Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Hart included, in duplicate, the agreement mentioned earlier. He asked Brautigan to sign and return one copy to the library. Richard didn’t write back and never signed the agreement. For the next half-dozen years, the Bancroft Library served as the somewhat unwilling curators of a Richard Brautigan collection they did not own.

  Around the middle of March, a six-page letter arrived for Richard from “the fat little fingers of the sister of yours whom [sic] once upon a time was like a second shadow [. . .]” B.J. was now Barbara Fitzhugh, married and living in Portland, Oregon. After all these years, Barbara still didn’t get along very well with her mother and limited her trips back to Eugene to “about twice a year whether I need to or not [. . .] I’m the outsider in the family.” Barbara enclosed snapshots Rex Sorenson had taken of her and the kids on his recent visit to Oregon. She said she’d thought of her big brother often over the years. “If you’d like to write, I wish you would,” she concluded, “and if you don’t, I can understand that also.” She signed, “As Always, Love, Barbara Jo.” Richard never wrote back, but he saved her letter and the snapshots until the end of his life.

  On the weekend Barbara’s letter arrived, Richard was away in Monterey with Sherry Vetter. They made several trips there that year and the next, flying down (airfare was $10.80 one-way) to spend time with Keith and Lani Abbott or with Price Dunn, always staying at Borg’s Motel in Pacific Grove. Brautigan had been scheduled to give a reading at the Ninety-second Street Y in New York on March 30, but for unexplained reasons, the event was canceled.

  In April, when Sherry’s car was in the shop for repairs, she rented a Chevy Malibu and drove Richard up to Mendocino for a long weekend, his first vacation in two years. A friend had loaned her a cabin on the edge of the picturesque coastal town. Brautigan promptly came down with the flu and spent three days in bed “staring out at the trees.”

  Richard ran a high fever and sweated through the nights. On the third morning, he wanted to have sex (“perhaps to break the monotony”) but couldn’t get an erection. His sickness had taken its toll. Brautigan sat staring forlornly at Sherry’s diaphragm lying on its plastic case as she playfully lifted his bathrobe and prodded Richard’s wilted penis with her big toe. She went into town around noon to have coffee with a friend.

  Brautigan tossed in bed, burning with fever and staring through the windows at the drizzle-shrouded trees. Unable to take it anymore, he struggled out of bed and into his clothes. He found an old girl’s bicycle leaning against the outside of the house and pedaled slowly for half a mile to a graveyard close by Mendocino. Always fascinated by cemeteries, Richard wandered feverishly among the tombstones under an overcast sky, reading the epitaphs of long-dead Californians. Brautigan was back in bed, snug under the covers, staring at the gloomy trees, when Sherry returned from her coffee date, bringing him a glass of orange juice.

  At the end of April, Brautigan sent a check for $50 to the Sonoma State College English Department, along with a short letter explaining that he had been overpaid by that amount for the reading he gave there the previous year. Around that same time, Kendrick Rand was shutting down the Minimum Daily Requirement for the very last time one cold windy evening when Richard and Sherry stopped by on their way to La Bodega for dinner. Rand planned a permanent move to his place in Stinson Beach and was closing the coffeehouse forever. Richard suggested a drink in celebration, and, after their meal, he and Sherry rejoined Kendrick on the terrace of Enrico’s, where they polished off “a bottle or so of wine.” Richard’s newfound affluence bankrolled a recent passion for expensive French white wine. Aside from that, Kendrick saw little difference in Brautigan. “He didn’t really change that much.”

  After their first bottle, Richard pulled a letter from Playboy out of his peacoat pocket. “I gotta show you some of this,” he said, handing it to Kendrick. The message expressed a warm appreciation for Richard’s work. “Since you are part of the family now,” the letter concluded, “please feel free to avail yourself of the services of the Playboy Club.” It was signed by Hugh Hefner. From where Rand sat, he looked straight down Kearny Street at the lighted facade of the Playboy Club several blocks away. “Hey, Richard,” Kendrick pointed at the distant nightclub. “You ever been in there?”

  “No,” Brautigan replied.

  “Well, by god, let’s go down there!”

  They hailed a cab. A woman dressed in the club’s signature abbreviated bunny costume greeted them at the door and asked if they were members. When they said no, she told them only club members were admitted. Richard produced his letter. “I’ve been invited here by Hugh Hefner,” he said.

  They were allowed in out of the cold to wait in a foyer while word of the letter worked its way up through the chain of command. The intrepid trio made their way to the lobby. There, a nest of scantily clad bunnies parted at the approach of “the madam.” She looked them over. “Everyone else is in three-piece suits,” Kendrick recalled. “Real Montgomery Street.” Thinking to call their bluff, the madam said, “Well, I understand that you are the guests of Mr. Hefner?”

  “Yes.” Richard handed her the letter. “He’s invited me to come to the Playboy Club and avail myself of the services.”

  The madam managed to say, “Just wait a moment. We’ll accommodate you.” After a while, they were escorted up the stairs from the lobby into a large gaming room where numerous bunnies attended the businessmen shooting pool. More stairs in the multilevel club led to a dining area, while another set descended to the toilets. “They had taken a table and placed it there with three chairs and sat us in this little foyer off the men’s and ladies’ room,” Kendrick related. “I’m sure we were the first and last people ever to sit there.” Richard, Sherry, and Kendrick ordered double Jack Daniel’s and “proceeded to get very drunk.” When members came down from the game room to use the facilities, the raucous trio pretended to be bathroom attendants and greeted them with rude insults. “It was quite an evening.”

  After leaving the Playboy Club, Kendrick said to Richard, “This is my last night in North Beach, and somehow, in all the years of North Beach, I have never been into a topless place.” Richard admitted he hadn’t either, and they decided to correct this unfortunate oversight, weaving their way into the Garden of Eden. “Pretty drunk,” they stuck around long enough to watch “the male-female act of love” before departing.

  The Simon & Schuster editions of The Abortion sold well, but not as well as the Brautigan books published by Dell/Delacorte. Jonathan Dolger attributed this to the S&S sales force being unfamiliar with Brautigan. The tepid reviews the novel received didn’t help. Clarence Peterson, writing in the Chicago Tribune Book World, called The Abortion “a whimsical delight,” but he went on to say it “appears to have been written in no more time than it takes to read it.” Steven Kroll (Washington Post Book World) also enjoyed the novel, yet said “it seems of little consequence.” Robert Adams bluntly stated in the New York Review of Books, “It isn’t a bad book. It just isn’t much of a book.” Harshest of all, in the New Republic, Jonathan Yardley referred to Brautigan as “the Love Generation’s answer to Charlie Schultz. Happiness is a warm hippie.”

  The same spring The Abortion appeared, Brautigan produced the last of his Digger-inspired giveaways. Jack Shoemaker had planned to move to Oregon in 1968, but stopped off in Berkeley for a few months to work at Serendipity Books, Peter Howard’s newly established first-edition emporium on University Avenue. Three years later, he was still there.

  Shoemaker never did make it to Oregon, staying on at Serendipity for six years. While there, he launched the Sand Dollar Press, the first in a series of distinguished publishing ventures. Because Serendipity planned to have a booth at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair in the spring of 1971, the notion of printing something by Richard Brautigan to hand out to the fair-goers made perfect sense. The end result, Five Poems, a seventeen-by-eleven broadside (Serendipity labeled it a “wideside”) became the most attractive of all Brautigan’s �
�free” publications. Printed with red titles and black text on heavy cream-colored paper by Clifford Burke’s Cranium Press, the broadsides owned a finished professional look lacking in the earlier com / co handouts.

  A long letter arrived from Jayne Palladino. She’d run into Richard for a few minutes at Ron Loewinsohn’s poetry reading in Berkeley a couple months earlier. Thinking about the positive effect he had on her life made her want to see him again. Attempts at phoning him failed because he changed his unlisted number so often and kept his phone unplugged for most of every day. In her letter, Jayne suggested a walk into the Berkeley Hills. Brautigan waited months before calling her. By then she was in love with someone else, so they didn’t get together.

  California Living, the magazine section of the San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, published “A Taste of the Taste of Brautigan” in mid-May. There were seven short enigmatic poems, accompanied by photographs, “conceived and executed by Richard with his good friend, photographer Edmund Shea.” Edmund took the pictures before departing for England. In his introduction, the editor confessed “while the temptation is great for this magazine to do a definitive personal profile of Richard, he prefers to let his writing speak for him . . . for now.”

  While everything continued to get better for Richard Brautigan, old friend Lew Welch fell on hard times. Depression and booze took their toll. Like Jack Kerouac, his drinking had reached pathological levels. “Stark raving mad,” Welch described himself as “such a bad alcoholic I can barely function.” He and Magda parted company.

  Cregg left the country to travel in Colombia, South America. “I was so much worse than I knew,” Lew wrote to her. “It must have been awful for you to watch [. . .] I really know now where Kerouac was—how the spirit dies so there isn’t even fear anymore & the body dies so there isn’t any love or courage possible.” Jack Shoemaker’s Sand Dollar Press had recently published a second edition of The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings. At the time, Courses was the only other Welch title still in print.

  Lew had a plan. Allen Ginsberg gave Welch his share of the hundred-acre communal property up by Nevada City where, on his portion, Gary Snyder built the log home he called “Kitkitdizze.” Welch planned to dry out at a friend’s Washington farm during the spring and build a cabin in the Sierra that summer. Letters from Gary instructed Lew on the protocol and criteria for selecting a cabin site, defined the “general code” comembers had agreed upon for land use, warned of fire danger, and offered useful tips on well drilling. Work on the eight-by-twenty log structure was set to start late in June.

  Welch arrived in the mountains by mid-May, living in his van while he set up camp. He needed a crew of five, including two carpenters, and had to supply all their food during construction as well as buying lumber. Lew had $3,000 set aside, but it wasn’t enough. He wrote Magda, pleading for a loan of $1,000. He planned on asking Richard and Don Carpenter for money. Isolation gripped him. “It’s funny,” he wrote, “but everybody seems somehow a stranger.”

  Lew Welch had long been struck by the large number of suicides among poets. Ten years earlier, in an unfinished letter to Robert Duncan from Ferlinghetti’s Bixby Canyon cabin, where he binged with Jack Kerouac, he stated, “The other possibility, the only other possibility, is suicide.” On May 22, Welch named Don Allen as his literary executor in his journal. In his agitated state, he misdated the entry as “March 22.” “I never could make anything work out right and now I’m betraying my friends,” he wrote. “I can’t make anything out of it—never could. I had great visions but never could bring them together with reality. I used it all up. It’s gone [. . .] I went Southwest. Goodbye.” Lew took his pistol and walked away from camp, disappearing into the mountains. He was never seen again.

  Early in June, the Sunday New York Times Book Review published “The Mercy Killing,” a parody of Richard Brautigan by the respected novelist Walker Percy (The Moviegoer). Sharply barbed on the surface, a literary parody is at heart a sincere compliment. In order for a reader to get the joke, the subject of a parody must be famous enough to be recognizable, possessing a distinctive individual style. Hemingway and Faulkner had unique voices and were readily parodied. Brautigan, too, had his own literary voice. Percy’s mocking send-up acknowledged Brautigan’s widespread fame.

  The Brautigan burlesque was sandwiched between parodies of James Baldwin and Donald Barthelme, distinguished company for a young writer recently arrived on the national scene. “The Mercy Killing: A Love Story, by Richard Brautigan” poked fun at The Abortion while misinterpreting the actual work. Walker Percy had the misguided notion that Brautigan celebrated illegal abortions. Even a cursory reading of the novel reveals otherwise.

  Richard and Sherry Vetter traveled often to the mountains on fishing trips. Sherry owned a baby blue Volkswagen “bug” and did all the driving. “We would load up the car with my fishing gear, ample extra clothes and a box full of cooking utensils and food,” Brautigan wrote ten years later. “The important thing that we did not take with us was sleeping bags because we always stayed in motels or cabins, most often with kitchens so we could cook, which included lots of trout that I caught.”

  Their longest trip to the upper Sacramento River lasted three weeks. Richard and Sherry took Ianthe, on her summer vacation, along with them, the day after Brautigan attended the Whole Earth Demise Party at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. To celebrate the final issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, editor Stewart Brand swirled through the crowd robed in black like a monk and gave away $20,000 in cash. Copies of a Lew Welch poem were also handed out. Most partygoers had no idea he’d gone missing and was very possibly dead.

  Shortly before they left, Richard called Sherry and told her that his daughter didn’t have any clothes. Would she please help her buy what she required? “She particularly needed a swimming suit, and she was so skinny,” Sherry recalled. “I did buy her this real cute dress, but none of the bathing suits would fit her.” Sherry sewed a little two-piece reversible suit for Ianthe. “She wore that thing over clothes and under her clothes every day for the three weeks.”

  Swimming suits were essential. Sherry loved to swim, and Richard described her bathing costume as “a very daring and delicious bikini.” Richard made sure the motels where they stayed always came with swimming pools. Richard and Sherry drove north across the Golden Gate Bridge, stopping at Ginny’s place in Sonoma to pick up Ianthe, and then straight on up to Redding, a distance of 239 miles, with Sherry behind the wheel for the entire trip. They stayed at the Hyatt Lodge, which had a pool and cost only $15 a night.

  During the day, Sherry and Ianthe spent much of their time swimming. Brautigan liked to sit poolside and watch them. “Richard was always watching,” Sherry recalled. “Watching for little things, like the way you moved and the way you walked and the way you swam.” Brautigan had his own take on this. In his unpublished memoir “American Hotels,” he observed, “Sherry was so graceful in the water that I liked to watch her swim, other than for obvious reasons, so often that I would eat by the pool and watch her splash around.”

  What gave Richard the most pleasure was when Sherry jumped out of the pool and squirmed into his lap, dripping and giggling. “Even though she was in her early 20s,” he wrote, “because she was so short, and innocent of face, she looked 15 or 16. I was in my middle 30s and looked a little old for my age, so it created some consternation with the people that we encountered [. . .] because we were obviously lovers.” Richard and Sherry “often adjourned to our room and made love like healthy fire.” After a nap, they went fishing in the afternoon. Sherry didn’t fish but brought along a book and sat on the bank reading under a tree. “I would just sit and watch,” she reminisced. “It was so incredible to watch him fish.”

  Sherry remembered the folks they scandalized around motel swimming pools. “All these men were sort of dressed down in these L. L. Bean fishing gear outfits, and their wives—they were rich guys!” On this trip, the trio ventured up to the little town
of Dunsmuir and stayed at the Venice Motel on the edge of the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. “This one particular guy followed Richard around for a couple of days to learn how to fish.” He was fascinated with Brautigan because Richard used so little gear. Brautigan waded wet in high-top tennis shoes. Aside from his fiberglass pole and a fern-stuffed wicker creel Sherry liked to sit on, he had none of the highly priced equipment favored by the Abercrombie & Fitch crowd.

  Richard, Sherry, and Ianthe had dinner one night with this man and his wife and two kids. Sherry remembered the evening as “kind of fun.” Richard and Sherry went into town that day and bought a couple bottles of wine, “and the guy was flabbergasted that this old, weird hippie knew anything about wine.” Brautigan also knew how to charm. “Richard had a way, wherever we went, of meeting and talking to and becoming friends with the oddest assortment of people,” Sherry recalled. “Many, many different kinds of people from all different social categories, from the poorest to the richest.”

  Years later, after their fishing trips faded to distant memories, Sherry told Richard that she had never enjoyed driving across endless miles of California backcountry. Worse, she actually hated the fishing, all the hours she spent watching Brautigan wading in trout streams. Only the books she brought along to read on the bank kept her “from going stark raving mad.”

  Two weeks after returning to San Francisco from their trip to the upper Sacramento, Richard Brautigan flew to New York. Again, he stayed in $25-a-night rooms at One Fifth Avenue. Brautigan was in town to meet his new editor at S&S and get to know some of the production people at the publishing house.

  After a small welcoming party at the S&S offices, Richard Snyder (later CEO and chairman of the company) suggested they all go up to Elaine’s Restaurant. Long a bastion of literary and showbiz celebrity, Elaine’s, on Second Avenue between Eighty-eighth and Eighty-ninth streets, like Toots Shor’s famous gin mill long before, gained a reputation for exclusivity based on brash rudeness and the arrogance implied by serving mediocre food for inflated prices.