Bob Creeley had a notion about the nature of Brautigan’s “noble” thoughts. “Richard, he’s not at all pleased by this,” Creeley said. In fact, Brautigan “was very turned off by Jim Morrison.” According to Creeley, “he loathed that sense of public disorder or public indifference.” Richard hated having broken glass lying about and borrowed a flashlight to look for pieces of the whiskey bottle. Bob Creeley recalled him earlier “on the beach picking up plastic.” For his part, Jim Morrison jumped to his feet and sauntered off. Two “sad groupies” passing by asked, “Where do you think they’re going?”
“Nowhere you’d like to go,” Creeley muttered.
Three days later, at a party following Carpenter’s reading at the Solomon Little Theatre, Creeley and Don sat and talked with a student when Richard approached and said, “We have to leave now.”
“Why . . . ?” the student protested. “Hey, the party’s just getting started. What do you have to leave for?”
“You’ll never know,” Creeley told him. “We have to leave ’cause Richard said so.” Soon after, they were all barreling down the San Diego Freeway in a Volkswagen with the Creeleys up front and Brautigan and Carpenter seated in the rear. Bob and Bobbie were “arguing like murder,” Don recalled. Suddenly, Creeley hit the brakes and stopped the little car beneath an underpass on the freeway. Richard and Don sat terrified in the backseat, “waiting for the semi to hit us, you know, from Mexico, highballing it north with all the toilet seats.” An accident was avoided after Bob got out, walked around, and opened the door for Bobbie. She took his place in the driver’s seat, and they sped off into the night.
On another occasion, Bobbie Creeley remembered going to “this funny bunkhouse” where they all were staying, to pick up Richard. “We were going to go up the coast to this woman’s house to have something to eat and sit on the beach and then come back.” Brautigan was sleeping in his room, naked, covered only with a blanket. When they woke him, Richard sat up, the blanket across his lap. Bobbie noticed his body was covered with bruises, “the kind of bruise that looks terrible when it starts to get yellow.” Don Carpenter stuck his head into the room, took one look, and said, “God, that woman should go to prison.”
Brautigan gave his presentation on August 23 in the Little Theatre auditorium. Creeley had read his exquisitely honed poetry the evening before, and the students doubtless expected a similar performance from the author of Trout Fishing in America. Richard neither read nor gave a talk. Instead, he stood at the back of the hall with a projector, showing Edmund Shea’s slides of punctuation marks. Don Carpenter sat in the audience. “It was terrifying at the beginning,” he remembered, “because they didn’t know what to do. This went on for forty-five minutes of punctuation marks. There aren’t that many punctuation marks. There were repeats!” Brautigan remained silent, not saying a word as he changed slide after slide.
“The students just sat there in that auditorium frozen with wondering how they were supposed to react to this. And he would hit one, like the semicolon and then the comma. And the comma would be up there five minutes and then the colon. And after a while you can hear first this one and then that one and then this one start to get it. And you hear the laughing. And it’s like when Mark Twain got up and told the same story six times in a row until they started to laugh. He was going to tell it as many times as it took for them to get the idea that that’s what was going on. And that’s what Richard was doing. Pay attention to these punctuation marks, and as soon as we got that, it was like you were real stupid if you weren’t laughing.”
Don Carpenter also recalled one afternoon sitting outside under a tree surrounded by a circle of students. “I’ve never had this experience at another writers’ conference,” he said. “I was explaining to them how I felt about certain literary matters. There was Richard sitting there listening to me. Not adding anything, not trying to be another teacher or anything like that. Just one of the students. It was really flattering, an enormously charming thing to do.” Carpenter chuckled at the memory. “The fact that there were a number of pretty girls sitting there wasn’t at issue, although it certainly became an issue later in the evening. I think I’m the only poet there that didn’t get laid.”
Don Carpenter should have brought his wife along. Most of the other poets did. Bobbie Creeley came with Bob. Michael McClure had Joanna by his side. Ed and Jenny Dorn were there with their baby son, Kidd, their first child, born two weeks before on the D. H. Lawrence Ranch near Taos. Most of the social activity was purely domestic. Bobbie Creeley remembered sitting on the grass with Richard, talking about their childhoods. Brautigan told her he’d stay in a place for three months and then move on.
“Why did you move so much?” she asked.
“One of my stepfathers had been a fry cook,” Richard replied.
Bobbie understood completely. Her own father had been a fry cook, and she moved around a lot as a child. “Fry cooks,” Bobbie said, “rank below itinerant evangelists and used car salesmen as a bad credit risk.”
Brautigan told her the story of the time his mother abandoned him in Great Falls with Tex Porterfield. Bobbie Creeley recalled that Richard felt this was “the crowning blow.”
“We didn’t even like each other that much,” he said.
“How did he treat you?” she asked.
“Well, he treated me well enough. I’d come to where he was working after school, and he’d give me $5, and I’d go out and eat dinner.”
Brautigan formed a lasting new friendship at California Western’s Summer Conference with Roxy and Judy Gordon, a young Texas couple who had come down to San Diego from the Fort Belknap Reservation in northern Montana. Half-Choctaw, half-Scottish, Roxy Lee Gordon had been adopted as “First Coyote Boy” by the Assiniboine (Nakota), who shared the reservation with the Gros Ventres (A’aninin). At twenty-four, already an accomplished storyteller and songwriter, Gordon had his own distinctive look, lean and lanky, wearing cowboy garb and mirrored aviator sunglasses. He wrote about his friends up on the rez and of some time he and Judy had spent in Colorado working for VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America). Roxy recalled how “Richard liked a short story I wrote. He hooked on to me. I think also he liked I had a car.” Newly pregnant, Judy was thinking about where she would have her baby. Brautigan suggested the Gordons come up to San Francisco. “I had to find San Francisco on the map,” Roxy Gordon remembered.
Richard’s teaching engagement at U.S. International lasted another week, until the following Friday. Most of the other writers cleared out once their presentations were over, but Schneck and Dorn stayed to read during the second week of the conference. The day after Brautigan’s reading, Don Allen hosted a big literary gathering at his place in Frisco. Bob and Bobbie Creeley were there, along with Michael and Joanna McClure, both poets having already departed San Diego. The guest list also included Lew Welch and Magda Cregg, Joanne Kyger and Jack Boyce, David Schaff, and Warren and Ellen Tallman. Valerie Estes came wearing a flowered black silk chiffon dress.
Along with gossip about Brother Antoninus and Joanne’s tales of the La Mama theater troupe coming to Bolinas and ripping everybody off “without giving a single performance,” Bob Creeley and Valerie talked about Charles Olson’s letters. Creeley didn’t understand them either. Bob insisted how fond he was of Richard. “It was the first and last thing he told me,” she wrote to Brautigan the next day. Allen’s party was just the sort of fashionable bohemian social event that so frequently found a mention in Herb Caen’s column. Maybe this one resulted in an additional baronhood for Michael McClure. Richard Brautigan had no regrets far off in San Diego. His days as a baron had come to an end. A coronation into the hierarchy of true literary royalty lay just ahead.
thirty-four: the great public library publishing caper
IT ALL STARTED with an obituary. Richard Brautigan tore the column from the back pages of the San Francisco Examiner in September of 1968, another piece of found art. He kept it among his personal papers for t
he remaining sixteen years of his life. The headline read, “Mrs. Myrtle Tate, Movie Projectionist.” The widow of Yancey S. Tate died at Kaiser Foundation Hospital at the age of sixty-six and had been a “longtime member” of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Motion Picture Machine Operators of San Francisco Union, Local 317. Richard wrote “Mrs. Myrtle Tate, Movie Projectionist,” a poem about “one of the few women who worked as a movie projectionist.”
Richard’s friend actor/poet/screenwriter Jack Thibeau had experimented with a series of Xerox poems later published in New York by Roger Kennedy and transformed by Mabou Mines, the experimental theater group, into The Saint and the Football Player, “a massive performance piece,” with music by minimalist composer Philip Glass. Thibeau showed this work to Brautigan. “He didn’t know what they were,” Jack recalled, “but he liked the concept that you can put the dimes in, Xerox it, and you’re published.”
Richard Brautigan was not looking for a cheap form of alternative printing. For the past couple years, his close affiliation with the Mime Troupe, the Diggers, and the Artists Liberation Front had directed his creative energy toward happenings and street theater. Please Plant This Book was one result of this collective thinking. Richard’s participation in Candle Opera and The Invisible Circus were others. When Jack Thibeau told him about Xerox publishing, new possibilities for public performance blossomed in his imagination.
Richard made all the arrangements. Poster artist Victor Moscoso remembered getting a phone call from Brautigan. “He said he had a friend, Jack Thibeau, I may have known Jack. And it was Richard’s idea to go down to the Public Library and produce a little book.” He had a simple plan. Each of the artists would have his own page to design in any way he pleased. Creative improvisation was encouraged. Richard Brautigan told them to bring their library cards.
Important cultural events needed recording for posterity, so Richard called his photographer friend Edmund Shea, asking him to come along with his camera. More to the point, Edmund owned a car. Not just any old jalopy, but a beautiful classic 1939 flathead straight-eight Packard. They would ride in style. Early in December, the foursome was ready to roll. Richard phoned ahead to the Main Library down at Civic Center to make all the arrangements. He wore a turtleneck sweater, a filigreed medallion (the number “13” enclosed within a circle) on a chain around his neck, the standard navy peacoat, and a new wide-brimmed, high-crowned hat with a leather band. Valerie Estes came with him. At Richard’s suggestion, she brought along Zenobia, her purebred Siamese cat. Jack Thibeau recalled the drive downtown in the big gangstermobile. “Edmund picked us up one at a time like we were going to rob a bank.”
Thibeau remembered “the PR department waiting for us at the door” when they arrived at the neoclassical beaux arts building on the corner of Larkin and McAllister. He was surprised to see Ann Kincaid, the librarian who had befriended him when he first arrived in the city four years before, among the greeting committee. The quartet was graciously escorted inside and led up the broad marble steps to the high-ceilinged, book-lined Reference Room housing the coin-operated Vico-Matic copy machine. A sign mounted on the device boasted: vico-matic copies anything in seconds for 10c bound books, checks, letters, resumes, contracts, legal briefs, etc. (It was a dry copier, actually a Thermofax, not a Xerox, thus explaining the severe age darkening that later obscured the photo-sensitive paper.)
Brautigan had come prepared with rolls of dimes, and he fed a coin into the copier. Turning to Jack Thibeau, he suggested, “Why don’t you go first?” Although up until that moment, Thibeau had no idea what he was going to do, he immediately said, “Okay.” For no particular reason, Thibeau had brought along a package of little stickum gold stars, the kind fifth-grade teachers affix to prize essays. He sprinkled these over the glass plate on the machine. Unzipping his black jacket and pulling up his shirt, Thibeau laid his bare chest down on top of them. With the coat collar pulled up over his head, Jack used his jacket as a hood to block the outside light. One dime followed another and photos of Jack Thibeau’s hirsute pectorals adrift among the stars, page after page, rolled out of the Vico-Matic. Seven years later, Jack landed a job in the Philippines as Martin Sheen’s body double on Apocalypse Now because his chest hair matched that of the star.
Next came Victor Moscoso’s turn. He, too, had bought a number of stars of different sizes at a stationery store. As Edmund Shea circled around them taking pictures, Victor laid the stars out on the copy machine and provided Zenobia’s brief moment of fame. With Valerie assisting, Victor placed the cat on the glass plate and dropped dimes into the machine. Another original art page was born.
Richard Brautigan produced his page by centering a copy of his poem about Mrs. Myrtle Tate on a background of newspaper movie ads, including The Graduate, The Shoes of the Fisherman, and a revival of Gone with the Wind. As a final touch, Richard placed his library card at the bottom of the page. He had also prepared a title page, The San Francisco Public Library: A Publishing House, which contained the following information, “This magazine was created and Xeroxed at the Main Library in the Civic Center using their ten cent Xerox machine on December 5, 1968 by: Victor Moscoso, Jack Thibeau, Richard Brautigan.”
Richard had prepared small slips of paper with a typed statement: “This is one of seven numbered and signed copies.” The line below contained a typed number. These were printed on seven of Brautigan’s pages, and he signed them all. In addition, Thibeau and Moscoso each signed an undisclosed number of their own pages. According to librarian David Belch, no more than twenty copies were printed. Richard bound each one together with three staples and placed all the copies, together with all the stars and other original material, in a large yellow photography paper box.
Jack Thibeau recalled the moment: “He sealed it with some stuff and said, ‘Well, that’s that.’” Eventually, each of the participants received a signed copy. “They shriveled up and died within a year,” Jack said. Moscoso was disappointed that they got so dark. Today, the few surviving copies have turned almost entirely black. Even so, a collector wishing to purchase one from a rare book dealer should be prepared to fork over at least $2,000 for the ephemeral item.
thirty-five: cover girls
A LONG-STANDING URBAN MYTH holds that the sequence of small stars on the covers of Playboy magazine (actually a code indicating various regional editions) stands for the number of times head honcho Hugh Hefner slept with the Playmate of the Month. Likewise, it has also long been rumored that the women on the covers of Richard Brautigan’s books were all at one time his lovers. As Don Carpenter said, “Richard’s sexual archive is reflected on his book covers.”
Michael McClure summed it up when he wrote, “Richard was crazy about beautiful women, smoothly glabrous ones with long hair and big eyes.” Don Carpenter remembered “lots of women,” getting straight to the point. “Richard did a lot of fucking. A lot of fucking! A lot!” Brautigan worshipped the women he loved, elevating a select few to the lofty status of “muse.” Some of these he sought to immortalize by placing their pictures on the front covers of his books.
The first muse thus anointed was Michaela Blake-Grand, pictured on Trout Fishing in America. By the time Don Allen published the novel, Mickey had slipped from muse status to the less exalted position of old friend and pen pal. The current muse was Marcia Pacaud, although even that relationship was on the wane when she set out one morning early in 1968, wearing a sleeveless cotton frock, to take some pictures with Brautigan and Edmund Shea. This was the first photo shoot Richard and Edmund worked on together.
The trio was heading for a railroad tower south of Market that Brautigan thought would make a good backdrop when they happened across a large hole in the ground at the corner of New Montgomery and Market Streets. It was an excavation site for the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), then under construction beneath the surface of Market Street. Edmund had read Richard’s poem “The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster,” although he was
not familiar with most of the other poetry in the planned collection. There had been some discussion about the book’s title, and when Edmund peered down into the hole he said, “Well, gee, here’s our mine.”
With no cops in sight, the threesome sneaked down into the gaping excavation. Large steel girders reached up like piers to support the sidewalk above. Marcia slipped off her shoes (but kept her watch on) and perched winsomely on a pile of rubble, bare arms crossed over her knees. Edmund snapped several pictures of Marcia alone and then a bunch more with Brautigan posed with her. In some he sat at her side. One shot seemed utterly characteristic of Richard. He stood behind Marcia, his arms over her shoulders, clasping his hands together as if in prayer while she gripped his elbows.
Later, when Brautigan went over the contact sheet with Shea, he selected a photograph of Marcia Pacaud sitting alone for the cover of the poetry book he would dedicate to her. Shea thought Brautigan included women in these pictures “because he liked girls. All of his writing is kind of romantic in a way. Loving, feelings and things like that. I think our only thing was to do good pictures.”
Their second effort at making a good picture came soon after, when Edmund arrived at Brautigan’s Geary Street apartment to shoot the cover for In Watermelon Sugar. This time, the muse of the moment was but a passing fancy, a woman no one, not even Edmund Shea, seemed to remember. Richard never wrote her any letters, although he corresponded frequently with his other lovers. Her name was Hilda Hoffman. A graceful Virgo, she had only recently moved to San Francisco from New York, where she had been a member of a singing and dancing troupe. For a brief period, she had been Paul Krassner’s girlfriend, although he recalled only her hippie sobriquet and even that recollection remained vague, “Morning Dove . . . Morning Glory . . . Morning Star, something like that.” Brautigan wrote a poem for Hilda that later appeared in Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt.
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