Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Richard introduced Sherry to Lew Welch at the No Name Bar in Sausalito. He gave her a copy of Courses, a chapbook published by Dave Haselwood in 1968. “Sign it, Lew,” Richard said. On the back cover, Welch wrote out a poem from the book: Comportment

  Think Jew

  Dance nigger

  Dress and drive Oakie.

  Earlier in the summer, when Brautigan was still in New York, Welch sent Richard a sequence of seven postcards on his journey north and west from Colorado. Lew had spent five weeks as poet-in-residence at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. Magda and her son Jeff were along on this trip.

  Coincidentally, Welch mailed one of his cards from Livingston, Montana. Another one, postmarked the previous day in Rock Springs, Wyoming, read in part, “The talk is about a hippy who ate the heart of a man he killed.” This referred to the cannibal murder of a social worker by two itinerant hitchhikers earlier in the year at La Duke Springs, along the Yellowstone River, about forty miles south of Livingston. Brautigan promised Lew Welch to try and get Helen Brann to represent his new poetry collection, Ring of Bone.

  In mid-September, Tim Leary escaped from the minimum security prison in San Luis Obispo. Helped by the Weather Underground and disguised as a bespectacled, bald businessman with a fake passport identifying him as Mr. William McNellis, Leary, along with his wife, Rosemary, flew first to Paris and then on to Algeria, taking refuge with the exiled Black Panther Party. In an ironic reversal of fortune, they became the virtual prisoners of Eldridge Cleaver, ex-con, information minister of the Black Panthers’ American Government in Exile, and author of the best seller Soul on Ice.

  As Richard’s affair with Sherry Vetter moved forward, he felt the need to check her out astrologically. One afternoon, sitting around with friends who were amateur astrologers, Richard offered Sherry’s birth statistics and they drew up her chart. Later that day, he knocked on her apartment door in Noe Valley. Sherry found Richard standing outside with a little packet of handwritten papers in his hand. “I’ve had your horoscope done. You’ve got every house on fire,” he said, with deadpan solemnity. “We can’t see each other again. This is the end.”

  Sherry cracked up. “I thought that was the funniest thing I had ever heard,” she said, “because I didn’t even know what sign I was.” Sherry also found it amusing that Richard had used the expression “on fire” to describe the aspect of her various houses, instead of “in fire.” Brautigan wasn’t joking. He treated the entire matter with utter seriousness, but the young woman’s laughter got through to him and he relented, handing over his handwritten notes, which she discarded.

  In spite of astrological misgivings, Richard Brautigan knew deep down that Sherry Vetter was a keeper. She was good for him. “You are my map to this other world,” Richard told her not long after they started going out together. “For twenty years, I’ve eaten spaghetti with no sauce and no meatballs. But now, I want to get into this other world.” Acting as his guide, Sherry took Richard to a party at her brother’s house across the Bay. Blaine Vetter worked as a headhunter in the computer industry and lived in a fine house on top of the Berkeley Hills. Later, Richard often played basketball with Blaine on the little court he had at his place, but on that first night, Sherry recalled, “everybody was all dressed up in suits and Richard had his regular outfit,” consisting of blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and his black high-top kangaroo-hide shoes.

  Feeling angry “because everybody was sort of looking down their noses at him,” Brautigan stormed out of the party. Sherry ran down the driveway after him. She knew he couldn’t go anywhere because she was the one with the car. “Those people,” Richard fumed. “Those people are all dying of terminal ordinary. I make more money in a month than they do in a year.” It was the first time that Vetter realized Brautigan was rich. All the money in the world would never be enough for Richard to escape his impoverished past.

  The following summer, on a fishing trip with Vetter to the Upper Sacramento River, Brautigan once again felt completely out of place in the off-season Mount Shasta ski resort where they spent a couple nights. “Voice of the snow dead,” Richard wrote in his notebook. “And I am always on the outside looking in. The air is blue. Alone, blue and dead. I feel like Gatsby. I’ve never been skiing. I’ve never been in a place like this before. I am humbled [. . .] It’s my childhood again. And always outside looking in.”

  If Sherry Vetter served as Brautigan’s road map into the brave new world of prosperity, Loie Weber provided him with a compass. Not that she told him which way to go; instead, Loie validated Richard’s choice of direction. “He liked to control everything,” she recalled. “I think he was one of the most measured, the most calculating people. He was terrified of exposure, and he chose his friends carefully. One of the reasons he asked me to work for him was that he already knew me. I was safe.”

  Able at last to afford a color television, Richard watched all the talk shows and studied the self-promotional efforts of other well-known authors. “He talked with me a lot about his strategizing in terms of interviews and noninterviews,” Loie said. “Richard was very aware of how available Kurt Vonnegut was in every way to the media, and he didn’t want to do that. [Brautigan] was very much sought after by a lot of the media, TV and magazines and newspapers and all kinds of others, the amount of letters that would come in, and he took a very hard-core stance. He was giving nothing to nobody. He was going to be sort of a mystery, unavailable.”

  Erik Weber’s take on the situation differed. Richard “wouldn’t go on talk shows,” he said. “I can understand why. He’s not spontaneous. To be sitting there and have somebody ask him a question or make a joke. He’d sit there with a stupid grin on his face and not say anything.” Weber believed Brautigan feared a vast talk show audience far removed from the undergraduate hippies buying his books. “It would have taken him into different places. I think Richard was afraid of all those places.”

  Brautigan’s mysterious inaccessibility not only kept the outside world at arm’s length, it served occasionally to give a cold shoulder to old friends closer to home. When Robert Briggs, who represented Ballantine Books on the West Coast, got David Meltzer a contract to do an interview/ anthology with ten Bay Area poets, Meltzer wanted to include Brautigan. By the time The San Francisco Poets appeared early in 1971, the cast had dwindled to five: Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, William (Brother Antoninus) Everson, and Lew Welch, along with Richard, who offered six poems he’d published in Rommel. Jack Shoemaker signed on to the project to assist Meltzer with the interviewing. Because David “didn’t get along with Richard very well,” Richard became Jack’s assignment. “It was my job to convince Richard to participate,” Shoemaker recalled, “and to smooth the way for there to be an interview, which Richard didn’t like and would never grant.”

  This presented a considerable problem. The lengthy interviews constituted the main body of the book. The other four poets talked honestly and often in great depth with Meltzer and Shoemaker. Brautigan balked, refusing the Q&A. Instead, Richard gave them a charming inconsequential essay four paragraphs long, which he called “Old Lady.” Much annoyed, Meltzer refused to include it, insisting on a proper interview. His position was “Richard won’t be in this book on those terms.” Brautigan withdrew from the project.

  “When Ballantine found out that Richard had pulled up stakes, they put a tremendous amount of pressure on David and on Briggs,” Shoemaker recalled. “They said, ‘You can’t lose Brautigan. He’s one of the most famous people in the book.’ So we had to agree that we would print this little self-interview Richard produced.” David Meltzer “hated it” but did as instructed in order to save his book. Five years later, when the Wingbow Press reprinted it as Golden Gate, Interviews with 5 San Francisco Poets, Meltzer dropped Brautigan and all his poetry.

  Busy dealing with the many demands of fame, Richard Brautigan produced little new work during 1970 and 1971. Every mail delivery brought fan letters, requests from editors, and assort
ed odd inquiries. Richard never answered any of these letters. They all went into files labeled “Unrequited Publishers” and “Pests.”

  Brautigan’s work continued to appear in major and minor publications throughout 1970. The demand for his material remained high. Helen Brann sold “Homage to the San Francisco YMCA” to Vogue for $350. Along with the three pieces in Mademoiselle, other work was published in the Evergreen Review (nos. 76 and 84), the Dutton Review (no. 1), Rolling Stone (no. 63)—“ Greyhound Tragedy” became the last of Brautigan’s stories published by Jann Wenner, who could no longer afford him—and Playboy, who called Richard a “hip huck finn,” paying $2,000 for three short tales they collectively dubbed “Little Memoirs.”

  Brautigan asked Erik Weber to take his photograph for Playboy’s “On the Scene” section. In one shot, Richard reclined fully clothed on his new brass bed, legs provocatively spread in a parody of a Playmate’s centerfold pose. “The absurd humor of the situation shines from his face,” Keith Abbott wrote. The Playboy editors didn’t appreciate the joke. They printed another of Erik’s pictures in the magazine.

  Brautigan was especially pleased when fiction editor Gordon Lish bought “The Lost Chapters of Trout Fishing in America” for the October issue of Esquire. In addition to a $1,000 paycheck, the acceptance washed away the residual bad feelings left over from failing to get “The Menu” published in Esquire six years earlier. Esquire no longer played around with Richard Brautigan. They wanted more of his stuff and said so. After two Standard Oil Company tankers collided in San Francisco Bay off Fort Point late in January 1971, and the resulting oil spill provided a hint of future ecological disaster (“Quite likely every lagoon and marsh in the Bay Area will be sterile forever,” an alarmed Lew Welch wrote Jim Koller about the event), the magazine called and offered Brautigan an assignment. “Esquire is interested in us doing a story on the spill,” Richard told Erik Weber on the phone. “Me doing a story and you photographing it.”

  Brautigan went over to the famed surfing area under the Golden Gate Bridge to observe the cleanup, watching volunteers with pitchforks toss what he took to be hay onto the water to soak up the petroleum tide. He scribbled notes, filling all fifty-five pages with rapidly scrawled random observations (“black, gooy [sic] [. . .] the smell of the fucking oil [. . .] oil on the bow of the ferry going to S.F.”). Composing the story, Richard made almost no use of his notes, relying instead on memory and metaphor. “The air is overwhelmed with the stench of oil like rotting dinosaurs covered with chocolate syrup.” He wrote many drafts of a piece he eventually called “Hay on the Water.”

  Esquire wanted a full-page photographic illustration. After Erik Weber spent all day taking pictures on different beaches, Richard sent him out into the countryside to photograph fields of grass ripening into hay, farmers cutting hay, cows eating hay, chickens laying eggs in nests of hay, an ironic contrast to the oil-sodden bales floating in the Bay. When someone pointed out to Brautigan that it was not hay but straw, he attempted to rescue his efforts, retitling one of the later drafts “Straw.” It was no use. None of Erik Weber’s photos fit the bill. Richard abandoned the project. “Forget it. It’s over,” Brautigan told Weber when he called. “Hay and straw are different things, so that ruins the story.”

  Brautigan collaborated with the Webers on another project based on Loie’s pregnancy. Erik took a series of photographs showing her belly growing ever larger “like the waxing moon.” He shot pictures until the birth of their daughter, Selina. Richard wrote a brief page-long text to go with the photos. The Webers called it “The Coming of Moonrose.” Richard had Andrew Hoyem design the layout and sent it off to Helen Brann. She received the proposed little book without enthusiasm. Nothing ever came of it. “It wasn’t her cup of tea,” Loie said. “It wasn’t enough Richard. It was a little too esoteric.”

  In the last week in August, six months after publication, Brautigan received his advance for Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt. Minus a 10 percent commission for the Sterling Lord agency, it totaled $31,500, a considerable sum for a slim book of poetry, more than most poets earn over an entire career. In November, Harvest Records (a division of Capitol) released Listening to Richard Brautigan. Mad River’s recording Paradise Bar and Grill, also on Capitol, came out about the same time. Richard received $5,000 for his spoken word album, considerably more than Apple’s initial offer. Brautigan printed his telephone number on the record’s front cover, and his fans barraged him with calls. He wasted no time changing the number.

  One old friend never heard Richard on vinyl. Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose in L.A. on October 4, 1970, at the Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard. Pearl was only twenty-seven years old. As Joplin’s meteoric career faded to black, Richard Brautigan’s rising star blazed ever more brightly. Four months after Dell published its first three Brautigan books, 100,000 copies of each title were in print. By the end of 1970, they sold between 7,000 to 10,000 copies per month. Six months later, the sales figures for Trout Fishing in America had grown to 265,000 copies.

  As part of the festivities celebrating the opening of the new University Art Museum at Berkeley, Richard was invited to share the bill with Gary Snyder and Robert Duncan at a poetry reading on an afternoon early in November. Snyder, Duncan, and Brautigan read outside in the sculpture garden. The minimalist composer Steve Reich performed indoors in the galleries later that evening. A surviving photograph from the event showed Brautigan keeping alive the old bohemian esprit. Seated beside the two older poets, Richard swilled whiskey from a bottle concealed in a brown paper bag.

  All through the fall of 1970, Brautigan kept on top of the design process for the two books about to be published by Simon & Schuster. He arranged with Edmund Shea to take the cover photograph and consulted with Andrew Hoyem about the book’s layout and typography. By coincidence, the designer in charge of production at S&S was Helen Barrow, sister of Roz Barrow, who held the same position at Dell. At the end of December, Brautigan received $25,000, his first advance payment from Simon & Schuster. A second installment of $75,000 followed in January. The same day, he received an additional $5,000 from Delacorte, the annual contracted amount for his three-book omnibus edition deal. As icing on the cake, a production company paid Brautigan $1,500 to use his poem “Horse Child Breakfast” in a film.

  In early February 1971, Richard traveled to the Universities of Texas and Colorado, flying first to Austin and then on to Boulder on the same trip. He received $750 (plus expenses) for each one-day stint. Roxy and Judy Gordon arranged for Brautigan’s gig at UTA. Judy recalled, “That was the largest, biggest reading ever, up until that point.” After the reading, Bill and Sally Wittliff hosted a big party for Richard at their home in Austin.

  The four-day literary festival at the University of Colorado proved a more sedate affair. The event also featured Ishmael Reed, Charles Wright, Peter Beagle, and Joanna Featherstone. Richard had never been to Colorado before and stayed only for a single day, even though he’d been told it was “beautiful in winter.” These were his only college readings in 1971.

  The Abortion was published by Simon & Schuster in March 1971, released simultaneously in a cloth edition and as a Touchstone Paperback. The beauty of Richard’s photographic covers was that they became ads unto themselves and instantly translated into various other forms of print promotion. Edmund Shea had been paid handsomely by S&S, yet had not received anything from Dell after all this time. Shea found it “incomprehensible,” sending a third bill to Rosalie Barrow. Altogether, the tab for all his photographic services totaled $1,500.

  Dell offered Shea $750, “in full settlement of all his claims.” Edmund rejected this. He moved to England for a year, using his Abortion S&S cover proceeds to bankroll his travels. On December 14, Dell increased their offer to $1,000, “the best that we can do.” Edmund Shea stuck to his guns, holding out for the full amount. In the end, he received his $1,500, which paid his way back home to the States from Kano, Nigeria.

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p; Richard Brautigan thought of his manuscripts and papers as treasures worth preserving. The sudden onslaught of fame increased his appraisal of the small personal archive stored in cardboard boxes at Geary Street. A casual conversation with Robert Duncan suggested the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley might be willing to store his papers for him. In February, Brautigan sent a carton of typed manuscripts, galleys, page proofs, and early first editions over to Berkeley. The small collection included rare treasures: a copy of The Return of the Rivers; manuscripts of Trout Fishing, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, and Rommel; the original production material for Lay the Marble Tea; and the galleys, page proofs, and production notes for Please Plant This Book.

  Richard wrote to Robert Duncan in March, outlining his conditions concerning access to the material he was storing at the library. He stipulated none of the items were to be made available to members of the public without first obtaining his written permission. Thus began a seven-year pas de deux between Brautigan and the Bancroft. James D. Hart, director of the rare book library, wrote to Richard in June, saying how happy he was to have Brautigan’s work “on deposit,” assuming “that someday students of your writing will be able to make use of the materials.”

  At the beginning of December, Hart spoke on the phone with Brautigan, suggesting that an “informal agreement” be drawn up regarding the placement of his papers. Later that month, Jack Shoemaker deposited more archival material (Revenge of the Lawn and The Abortion) at the library in Berkeley. Hart followed up with another letter to Richard. He said the Bancroft “would like to think of owning a fine Richard Brautigan collection but we are somewhat uneasy about serving merely as a place of storage without any likelihood of becoming the place of ownership.”