Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  The Four Seasons Foundation simultaneously published In Watermelon Sugar and The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster on November 19, 1968. According to his wishes, Richard Brautigan’s name did not appear on the front cover of either book, only along the spine. Uniform in size with Trout Fishing, the two were better designed, both volumes produced by Edwards Brothers of Ann Arbor. Lovely young women graced the photographic covers. Over the next four months, both titles sold a combined fifty thousand copies. In 1969, Richard earned over $7,500 in royalties from the Four Seasons Foundation.

  Donald Allen submitted several poems not included in The Pill to the editors of Poetry, the venerable Chicago magazine that earlier in the century had championed the work of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Frost. Visiting editor Daryl Hine wrote Allen to say he was keeping both “Love’s Not the Way to Treat a Friend” and “Wood” for future publication, asking for Brautigan’s address. He needed to send a payment and the proofs directly to the author.

  Evergreen Review no. 61 published “What Are You Going to Do with 390 Photographs of Christmas Trees” in December. A full-page photo collage of Erik Weber’s shots of discarded Christmas trees accompanied the piece. Evergreen paid Weber an additional $100. They mailed the check to Richard. He wrote to Erik in India, asking if he should take it over to Erik’s mother. “So much for Christmas trees,” Richard wrote. “I finish one thing and then something new comes along. It gives life an interesting pace.”

  Richard brought Erik’s check to his mother’s house at his request. Brautigan spoke with her and Weber’s sister, Avril. They all felt it was a shame that Erik and Lois had broken up so far away in India. Brautigan had “faith” that Erik was “doing what is right.” A couple days later, Richard airmailed copies of In Watermelon Sugar and the Evergreen Review to India with “very much love from America.”

  Erik and Loie soon got back together. Weber wrote to Brautigan, asking him to send some LSD. Richard declined, writing back, “I’m very sorry but I can’t help you out with your request.” Reading the letter on a hot tropical night in India pissed Erik off so much he smashed a swollen mosquito with it and mailed the bloodstained page back to Brautigan.

  By any reasonable standard, 1968 had turned out to be a bummer year. In February, Neal Cassady died from exposure and drug overdose beside the railroad tracks outside of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. The old hipster was not the only casualty. Day by day, week after week, month by bloody month, the Vietnam War escalated further into inevitable catastrophe. Over thirty thousand young Americans had already been killed in Southeast Asia. H. Rap Brown proclaimed violence “as American as cherry pie,” heralding the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, both cut down by an increasingly familiar media figure, the lone psychotic gunman. “Burn, baby, burn!” became a new urban battle cry. Every evening, cities across riot-torn America burst into flame on the nightly newscast. The Yippies went to the Chicago Democratic National Convention, making their usual Dada-anarchist political statement with a porcine candidate named Pigasus, and found themselves swept up in a police riot they had helped to instigate. To cap things off, Richard Milhous Nixon got elected the thirty-seventh president of the United States.

  Even so, 1968 had been a very fine year for both Jann Wenner and Richard Brautigan. Rolling Stone’s first anniversary issue (“Forty Pages Full of Dope, Sex & Cheap Thrills”) featured an interview with John Lennon and pictured on the cover John and Yoko nude from the rear. It sold like mad and generated a ton of publicity. After twelve uncertain months, the little music magazine was here to stay. A celebrity-hound forever on the scent of copy, Wenner got in touch with Brautigan in early December, asking if he wanted to write for Rolling Stone. Richard, a keen observer of his own career path, intuited that the magazine’s youthful rock-and-roll readership was his audience as well. It made sense to appear in a publication celebrating Janis Joplin and the Beatles. Also, Jann offered to pay.

  Brautigan told Wenner he had lots of short stories. At a time when Rolling Stone advertised for reviewers and writers to submit their work for free, Jann appreciated the worth of featuring a celebrated author in the magazine. At $35 per story, he also knew a bargain when he saw it. Wenner paid Richard $100 for the first three, “Crazy Old Women Are Riding the Buses of America Today,” “Fame in California,” and “A Need for Gardens,” all published in December, in issue number 24.

  The next ten issues all contained stories by Richard Brautigan. At one point, Wenner increased the payment to $50 for each piece and invited Richard to “come in some time and yak about it with me.” Brautigan published a total of nineteen short stories in Rolling Stone during the coming year. At times, when the supply ran short, Jann Wenner dashed off a quick note: “Richard: We’ve run out of your stories; we need a new bunch [. . .]” Once, the editor scrawled his plea on the payment check stub: “We need more stories NOW! To the rescue please!”

  The publication of Trout Fishing in America sent ever-widening ripples through the sluggish East Coast literary establishment. Stephen Schneck told his New York agent, an aggressive and intelligent young woman named Helen Brann at the Sterling Lord agency (which also represented the work of Jack Kerouac), about the novel. Schneck mailed her copies of Richard’s books, and she read them straightaway. Immediately catching the vibe, she contacted Brautigan, offering to act as his agent. Helen Brann was hooked. Her every instinct insisted she’d just found a winner.

  The new year of 1969 began bright with promise for Richard Brautigan. His three books published by the Four Seasons Foundation were selling briskly, Apple was about to produce a recording of his work, and a powerful New York literary agency wanted to represent him. In January he wrote to Daryl Hine at Poetry magazine asking him to withdraw “Love’s Not the Way to Treat a Friend” from pending publication. Brautigan had other plans for his poem.

  Early in January, Ralph Gleason urged Janis Joplin to ditch Big Brother and the Holding Company. He said the band was unworthy of her talents. A few days later, the blues singer followed his advice. Janis began putting together another group, and word went out among the hip community that she was looking for a great new name for the ensemble. During this period, Richard Brautigan ran into Janis from time to time. Valerie Estes recalled meeting her at Enrico’s one afternoon. For some impromptu reason, Joplin gave Estes one of her earrings.

  On another January afternoon, Richard and Price Dunn sat people watching on the terrace at Enrico’s when Janis Joplin came by and joined them. With the income from the Cheap Thrills album, Janis treated herself to a Porsche and had it repainted in swirling psychedelic images by Dave Richards, one of the roadies for Big Brother. “How do you like my car?” the singer grinned.

  After a few drinks, Janis drove up a few blocks to Gino and Carlo’s. They had been drinking wine but switched to hard stuff at the literary workingman’s bar. “Richard was really getting off being with Janis Joplin,” Price recalled, “because everybody recognized [her].”

  Richard and Janis played pool. Price observed them from the bar. “They were just wild and crazy,” he recalled. Eventually, the trio set out in search of dinner. After a hard day of physical work, Price “wanted a substantial meal, but no, they didn’t want to eat roast beef.” They ended up at the Old Spaghetti Factory on Grant Avenue and continued drinking. “Come on, have another one,” the rowdy crowd demanded. When one round was finished, the next stood waiting. Price Dunn had a low opinion of Spaghetti Factory fare: “god-awful. This appalling shit, sauce like colored food dye.” An abundance of booze lubricates the most discriminating palate, and they wolfed down their abysmal pasta with the gusto of the gloriously drunk.

  Their inebriated conversation centered on Joplin’s quest for the perfect name for her new band. “She wanted Richard to come up with a name,” Price recalled. “Oh god, how drunk we all were.” Price staggered out into the night, wisely leaving his car in a garage, and took a cab home. Brautigan had no answers for Janis Jopli
n at the Spaghetti Factory. Finding an appropriate band name haunted his imagination for days. Janis listened politely when Richard finally told her his perfect choice, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” His inspiration came from the first line of a Walt Whitman poem originally published in 1859. Unimpressed, Joplin called her last two groups the Kozmic Blues Band and Full Tilt Boogie.

  Valerie Estes lived in an apartment in the same building as V. “Valhalla” Vale, the keyboard player (as Vale Harnaka) in the six-man blues/rock band Blue Cheer. He shared his birthday with Richard Brautigan, and they decided to hold a joint party on January 30. It was an open house. A large boisterous crowd wandered between Vale’s place and Estes’s apartment.

  Janis Joplin was among the many revelers celebrating Richard’s thirty-fourth birthday, along with Bill Brown, Lew Welch and Magda Cregg, Emmett Grogan (who brought a horde of Diggers), and Chinese American novelist/playwright Frank Chin, “the first Chinaman to ride the rails,” he claimed, referring to his job as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific Railroad. Dr. John Doss remembered Joplin wandering through the crowded party demanding, “Where’s the dope?”

  Valerie Estes said, “Janis was drunk and looking for more Southern Comfort.” It was Grogan who “was trying to score heavy-duty dope.” Margot Patterson Doss was introduced three separate times to Emmett Grogan, whom she already knew. “Why do people keep introducing me to Grogan?” she asked Bill Brown.

  “Margot,” Bill replied, “don’t you realize that there is a valley between the ying and the yang that neither you nor Grogan could ever cross?”

  A couple weeks later, Barry Miles arrived in Frisco from L.A. Having no place to stay, he headed straight over to Richard Brautigan’s Geary Street apartment. A supremely self-confident fellow, Miles had some apprehension about his first meeting with Richard. Allen Ginsberg, a mutual acquaintance, put down Brautigan’s work to Miles, calling it “shallow and contrived.” In an elaboration of the pejorative nickname, “Frood,” that Ginsberg hung on Richard back in 1956, the Beat poet started calling him “Bunthorne” behind his back. (Reginald Bunthorne was the lily-carrying aesthete in Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1881 operetta Patience, a character meant as a parody of Oscar Wilde.)

  When Miles arrived at the Museum, which he found “an obvious bachelor pad, scruffy but pleasant,” Brautigan led him straight to the kitchen, the apartment’s social hub. Miles later described Brautigan as “tall and gangling,” saying that he “affected the image of an old prospector or western pioneer.” Keith Abbott and Valerie sat waiting at the big round kitchen table. Richard presented Keith as his “best buddy,” and Miles came to regard him as Brautigan’s “constant companion.”

  On that first afternoon, the pair had a little fun at the Englishman’s expense. Miles informed them that he was called only by his last name. Taking this as his cue, Richard began addressing Keith as “Abbott,” telling Miles that his buddy also went by a single name. Their tongue-in-cheek gag had a lasting effect. Thirty-four years later, Miles published his memoir of the sixties, and the old hoax found its way into print. “Abbott, as he was known, made continual runs to the fridge for beer,” Miles reported, none the wiser after all that time.

  The telephone became a central image in Richard’s concept for his spoken word album. On the first track, Brautigan spoke to an unknown caller about the chaos the sound engineers left behind in his Geary Street apartment. Richard said it looked like something dropped from outer space. “The place is just surrounded with electronic equipment. We have four microphones, stands, amplifiers, speakers, wires all over [. . .] all we need is a body to cut up and bring back to life . . .”

  The gear was there to record segments of what Richard called “the sounds of my life in San Francisco.” These included the rustle of taking off his clothes, splashing in his bath, the scrape of a razor along his whiskered cheek, and, click, a light switching off when he went to bed at night. He also included a long rambling conversation with Price Dunn about what to have for dinner. In Miles’s 1997 biography of Paul McCartney, he mentioned recording “hours of tape of Richard [. . .] sitting around the kitchen table drinking beer with his buddy Price.”

  The studio sessions took place south of Market at the Golden State Recorders, where Brautigan had previously worked with Mad River. Brautigan read the “Hunchback Trout” chapter from Trout Fishing as well as chapters from Confederate General and In Watermelon Sugar, and a representative selection of his poems from The Pill, four of which, he declared on tape (a deliberate dig at Valerie) were dedicated to Marcia Pacaud. He also included a selection of four short stories from his planned collection. Miles, unduly influenced by Ginsberg, missed the point completely, claiming he “wanted to capture the whimsical, almost precious, innocence of Richard’s work.” In order to “create an accessible public surface,” Miles overdubbed Brautigan’s Trout Fishing reading with the purling sounds of a mountain stream, adding a ringing telephone and the wail of an ambulance siren.

  Rounding up eighteen of his friends to all read the same poem resulted in Brautigan’s most inspired contribution to the record album. Originally written in April 1966, and later published during the Summer of Love as a com/co broadside, “Love Poem” was only twenty-seven words long but provided an impressive amount of what Tom McGuane once called “perfect power-to-weight ratio.” Richard used this poem because Ianthe had memorized it when she was about eight years old. He paid his daughter $11 for reading “Love Poem” on his recording. She spent it all on Cracker Jack and Archie comics.

  Richard’s diverse reading group included Valerie Estes, Michaela Blake-Grand, Margot Patterson Doss, Betty Kirkendall, Michael McClure, Price Dunn, Donald Allen, Peter Berg, Bruce Conner, KSAN DJ Alan Stone, Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, and David Schaff, whose book of poetry, The Moon by Day, had been published by Donald Allen’s Four Seasons Foundation. They all assembled in the recording studio at the designated hour without any notion of what Brautigan expected them to read.

  Celebrated photographer Imogen Cunningham, then eighty-five years old, was a surprise guest reader. The connection to Cunningham came through Margot Doss, her neighbor on the western slope of Russian Hill. Valerie picked the elderly photographer up in a rented Mustang with Miles and Richard, chauffeuring them all over to Golden State Recorders. David Schaff recalled that Cunningham “wasn’t particularly socially adept,” but “Richard had an interesting quality in his affection for people who were strange, who were nonthreatening strange.”

  “Each one of us had to figure out a different way to read the poem,” Margot Doss recounted. Michael McClure read with a calculated poet’s intonation. Bruce Conner put on a performance, yawning his lines like a dreamer emerging from sleep. Anthony Storrs, a Hispanic/black man who called himself “Antonio,” read the poem in Spanish. David Schaff remembered him in retrospect as “a Six Degrees of Separation type of character, except with more edge.” Don Allen read twice, once alone, and again at Brautigan’s suggestion, in tandem with Schaff. Alan Stone used his sonorous DJ’s intonation, while Peter Berg, always the contrarian, turned a simple declarative statement into a query. Only the women put on no act, reading honestly and without affectation. Brautigan’s straightforward language struck a resonant chord within them all. Richard did not read his own version of “Love Poem.” He concluded by reading “Boo, Forever,” a different sort of poem about the loss of love, set to the whirling mechanical sound of a metal top slowly losing its centrifugal energy as it spins to a stop.

  Throughout the month of February Brautigan’s mail brought a constant stream of good news. Missy Maytag wrote inviting Richard to read again at the Unicorn (“Come to Santa Barbara and cheer us up”). A week later, he traveled down and earned $150 at the bookshop. Jack Shoemaker mentioned the UC Santa Barbara Renaissance Fair coming up in April, and Richard agreed to participate. When Kendrick Rand heard about the university’s offer, he told Brautigan, “You’re worth more than that. This is ridiculous. You are selling yourself r
eally too cheaply.” Richard thought it over and said that if he got more money, he’d pay for an airline ticket for Kendrick to come down with him.

  A more lucrative invitation arrived from the United States International University (California Western) in San Diego, a private liberal arts college with an enrollment of around sixteen hundred students. The school was organizing a Creative Arts Conference in August and wanted Brautigan to conduct a two-week prose workshop and give “one evening’s reading or presentation for the general Conference.” The university offered a contract for $1,200, plus the use of a suite without cooking facilities on campus. Meals at the commons were available at a 20 percent discount.

  A discordant note came in a letter from the Guggenheim Foundation, informing Brautigan that he had once again not been nominated for a fellowship. Having been invited to reapply made this second rejection specially galling. News from Helen Brann in New York turned the Guggenheim business into an ironic joke. Sterling Lord submitted his three-book proposal to a number of publishing houses. The agency was running an auction. E. P. Dutton bid $7,500, Random House upped that to $12,500, and Doubleday, which had earlier rejected Trout Fishing, eventually offered $17,500.

  An interlocutory judgment of dissolution of his marriage to Virginia Alder arrived at Richard Hodge’s Kearny Street office during the first week in March, and Richard breathed a little easier. Single again, he was off the financial hook. Brautigan no longer had to fear losing a big chunk of the good fortune coming his way in a divorce settlement. Wanting to meet Helen Brann and have a look at the famous Sterling Lord agency, Richard planned his first trip back east.

  An upcoming visit to New Mexico was on Brautigan’s mind when he ran into Gary Snyder at a party after a reading at California State College. Feeling expansive with a $125 paycheck in his pocket, Richard picked up the tab and got drunk with Snyder. Recalling Gary’s studies in Japanese Buddhism, Brautigan improvised a brief “Zen” poem for his inebriated fellow poet: “There is a motorcycle / in New Mexico.” Richard called it “Third Eye.”