino mane and sleek legs.” McClure thought Brautigan’s “delicate” poem was “canny and memorable.” “It’s gorgeous!” he exulted. Richard concluded, “Horse child breakfast / what you’re doing to me, / I want done forever.”

  This was not to be. Brautigan remained incapable of sustaining lasting committed relationships. An unknown girlfriend from this period wrote a curt note breaking things off with him. “The only one of your favorite things I can do with you is fuck, and that isn’t enough for me,” she declared. “I didn’t guess when you said you didn’t want a girl as your center just how far away from your center you wanted a girl to be.” She ended with a reprimand: “Illusion stomps out reality like an anesthetic stomps out sensation or a boy scout his campfire. and fucking reality will go too. before that does I will altogether. Writing this is unreal.” Richard saved her card for the rest of his life.

  The single letter Richard Brautigan wrote during the spring and summer of his passion for Marcia Pacaud was to his agent. Bob Mills had written in mid-July to say that The Abortion had been read and rejected at Harcourt Brace, Simon & Schuster, Viking, Putnam’s, Harper & Row, Random House, and William Morrow. “The consensus seems to be that it’s not quite a complete, unified book.” Mills didn’t send only bad news. Robert Cowley, an editor at Horizon, had heard of Brautigan and wanted “an article or two” for the magazine.

  Richard responded, saying he’d like to write “about the Diggers in San Francisco.” Robert Mills either lost this letter or never received it. When Brautigan wrote again a month later to ask, “What’s happening with the Horizon article?” his agent confessed that when the magazine didn’t hear back from him in a timely fashion they assigned the piece on the San Francisco scene to someone else. Mills mentioned that the other writer “tried to get in touch with you while he was there, but couldn’t find you, they tell me.”

  A phone call from New York around the end of July provided Brautigan with an opportunity to write about the Diggers after all. William Jersey, president of Quest Productions, a small film company, wanted to do a story about the hippies in San Francisco and called Richard to talk things over. Jersey, a University of Southern California film school graduate who got his start as art director on the Steve McQueen horror flick, The Blob, had moved into documentaries. The previous year, he produced A Time for Burning, a civil rights film that had been nominated for an Academy Award. In the course of their conversation, they discussed life in the Haight-Ashbury. Richard told Bill Jersey a little of his involvement with the Diggers. They worked up an “idea,” and Jersey agreed to pay Brautigan $1,000 for an “expanded treatment.”

  Quest Productions sent Richard Brautigan a check for $500, the second half payable once a finished treatment was delivered. Should the treatment later be developed into a film script with further work required, Richard would be paid “commensurately.” Brautigan signed the enclosed papers, mailed them back to New York, and set to work. He titled his film story “Magicians of Light,” a reference to light show artists like Bill Ham and Ben Van Meter.r />
  “Magicians of Light” was to be a movie about making a movie. A New York filmmaker scouts for locations in San Francisco. Many of the scenes take place in familiar Brautigan territory: the Presidio pet cemetery, Foster’s cafeteria on Market Street, Golden Gate Park, a “VD Clinic,” a light show commune, and “a psychedelic whorehouse” on Telegraph Hill. Richard also suggested additional scenes be shot using actual members of the hip community. “Perhaps people like: Michael McClure/Grateful Dead/Janis Joplin/with/Big Brother & the Holding Company/Bill Graham/Allen Cohen/Red & Jay Thelin/ etc etc etc etc etc.”

  As an outline for a motion picture, Brautigan’s treatment seemed oddly static and lacking dramatic tension. Nothing much happens. The characters wander about almost aimlessly. Scene 18 is typical: “There is another knock at the door. The poet answers the door and it is Willard. He comes in and joins them in the bedroom. Somehow he ends up on the bed, too. They are all sitting there talking. It is kind of nice in a warm magic way. Then they have breakfast.”

  Richard wrote his fifteen-page screen treatment at great speed in a few days. Impatient, he wrote Bill Jersey: “Hey, I haven’t received the second five hundred dollars yet. I’d like to get it soon. I need the money for projects I’m working on here in San Francisco.” He received his payment without further delay.

  The $1,000 represented the bulk of Brautigan’s total income ($1,356.75) for 1967. Richard’s gross income for 1965 was only $940.45 and his advance from Grove Press (never earned out) for Confederate General came to $1,500. “Magicians of Light” was a slight pedestrian effort with virtually none of Brautigan’s unique quirky imagination in evidence. Considering Richard’s Digger ethos and the quality of the work he gave away for free, the whole endeavor hints at a rip-off. Quest Productions never made the film.

  Brautigan often traveled south to Santa Barbara in August to visit Jack and Vicki Shoemaker. He hung out at the Unicorn and read his work on a weekly two-hour Sunday literary program Jack hosted at a local radio station. Richard sometimes brought Marcia Pacaud along. Jack Shoemaker never really got to know her well. “It was Richard’s habit to keep his girlfriends silent and behind him,” Shoemaker recalled. “He was an instantaneously jealous man.”

  Things looked grim in the Haight-Ashbury at the beginning of August. The Summer of Love was turning out to be a bad trip just as the Diggers had predicted. Overcrowded with runaways ripe for the fleecing, Haight Street became a favored hunting ground for social predators and strong-arm artists. Rape was a common, if generally unreported, crime. The waiting room at the Free Clinic remained perpetually crowded with VD sufferers. An epidemic of methedrine hit the street, and speed freaks wandered about like walking wounded, jabbering manically to themselves.

  The increased drug trade opened the door to more serious crime. On August 3, a well-known acid dealer named John “Shob” Carter was found stabbed to death in his apartment, his right arm neatly severed at the elbow. The missing limb turned up in the trunk of Shob’s car along with his pistol and a large quantity of cash. At the wheel sat celebrated motorcycle racer Eric Frank Dahlstrom, who told the police, “I’m very, very hazy about that arm.” Three days later, the body of renowned black dealer Super Spade was found in a sleeping bag snagged on some cliffside rocks near the Point Reyes Lighthouse in Marin County. He had been stabbed in the chest and shot once through the back of his head. Super Spade’s corpse had only $15 in a worn wallet, yet friends claimed he had carried nearly fifty grand in cash only the week before.

  The bad vibes continued. Chester Anderson feuded with the Diggers and split from com/ co. The Gestetners were moved to the basement of the Trip Without a Ticket. Anderson split for Florida, permanently denied access to the machines. After his return, he moved to the East Bay. Claude Hayward went over to see him, thinking Chester still had the Gestetners. Anderson, crazed on speed, pulled a gun. They never spoke or saw each other again. On August 23, Chocolate George, the affable Hells Angel, was struck by a motorist while driving his chopper on Haight Street. He died of a skull fracture the next day in General Hospital. The whole summer was turning out to be an epic bummer.

  A peek into Richard Brautigan’s pocket notebook revealed the broad extent of his social contacts in 1967. A page scrawled with telephone numbers compiled a Who’s Who of the current scene. Among the names were Lew Welch, Lenore Kandel, The Flying Circus, Marty Balan [sic], Chet Helms, Bill Fritsch, and Sopwith Camel. Another small notebook from 1967 contained addresses and phone numbers for “Emmett,” Margot St. James, actor Rip Torn, and Harvey Kornspan (Brautigan misspelled his name with a “C”). The most illustrious contact was John Lennon. Richard had his phone number. Brautigan wrote the address down as “Waybridge [sic], England.” Lennon owned Weybridge, an elegant Tudor-style home in Kenwood, a “stockbroker belt” suburb of London.

  Rip Torn found his place in Richard’s notebook courtesy of Michael McClure, whose play The Beard appeared in Barney Rosset’s Evergreen Review. Having published Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, and William Burroughs in his long one-man struggle against the U.S. censorship laws, Rosset wanted The Beard (and the controversy attending it) as the first production for his new Evergreen Theater in New York. He suggested Rip Torn as the director for the project (still starring Richard Bright and Billie Dixon), and the actor flew out to Frisco to meet with McClure.

  They got together at Enrico’s for a lunch of linguini and white clam sauce. Michael brought along Don Carpenter and Emmett Grogan. Both wanted to check the actor out. Also present was Jim Walsh, a New York producer in charge of The Beard, who favored Torn to direct the play. Former child star and current UN ambassador Shirley Temple Black sat at a nearby table. When Rip greeted her with a nod, “she coolly nodded back.”

  At the end of the meal, Enrico Banducci joined them, treating the table to a round of espresso and Courvoisier. The expensive cognac Brautigan adored but could seldom afford brought Richard into the conversation. At the mention of his friend’s name, Michael McClure “started to giggle.” Rip Torn would have happily spent the rest of the day at Enrico’s, but McClure had made other plans. “We won’t wait up for you tonight. You and Richard are going fishing.” Shaking his head and laughing, McClure added, “Try to get back before the week ends.”

  After getting directions, Rip Torn drove his rental car out to Geary Street and parked in the Sears lot across from Brautigan’s place. When he rang the bell, the door was opened by “a woman friend,” who said, “I’m on my way out. Richard’s in the back brewing some tea.” Rip found Brautigan presiding over the kettle. He’d met Richard at a sushi bar the previous fall, but Richard had “hidden” from him. This time around, Brautigan was more affable. Over cups of tea their conversation ranged from The Beard and the San Francisco poetry scene to Beowulf and “fishing for half-pounders in Oregon.” Taking note of his “falcon’s gaze,” Torn thought Brautigan had an anachronistic resemblance to Custer and Mark Twain.

  Brautigan organized his fishing tackle, outlining his plans for the day. Numbers of nine-inch fish were “bottled up” in a freshwater pond behind the sandbar at Muir Beach where Muir Creek ran to the sea off Mt. Tamalpais. “Everybody thinks I’m crazy,” Richard said as he bent down the barbs on his dry flies with a pair of needle-nose pliers. “That these fish are just rainbows planted by the parks department, but I think they’re little steelhead waiting for a rain so the creek will cut the sandbar and they can go to sea.” After buying fly dope at Sears, with Rip behind the wheel, they were on their way across the Golden Gate Bridge and up Route 1 to Muir Beach.

  Brautigan dismissed Rip Torn’s gear. “Bass fisherman,” he drily observed, tying up a new nine-foot leader with a 7X tippet for Rip. The actor knew almost nothing about fly-fishing, having previously caught only bluegills on dry flies. Although he didn’t cast badly, Torn felt his ability was “nothing compared with Richard’s effortless form.” Brautigan “caught and released three small fish.” Rip caught one.

  After that, Richard re
vealed the ulterior motive for his fishing trip. “We’re all friends of McClure’s,” he said. “We hear you’re right to direct his play, but I’m leery of New York and, well, I figured if you checked out as a real fisherman, were telling the truth about that, that you were probably straight in the art department, too.” Brautigan suggested they leave the little trout “for the Rain God” and repair for a “sundowner” to the No Name Bar in Sausalito. Here they plotted getting together for “some real trout fishing” at a future date.

  Erik and Loie Weber left San Francisco on August 20, planning an extended stay in India.

  Two weeks before their departure, Erik took Richard out to the garden behind his Geary Street apartment for a final photo session. It was the only time Weber ever photographed his friend in color. The day was damp and chilly. Richard wore his familiar navy peacoat fully buttoned. (“The coldest winter I ever spent,” Mark Twain once quipped, “was summer in San Francisco.”) For fun at Brautigan’s suggestion, Erik took a picture of him seated in the grass, his right hand cupped around a stray yellow jonquil. This image (used on the cover of The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings) provides the only example of Brautigan adopting the “flower power” iconography of the 1960s.