Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  “One time we went and bought a watermelon.” Barbara laughed as she told the story. “I was around eight or nine years old. We walked downtown. It was real hot, one summer day, and this store was selling watermelon for like a penny and a half a pound.” Dick Porterfield picked out a huge one. Twenty-five pounds. He paid for it with his own money. “He says, ‘Okay, we’re going to take turns carrying this watermelon back home. I’ll carry it a block, and you carry it a block.’”

  Barbara was small for her age, and it was a long trudge back to Hayes Street. After about eight blocks, changing off and on with him, Barbara said, “Richard, you’ve got to help me. I’m going to drop it. My arms won’t hold it anymore. And then, crash! I dropped it on the grass. Broke into like twenty pieces. And he looked at me, and he said, ‘Well, we’d better sit down and eat it. I don’t want it to go to waste.’ So, right then and there on someone’s lawn, we sat down and ate that watermelon. Ate the whole thing.”

  Gary Stewart also cherished juicy watermelon dreams. One summer afternoon, he and Dick Porterfield were hanging out on the U of O campus. They spent a lot of time roaming the open stacks of the college library. Over a million volumes. “The library was sort of our home. We got full run of the University of Oregon library.” In those days, Thirteenth Street traversed the campus and on that particular afternoon a watermelon dropped off a passing truck just as the two kids happened by. “We went out, and we just ate the heart. Something you’ve always wanted to do. Just eat the heart.”

  In the fall of 1947, Dick Porterfield, Gary Stewart, and the Hiebert twins began their first year of junior high at Woodrow Wilson school on Jefferson Street. In a bizarre life coincidence seemingly lifted from the pages of Brautigan’s fiction, among their classmates in the seventh grade were two other sets of identical twins. The edge-of-town boys soon became fast friends with Charles and Arthur Wical and with Jerry and John Wicks, each pair mirror-image bookends. They all shared a passion for basketball. Dick Porterfield played center for Wilson Junior High during his first year. This didn’t last long. By the time they reached high school none of them tried out for the team for fear of spending most of the season warming the bench.

  The Hiebert twins were Baptists and attended a church on Ninth and Broadway that had a gym. They’d all go there after school to shoot some hoops. “We’d slip in the back door,” Gary Stewart recalled. Art Wical remembered the ceilings in the downstairs gym at First Baptist were less than ten feet high. “It was a shortened court, and we used to have to shoot shorter shots, and we’d try to learn how to slam the ball there because the basket was smaller.”

  Being tallest, Dick Porterfield played center. The other four starting players were the Hieberts and the Wical brothers. The impromptu clandestine games evolved into an official church team. First Baptist played against Eugene’s other denominations in a league organized by the YMCA. The same group of kids also played noon intramural ball at the Wilson school playground. Don Hiebert dubbed this gang of look-alikes the “Vagrant Varlets.” They all got in on the gag, taunting their opponents with mock Old English insults in the heat of the action. “Fie on you,” they’d shout, whenever a point was scored against them. “A pox on your head; you fouled me!” It drove the other teams crazy. “A pox on you all!”

  Along with their pithy archaic epithets, the Varlets had a talent for ball handling. They won the league championship and went on to the regional YMCA finals in Walla Walla, Washington. Here, luck ran out and they got their asses kicked. Not even extravagant extemporaneous wit saved the day.

  Nominally a Catholic, young Dick began attending the First Baptist Church about the same time he started sneaking into their basement gym. During his first year at Woodrow Wilson, he received a signed certificate for his attendance at the Junior High Week Day Church School. In grade school, Dick attended Bible class for an hour each day. He took his Bible to bed with him every night until he was twenty, but Dick Porterfield’s affiliation with any organized religion was short-lived.

  The family never prayed or went to church together. “We never did anything together as a family, let alone pray,” Barbara said. Gary Stewart remembered his friend as “sort of a teenage philosopher.” Peter Webster, another friend from those years who played for the First Christian Church basketball team against the Varlets, recalled that “Dick claimed to be an atheist. We had long discussions about God, church, and religion. But they consisted mostly of Dick talking and my listening.”

  Don Hiebert stated that Brautigan seemed “angry” at those whose religious feelings did not coincide with his own. Whatever his spiritual beliefs, Dick Porterfield soon stopped going to church altogether. “He believed in God and in the Bible but he didn’t like preachers,” Mary Lou commented. “‘Because, Mother,’ he says, ‘It’s all graft. You have to donate 20 percent of your income to the preacher.’ He said all the preachers in Eugene are millionaires.”

  Dick Porterfield’s true religion was going to the movies, worshipping at the altar of the silver screen. In the period after World War II, there were six movie theaters in Eugene. The McDonald and the Heilig (“holy” in German) featured first-run shows. Boasting plush seats and gilded ornamentation, the Heilig Theater was the finest building in town when it opened in 1903 (as the Eugene), hosting touring vaudeville companies before converting to motion picture use in 1926.

  The Heilig had an elaborate electric sign arching across Willamette Street, advertising its odd name in letters large enough to be seen from the Southern Pacific Railroad Station many blocks away on Fourth Avenue. Ken Kesey, born the same year as Brautigan and raised in Springfield, just across the river, described the fabulous sign: “flashing what we all took to be the Norwegian word for ‘hello,’ . . . ‘Heilig, Heilig, Heilig.’”

  Of the second-run theaters, the Mayflower and the Lane were both managed by the Heilig, while the McDonald controlled the Rex. The State Theater, a miserable hole-in-the-wall, was not well attended. Run-down and shabby, the Lane showed mainly Westerns. Located on a side street off the lower end of Willamette (at that time Eugene’s skid row), the Lane charged only a dime. Hobos and winos frequently went in to sleep off a jag, their muffled snores competing with the thundering hoof beats and crack of six-guns. Mary Lou remembered large rats running across the stage in the dark at the Lane. Barbara recalled the rodents coming even closer. “It wasn’t unusual if you felt something brush your leg.”

  Dick and B.J. went to the movies together frequently, walking eighteen blocks downtown to save bus fare. An Arthur Murray Studio was located close by the Lane. “Walk in and dance out,” Dick quipped to his sister as they passed the entrance. They never bought any popcorn in the theater, another economy measure. The show was always a double feature, with newsreels, cartoons, a serial episode, and an occasional short subject. On Saturdays, they arrived early, shortly after noon, when the first bill began, and stayed through until closing, around midnight, seeing the films over and over. They didn’t ever sit together. Dick enjoyed being up close to the screen. Barbara preferred sitting in the back. After the show was over (and over and over), they’d meet outside and walk home, talking about what they had just seen.

  Peter Webster remembered Dick as “a fanatic about movies.” In the summer, he would go “every day of the week if he could. When he found one he liked he would watch it again and again.” Shane, starring Alan Ladd and Jack Palance, was one of Dick Porterfield’s particular favorites. “He loved it because the props were so authentic and the costumes were authentic.” Dick first saw Shane on his only trip to a drive-in. The picture came on during an electrical storm, furious flashes of heat lightning igniting the dark sky behind the screen. “It made Shane seem almost like a religion.”

  Movies haunted Dick Porterfield’s imagination. Playing make-believe games with the neighborhood gang, Dick pretended to be Frankenstein’s monster, “dragging his foot and waving his arms.” Another horror movie had a profound effect on young Dick’s psyche. The Beast with Fi
ve Fingers, starring Peter Lorre, was a Curt Siodmak tale of a murdered pianist whose disembodied hand assumed a life of its own, creeping around spiderlike on its fingertips, taking revenge in the dead of night.

  Dick saw the picture with Gary Stewart in the fall of 1947. They walked downtown and when the show was over headed home together. It was late and very dark. There was no traffic, and the two boys walked up the middle of Tenth Street, the film’s grim mood enveloping them. Low flights of migrating geese thrashed through the blackness overhead. Filled with dread, they held hands.

  Gary looked back over his shoulder and saw a shadowy “hand” scuttling after them down the street. They panicked and ran for their lives. Gripped by utter terror, they fled into the darkness for five or six blocks before reason prevailed. Gasping for breath, the boys agreed they’d seen a large dry maple leaf blown along the macadam by the wind.

  Imagination feeds on the irrational. By the time Dick Porterfield arrived home that night, uncontrollable fear gripped him like a fever. “God, he was wild,” his mother remembered. “He’d wake up screaming. I laid down on the bed beside him and spent the night with him. All he mentioned was the hand was going to get him. He was so frightened.”

  The horrors of actual life exact a more profound toll than manufactured fantasies. Donald Husband, Dick Porterfield’s ninth-grade classmate at Woodrow Wilson, died on March 29, 1949, in a shooting accident involving a .22 rifle. Donny played first string on the basketball team and had been a member of the Golden Ball Tournament champions the previous year. Wealthy by Eugene standards, the Husband family lived in a big house on Charnelton Street. Dad was a partner in a local law firm. The smiling picture above The Register-Guard’s front-page article showed a confident, well-loved kid.

  Donald Husband died hunting pheasants among the old apple orchards on Bailey Hill, where Dick Porterfield often shot birds with Barbara. His death struck a powerful chord in the future author. Sudden tragic events take a permanent hold on the youthful imagination. “All of us at school remember,” Gary Stewart said of Donny’s unexpected death. “He was a popular kid.”

  Not long after the Porterfields moved into the house on Thirteenth, Mary Lou caught the eye of her neighbor, Bill Folston, who was one-half Nez Percé. Recently discharged from the army, Bill lived with his father in the little house they owned on Hayes Street. He was three years younger than the grass widow next door. However they first met, whether because Sandra toddled over through the fence into the lonely bachelor’s yard as she remembered, or if Mary Lou draped herself across the woodpile, feigning a swoon in her ratty fur coat, as Barbara recalled, Mrs. Porterfield was soon pregnant by Folston and suffered a miscarriage in 1949. “We lived together for three years,” Mary Lou recalled, “and I said, ‘I’m not going to marry you, you big Indian swamp, you.’ Oh, god, I was constantly insulting him.”

  Moonshine Bess died of myocardial infarction at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland on April 19, 1950. Around the same time, Mary Lou found herself once again in a family way. “She never, ever showed,” Sandra recalled. “I don’t ever remember her wearing a maternity outfit when she was pregnant with my younger brother.” Though she was “under the shotgun,” Mary Lou looked quite trim when she applied for a license and married William Folston in Nevada on June 12, 1950. They tied the knot at the Washoe County Courthouse in Reno, District Judge A. J. Maestretti presiding. She used the name Mary Lou Porterfield. On her marriage license application affidavit, she claimed that her previous husband was deceased.

  In fact, Mary Lou’s divorce from Robert Geoffry Porterfield did not become final until one month later, on the twelfth of July, but she didn’t let legal technicalities get in the way. “I kept telling that man I wasn’t going to marry him until we got to the courthouse,” she insisted. “It was all assigned like that, you know. Three minutes. ‘I now pronounce you husbands and wives. My fee is $10 each and goodbye. I don’t want to see you back here for a divorce next month either.’ And he said it all in broken English.”

  That night at the motel, the newlyweds lay in bed watching a pair of rats cavort in the moonlight on the window ledge. Nose to nose, the rodents did something strange with their mouths. It looked like they were kissing. “And this on our wedding day. Oh my god! What a nightmare.”

  Bill Folston dreamed a different dream. “I don’t think there was anybody in the world any better-hearted than him,” recalled Barbara’s husband, Jim Fitzhugh. Barbara assessed her new stepfather with affection. “I have to admire him for taking on a woman that had three children and then having a fourth and working two jobs and doing the best he could to support this family.” A born-again optimist, Bill Folston probably viewed the kissing rats as a good omen, lying in the dark beside his new bride, the son he longed for already growing inside her.

  Life changed for the Porterfield clan after their mother’s marriage to the man next door. Mary Lou never worked outside the home again. No more waitress jobs or walking downtown to clean a dentist’s office. She had found her nest at last. Just before David’s birth some deficiency was detected in her blood and her doctor prescribed a pint of beer per day. “It was to build up something in her blood,” Barbara said. “She hated beer. For a long time she had a terrible time getting that one beer down.”

  After a while, the medicine got easier to swallow. One beer led to another, “and then it became more and more and more and more.” Most days, by late afternoon Mary Lou was feeling no pain. Even on deer-hunting trips with the boisterous Folston clan, she made sure to bring along a little taste. “I’d always have a couple quarts of beer that I used to put in the creek and get it nice and cold,” Mary Lou said. “Sneak it on the side.” It got so Dick and Barbara couldn’t stand to see their mother chain-smoking, a glass in the other hand, that glazed look clouding her eyes. After one particularly bad afternoon, the two kids promised each other, “We’ll never do that. We don’t want to end up like her.”

  William David Folston was born in Eugene on December 19, 1950. For a time after the baby arrived, the family occupied both residences on the corner lot at Hayes and West Thirteenth. “Mom and Bill and Sandi lived in the other house,” Barbara recollected. She and Dick remained at the rented Shields place. “By ourselves. Over there.” They raised cats in secret, feeding them the heads and innards of the catfish they caught in the logging ponds. Once, they kept a pet mouse in a fish bowl filled with torn-up newspaper. When Mary Lou found out, “it disappeared.”

  At night, they listened to the radio. They didn’t have a phonograph, so this provided their only source for music. Dick liked the pseudo-Peruvian warbling of Yma Sumac and Eartha Kitt’s low feline growl. “I Love a Mystery,” “The Lone Ranger,” “Inner Sanctum,” and “The Shadow” were among their favorite dramatic programs.

  “He’d make up stories,” Barbara remembered fondly. “We’d sit there and he’d tell me these ghost stories.” Barbara thought Dick’s made-up tales were better than the ones on the radio. “I’d be more scared from the things he’d tell me.” The bond between Dick and B.J. grew ever stronger in these shared hours of make-believe. Their isolation reinforced a conviction born two years earlier after being unfairly punished by their mother. “We got to talking,” Barbara remembered, “and he asked me: ‘Do you think we’re adopted?’

  “And I said, ‘Well, I probably am because I sure don’t look like any of the family.’

  “And he said something to the fact that the way we were punished and everything, that we just didn’t fit in with the rest of the family and perhaps we were adopted. And then we couldn’t figure it out. If she indeed didn’t like us, why would she take us with her? It was obvious to us that she didn’t care for us.”

  There wasn’t space enough in the little one-bedroom house at 1287 Hayes for Dick and B.J. This inherent inhospitality manifested itself in various odd ways. When Barbara wandered over one afternoon during canning season, she found a kettle full of fruit jars sterilizing on the stove. All the water
had boiled away and the little girl in pigtails was only helping out when she poured a pan of cold water onto the hot glass. The jars exploded in her face. “It’s just amazing Barbara was never scarred from that,” Sandra observed.

  Psychological scars endure long after all trace of physical injury fades. Soon after David’s birth, Bill Folston added a bedroom onto his house. Mary Lou moved in the minute it was finished. Not wanting any more children, she dropped a final curtain on sleeping with her husband. Big-hearted Bill wished to bring the family closer, so he moved Dick and Barbara over to live at his place. Cramped quarters grew even tighter. B.J. and Sandi slept on a fold-out davenport in the dining/ living area opposite the kitchen. Dick Porterfield bunked on a cot set up in the tiny breakfast nook. Dick was over six foot at fifteen. His legs hung far off the end of the cot, and his mother placed a crate there so he’d have a place to rest his size 12s.

  Postwar prosperity bypassed the corner of West Thirteenth and Hayes, where the Kitchen of Tomorrow remained today’s impossible dream. Only Depression-era amenities graced the Folston household. Two iron wood-burning stoves, one in the kitchen, the other perching, squat and black, in the living area, provided heat and cooking facilities. Not having electric refrigeration, the family made do with a discarded commercial “Coke” cooler with a sliding top and a recessed opener mounted in the side.

  Celebrating Christmas had never been a very big deal for the Porterfields, and the holiday remained a low-key occasion even after they moved in with Bill Folston. Mary Lou baked a turkey and a mince pie, what she called “gourmet cooking.” Barbara recalled that it wasn’t “like most kids think Christmas is. You’ve seen the trees like in Snoopy, where there is a tree with five branches . . . ? That was our tree. On a wooden cross stand. One set of bubble lights. Maybe ten or twelve balls. I think we each got one present. And that was it.” Barbara and Dick never exchanged Christmas gifts.