Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  When Keith Abbott saw Weber’s New York pictures for the first time, he found Brautigan’s poses “studied. He knows what he wants to look like.” Keith thought Erik captured “Richard shining in his newly minted fame.” They showed his “clearest attempt to break free of his social class.” Carefully posed in his agent’s office, “he is in on a joke. His fingers are on his temple, mimicking the standard thoughtful back cover author poses. He smiles at his unbelievable good luck.”

  Brautigan’s lingering smile might have resulted from a chance encounter with Carol Brissie, an attractive young woman who worked at the Sterling Lord agency. She spent time with him and the Webers during his brief stay in New York. Wanting to see more of Richard, she tried to reach him the night before he left for Cambridge but called too late. Richard flew with Erik and Loie to Boston. “It was the beginning of Richard’s largesse,” Loie recalled, “of having money, having his friends be with him.”

  In Cambridge, Brautigan introduced the Webers to Ron Loewinsohn and the Trout Fishing in America School people. Life sent photographer Steve Hansen to take Brautigan’s picture seated on the sidewalk in front of one of the storefront schools with the students and faculty assembled behind him. Erik Weber captured the event with a photograph showing Hansen crouched over his tripod-mounted camera and Richard posing in the background. Erik and Loie returned to San Francisco about the same time Brautigan came back from Boston. Flat broke, the Webers moved in to a little house on Rhode Island Street on Potrero Hill.

  Newly pregnant, Loie started working for Richard as his secretary/girl Friday. She remembered the apartment on Geary Street looked much the same as it had before she left for Asia. Her first job was organizing Brautigan’s chaotic files. Richard bought a new filing cabinet. “We spent a week, two weeks, billions of little pieces of paper and making piles. Because he had things in paper bags, things in envelopes. Brautigan had one file for correspondence with fans. Another, where Richard disposed of requests from assorted crackpots and pushy wannabe interviewers, was marked “Pests.”.

  Loie also took dictation, typing business letters. Richard carried the typewriter out of his sacred writing room (“this dank little cavey place that was totally unappealing”) into the kitchen, and she worked at the round oak table. At times, they collaborated, writing letters together. “We had quite a lot of laughter over the writing of some of those letters,” Loie recalled. She felt Richard tried to cope with his new fame “with a certain grace and integrity.” He seemed more relaxed and had even stopped biting his nails. “He was a worrier, a fretter, a nail-biter,” she remembered. “The same attention to detail, that same gnawing mentality that went into crafting his style and his work, a lot of that was also internally applied to himself.”

  All during the first year of Richard Brautigan’s enormous success, his life seemed touched by magic. Later, Richard frequently complained of the ill treatment he received at the hands of critics and book reviewers. This time around, in the bright spring of his fame, praise came his way in rushing laudatory torrents. Even a mass-market magazine like Newsweek proclaimed, “Brautigan makes all the senses breathe [. . .] He combines the surface finality of Hemingway, the straightforwardness of Sherwood Anderson and the guile of Baudelaire.”

  J. D. O’Hara, writing in Book World, observed, “Brautigan at secondhand is all too likely to sound merely whimsical and cute. He is not; what underlies these games is a modern fatalism, not maudlin fatheadedness.” Dan Wakefield called Brautigan “a real writer,” on the front page of the Los Angeles Times Books section. In the New York Times Book Review, Thomas McGuane wrote “These books are fun to read,” comparing Brautigan’s style to Kenneth Patchen, Thoreau, W. C. Williams, and “the infrequently cited Zane Grey.”

  Across the pond in London, Tony Tanner in the Times described Trout Fishing in America as “a minor classic” and “one of the most original and attractive novels to have come out of America during the last decade,” while John Coleman in the Observer found the novel “a pleasant surprise [. . .] an excellent and pretty original compilation [. . .] streets ahead of Burroughs or Kerouac [. . .]” The esteemed Guy Davenport declared in the Hudson Review, “Both these works show Mr. Brautigan to be one of the most gifted innovators in our literature.”

  On the other hand, Jean Stafford lamented in Vogue that she did “not understand [. . .] Richard Brautigan’s what-you-may-call-its.” Stafford had been puzzled by Richard’s work, and before writing her review, she called Sam Lawrence at home one night at 10:00 pm, “in her cups and rambled on about Brautigan.” She wanted the “lowdown” on the author “and why the book looked the way it did.” Sam assured her “there was no ‘lowdown,’ just what was in the book.” She still didn’t get it.

  After receiving his graduate degree from Harvard early in April, Peter Miller found himself wondering what to do next. The Trout Fishing in America School ran along on its own energy, and Miller felt at loose ends. Peter mentioned this when Richard phoned to ask how things were going. “Why don’t you come out to California?” Brautigan said.

  Miller had never been to the West Coast. Richard sent him an airline ticket, and he flew out for the first time. Brautigan’s hospitality included providing a place to stay in San Francisco. Richard invited Peter to crash for a while at the Geary Street apartment. Miller remembered the Museum as “the weird one with all the stuff on the floors.”

  During Peter’s visit, Richard received a call from Michael McClure, who needed to dig up a pipeline in his backyard. “We’ll go help him,” Brautigan said. He and Miller headed over to McClure’s place. They put on work gloves, but the poets appeared unfit for manual labor. Richard and Michael stood around talking while Peter got to work with the shovel. “I dug this fucking hole,” he recalled, “because that’s just not what they did.”

  Brautigan’s audience consisted mainly of college students who did not concern themselves with book reviews. Richard gave twenty campus readings in 1970. All but one were in California. Fifteen had been arranged by the California Poetry Reading Circuit, a division of the Writing Center of the English Department at the University of California. They planned a spring tour, beginning the last week of April and running until the end of May. Richard traveled to Stanford, Pomona, Cal Tech, USC, many branches of the University of California (Berkeley, Irvine, Santa Cruz, Davis, and Santa Barbara) and state colleges in Sacramento, Chico, Sonoma, and Humboldt County. Brautigan always drew a large crowd. “Wherever he reads his audience runs into thousands,” Sam Lawrence wrote in a letter to the Dell hierarchy.

  Brautigan began his California tour at Berkeley. Wearing his tweed sports jacket, he read to a packed house at the Wheeler Auditorium. After dinner and many rounds of drinks, Ron Loewinsohn brought him to a “depressing graduate student party” at a house close by the campus. The moment Richard and his companions “burst into the room,” the atmosphere at the effete academic gathering noticeably altered. “That’s Richard Brautigan . . . That’s Richard Brautigan . . .” everyone began whispering. Richard was in a surly mood. When asked “Are you really Richard Brautigan?” he replied with a curt “No!”

  Jayne Palladino, a twenty-six-year-old PhD candidate in comparative literature, was among the partygoers that night. Married at eighteen and only recently divorced, Palladino had not been having a good time. She’d been looking for a polite means of escape when Brautigan barged in, hostile and obnoxious. She thought he seemed “much too big” for this company, which felt “oppressively small” to her, and she took an immediate liking to him for being different. Feeling emotionally vulnerable at the time, Jayne expected Richard to treat her badly when he struck up a conversation. At first, he was “perfectly awful,” a bragging boastful drunk laying his “famous author trip” on her. Soon, Brautigan made her laugh and listened to her ideas about poetry, becoming increasingly gentle and entertaining. Amazed that he seemed to actually like her, Jayne Palladino was further astonished when Richard invited her to dinner at his place. Alt
hough “terrified,” she agreed to the future date.

  Ed McClanahan introduced Brautigan the next afternoon at Stanford, the second reading on the tour. Richard asked those standing in the back to come down and take the empty seats up front. He told the students about the cat sitting on the stage during his Harvard reading the previous fall. “At Stanford, it’s a dog,” he said. “At the University of California, it’s probably a frog.” After reading from The Pill, Brautigan launched into more-recent work. After “Jules Verne Zucchini,” he said, “I was not overjoyed with this Apollo 13 shot. I thought it was a tremendous extravagance and waste of human energy and time and material. I didn’t feel very good about the first one either. The poem’s about that. I think we should wheel and deal down here.” His remarks were greeted by a slight smattering of applause. “Two people who want to live on Earth,” he quipped.

  Earlier in April, Richard called Rip Torn in New York. “I’m getting another Blunder Brothers act together. Interested in a Feather River adventure?”

  “Damn right!” Rip yelled.

  The day after Brautigan’s Stanford reading, Torn rendezvoused in Frisco with Brautigan, Price and Bruce Dunn, Peter Miller, and Paul Kantner, the lead guitar player for Jefferson Airplane. The sextet set off for Sacramento in “another old car.” Sacramento State was a scheduled stop on Brautigan’s California reading tour. They had to be there before one in the afternoon. Torn considered Richard Brautigan “a splendid reader.” This was a true compliment as it came from one of the finest performers of the time. The audience at State was energized by excitement. Richard focused on a pretty redheaded nurse who stared up at him, “enraptured.”

  The party food provided after the reading proved inadequate. The participating poet had been promised a meal, but “all they had were dips and cheese balls and cheap wine.” Richard concentrated on the redhead. Leaving the party without her, he said to Rip, “I talked too damn much and ruined it. I scared her off. Dammit!” They crashed not far from the campus at “an upstairs back-of-the-house apartment with a screened-in porch.” Along with a half bottle of Jim Beam and “a few beers,” the boys augmented the party’s meager fare with a vegetable stew enhanced by liberal doses of bonita flakes, lemon, and Tabasco.

  Rip Torn described the scene in “Blunder Brothers: A Memoir.” “Down to his skivvies, Richard headed for the mattress on the porch. He poked his head in the door. ‘Ah, dammit! No blanket. I hate to ask you, but I’d hate worse to have to get dressed again.’ I was going to sleep in the car, where the bedding was. ‘Sure, Richard, I’ll get you one.’ He sighed and scratched. ‘You see, I talked too much.’ But as he lamented, there came a shy knock at the door, and in walked the redheaded nurse. By the time I got back up, they were out on the porch and on the mattress.”

  Rip brought the blanket and a snort of Jim Beam, invited onto the porch by Richard, who said they didn’t care if he looked. “She’s beautiful. Give old Rip a look. It’ll keep him warm.” Torn left the bourbon behind. The nurse worked an early shift and was gone before anyone else awoke. She forgot to cover “the bare-assed poet,” and Richard caught cold in the chill dawn.

  He had another reading that afternoon at UC Davis, ten miles from Sacramento. The Blunder Brothers provided the ride. After Davis, Richard had four days off from his tour. Or so he thought. A change of scheduling made him pencil in Sonoma State for the morning of May 4. With only three days left for fishing, they drove straight from Davis to Sierra City, in the Tahoe National Forest. By the time they made camp, it was dark.

  Richard camped much the same as he had as a boy, sleeping on the ground wrapped in a blanket. They bivouacked right off the road in a clearing gnarly with exposed roots and rocks. Rip wrote of motorcycles roaring by at five in the morning. Fishing the North Fork of the Feather proved slow the next day. “Nobody got any fish,” Miller said. Richard called it “fishing over mausoleums.” They decided to head to Oroville for chicken fried steaks. At a grocery/tackle shop, stocking up on hooks and jars of salmon eggs, they learned from the proprietor that the Feather had been rendered sterile through the misguided efforts the Fish and Game Department. He told them to give the Yuba River a try.

  The gang fished the rushing snowmelt of the Yuba that afternoon. Miller admitted to not being much of a fisherman. “I didn’t know how to fish,” he said. “I just went up with these guys. And Bruce didn’t know how to fish.” Even so, they all had a great time. Rip, a passionate fisherman, marveled “at how a trout could come rocketing up to snatch a bit of bait in the tumbling white water.” He admired the “effortless grace” of Richard’s casting. The poet was poetry in motion.”

  They fished with spinners and eggs, catching trout in water tumbling past rusted mining machinery. Tired of bait-fishing, Brautigan rigged Torn’s line with a light tippet and a Royal Coachman. “See right there?” Richard pointed. “That big boulder in the cascade? There’s fish behind that boulder. You can’t see them because of the bubbles, but they can’t see you either. Cast right where that rill comes over that crack in the stone.”

  Rip did as instructed and hooked into a two-pound rainbow he had to chase down the river, the fish cartwheeling in a quicksilver dazzle above the current. Examining the big rainbow’s stomach contents, mainly “sticks and gravel,” Brautigan shared more of his Trout Fisherman in America expertise. “These are caddis houses or casements,” he said, pulling a tiny cream-colored larva from its shell. “And this little fellow is the caddis worm. I’ve caught a lot of fish using these on a fine hook.”

  Having landed enough trout for dinner, the gang gathered at “a ghostly old gold camp [ . . . ] on the river, across the road from a high butte.” Richard got out his cast-iron skillet and displayed a streamside cooking technique he’d perfected during boyhood excursions on the McKenzie. He fried the fish with bacon and onions. In another pan, they cooked up spuds and parsley, a great feast, augmented by lemons and ketchup. “Nothing compares with fish that are taken right from the water to the flame,” Rip Torn reminisced.

  By nightfall, Richard wasn’t doing so well. Once the sun went down, it turned very cold. Rip felt “it was like opening the door on a freezer.” Brautigan shivered and shook, the phlegm rattling deep in his chest at every breath. He’d speared himself with the barbecue fork while cooking, and his hand was red and swollen. Rip thought it resembled a “lobster claw.” Bundled in his blanket and wedged between two boulders, Richard trembled in his sleep. Bruce Dunn wondered, half-seriously, whether he’d make it through the night.

  Rip suggested strong medicine, proposing a run to the nearest bar. After covering Brautigan with an extra blanket, Rip and Bruce set off in search of hooch. The best they could come up with was some cheap California rotgut brandy scored at a local roadhouse. It must have done the trick. Brautigan, much the worse for wear, made it to Sonoma State in time for his reading the next morning.

  At the end of the first week of May, Brautigan read to an audience of about seven hundred at the First Unitarian Universalist Church in San Francisco, sponsored by the San Francisco State College Poetry Center. There was a $2 admission. Helen Brann flew out for the occasion, pleased to see copies of Rommel in bookstores all over town. It was the first time Helen heard Richard read from his work. Kendrick Rand sat in the pew behind her. He brought a half-gallon of white wine “to share with him in anticipation of sitting around afterwards.” Richard grabbed the jug in its concealing paper bag, carrying it up with him onto the simple Unitarian-style sanctuary, a raised oval stage covered with Oriental carpets. Brautigan poured a glass of wine, setting it on the pulpit to his left, and placed the jug at his feet within easy reach. Richard wore jeans, a blue vest, and a long blue woolen scarf. Terry Link, a reporter for Rolling Stone, thought it looked “almost like a priest’s stole.”

  As the church filled with people, Brautigan swigged wine and paced the platform, nervously swinging his arms. Every so often, he’d “do a few knee squats, like an athlete warming up,” Link observed. Rich
ard began the reading with recent poems. “Voluntary Quicksand,” a reaction to the shootings at Kent State, was written that very morning. Other poetry written during the past few weeks he referred to as “short, flat, funky poems,” saying they “lie like mush on a page.” The audience reaction was muted. Perhaps the sepulchral atmosphere in the church had something to do with it. “I have a feeling this whole audience is prose writers,” Brautigan quipped. “For a while I thought I was reading in a mortuary. I guess a church is the same thing.”

  Changing the pace, Richard switched to more familiar material from The Pill. “Surefire things,” Kendrick Rand said, “that always sort of got the audience going.” This time, “they bombed.” Brautigan tried to talk his way out of a tight spot. Between sips of wine, Richard said the purpose of the poet was not to write good poems, but instead “to work out the possibilities of language and the human condition.” The biggest round of applause came when he announced his upcoming book of short stories would contain two “lost” chapters left out of Trout Fishing in America.

  Afterward, Brautigan asked Kendrick Rand, “Well, what did you think?” His friend told him that the reading “went over like a lead balloon.”

  “I guess,” Richard replied.

  “I mean, everyone’s sitting in pews and there’s the Bible and the hymnal in front of you and you’re up there reading your poetry about your dick and screwing,” Rand said. “I think everybody was aware that they were in a church and they really felt uncomfortable with the subject matter.”

  Helen Brann hung out with Richard for the next couple days. “It was like walking around with a movie star,” she recalled. He took her to his favorite restaurants and bars. When they walked along the street together, strangers approached to ask for his autograph. Richard always took the time to stop and talk politely with his fans. “He was marvelous with them,” Helen said. “He was very more composed and more charming than a lot of movie stars that I’ve been with.”