Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Kenn Davis recorded this happy domestic activity in his sketchbook. He drew Richard eating watermelon, reading the morning paper, sitting at his typewriter staring out at the rain, and playing indoor badminton. On two occasions, Kenn attempted to teach Dick to drive in the ’55 Chevy. Once was in a long graveled area down in the Marina District, a wealthy flatland neighborhood of pastel houses built atop landfill rubble from the 1906 earthquake.

  “What I liked about it,” Kenn recalled, “was the fact that you could actually drive a car without hitting anybody.” He later taught Frank Curtin to drive in the same place. “Frank turned out fine. But Dick, he just never—him and machinery. After about twenty minutes, I realized this is hopeless.” The second attempt took place on a camping and fishing trip to Yosemite and ended with similar results. Kenn made better use of his time sketching Richard casting on a trout stream.

  One moonlit evening, the three apartment-mates were out having fun near the yacht harbor far from Potrero. Nine years after San Francisco rose anew from the ashes, the Panama–Pacific Exposition of 1915 blazed into life along the waterfront in the Marina. Officially a celebration of the opening of the Panama Canal, the big bash became an enormous party to honor the city’s rebirth. The centerpiece of the festivities was the Palace of Fine Arts, Bernard Maybeck’s fantasy re-creation of a Roman ruin surrounded by a reflecting pool. Framed in wood and covered with staff (a mixture of plaster and fibrous materials), the romantic structure was intended to last only for the life of the fair. So beloved by San Franciscans, the building was spared while a Turkish mosque, the 435-foot-high “Tower of Jewels,” and all the other palaces (education, industry, and horticulture) were demolished.

  A half century later, the Palace of Fine Arts itself stood in ruins, lathe work showing through where staff putti had crumbled. Kenn Davis found the place “very romantic and secluded.” One night, he took Richard and Ginny to this magic spot. Wandering under a full moon, they marveled at the decaying colonnaded dome rising dreamlike above its own wavering reflection. “Entrancing,” Ginny recalled.

  The trio felt caught up in the zany spirit of romance and scaled the decaying walls of the imaginary moon-pale palace. They climbed upon a shed and from the roof up onto an iron framework supporting the statuary-adorned colonnade. Huge urns perched on large steplike platforms. They climbed these like giant stairs. Iron posts thrust from broken sculpture like time-blackened bones. “The heads were off of a lot of the statues.” Ginny remembered fear gripping them when they tried to figure out how to get back down again. “It was scary.”

  Potrero Hill, a remote neighborhood with fabulous views of downtown San Francisco, provided Brautigan a home, but the focus of his intellectual and social life continued to be in North Beach. The couple depended on bus transportation to take them everywhere, to work as well as play. Aside from their roommate, Richard and Ginny knew very few other people on Potrero. Their friends Tom and Shirley Lipsett lived at the top of the hill. Ginny and Richard frequently walked up to visit with them. Ginny made friends with a Spanish-speaking sandal maker who lived down the street in a lovely old Arts and Crafts house designed by Bernard Maybeck. Later, the place was torn down to make room for a freeway. She enjoyed conversing in his native tongue as he taught her how to work with leather.

  Following the publication of After Lorca, Jack Spicer worked on a sequence of cryptic cautionary poems he called Admonitions. Not published until 1970, most were written in 1958. Each poem was addressed to a specific friend, but only two (those to Joe Dunn and Robin Blaser) were purely epistolary. Other designated subjects included Nemi Frost, Ebbe Borregaard, Russell FitzGerald, Graham Mackintosh, and Charles Olson. Spicer’s poem for Richard Brautigan went straight to the recipient’s heart. “For Dick” concluded with the lines, “Look / Innocence is important / It has meaning / Look / It can give us / Hope against the very winds that we batter against it.” Having a personalized poem from a man he admired as much as Spicer pleased Richard Brautigan a great deal, but it didn’t help buy the groceries, the wolf on the doorstep being more troubling than any poet’s wind rumbling like a “sabre-toothed ape.”

  Ginny continued working for the law firm downtown. Richard wanted to pull his weight, too. After a bit of searching, he found part-time employment with Pacific Chemical Laboratories, Inc., at 350 Clay Street. Richard remained secretive about his peculiar job. He kept it for years, telling few of his friends exactly what it was he did those two or three afternoons a week. Many thought he worked developing photographs. Price Dunn knew it was “some esoteric laboratory where he mixed the brews.”

  Richard prepared a powdered formula for barium swallows at Pacific Chemical. The mysterious concoction came in two flavors, chocolate and vanilla. (In “The Daily Bread,” an unpublished poem written on June 11, 1963, Brautigan described the process: “My job is to weigh / things out, / and so I do it: 400 grams / of cellulose gum, / and four grams of saccharine and / .8 gram of / naconol [. . .]”)

  Aside from writing, his main efforts went toward trying to get published. Ginny typed up fair copies of his poetry at work, mailing them out in batches to various magazines. Once, with Richard anxious to get poems off to The Nation and having no typewriter at home, he and Kenn Davis went downtown with Ginny after business hours to the office where she worked. Ginny can’t remember how they got into the building “with a big cardboard box,” but they came back down in the elevator carrying an IBM Executive inside it. “Feeling very guilty,” Ginny typed all of Richard’s poems that night, and they smuggled the electric typewriter back into the offices of Landelf, Weigel, Ripley and Diamond early the next morning, “vowing never to do anything like that again.”

  Richard Brautigan knew there was no money to be made in poetry. He told Ginny the only book of poetry ever to become a best seller in America was Spoon River Anthology. Edgar Lee Masters sold over a hundred thousand copies. Such astronomical sales figures were out of the question for Brautigan, but his experiences with Inferno and White Rabbit Press taught him a valuable lesson: As your own publisher you never got any rejection slips. In early March of 1959, when Gary Snyder returned to Japan and the wrecking crew began dismantling the Montgomery Block (many of the old-time bohemian residents moved to the Hotel Wentley on Polk and Sutter), Richard and Ginny decided to go for broke and bring out a book of Brautigan’s poetry on their own. Long hours were spent around the kitchen table, debating what they should call this new endeavor. They came up with the name Carp Press.

  The irony of this off-kilter choice appealed to trout fisherman Richard Brautigan. He also liked the notion of a carp’s longevity. “They live forever,” Ginny said. “They live on the bottom and are bottom feeders and it had a lot to do with crap. We couldn’t really call it Crap Press, so we called it Carp Press. It had to do with the ugliness of the business side of poetry and the longevity of poetry.” Kenn Davis recalled that the name also referred to “people who just carp. Richard liked that. To find a simple word that could be a lot of things at once.”

  Needing a colophon, Richard and Kenn “sat around one evening drawing fishies.” As Davis remembered it, “I was showing him some real simple stuff, and he picked up on it very quickly. He did a whole page of them, and we finally picked one that he thought was really great, but the thing was lacking an eye. So, he started drawing eyes in some of the better ones and one in particular had a kind of weird look to it. He says, ‘Ooooh! Let’s use that.’” The final result looked quite a lot like the primitive piscine symbol used by the early Christian church. So much so that many people asked Kenn Davis if it represented some sort of religious press. “Are you kidding?” he’d tell them. “With a name like Carp?” Brautigan liked the design well enough to utilize it for the rest of his life, sketching it on book inscriptions and posters, making it an integral element of his mock “trout money.”

  Richard collected two dozen of his best poems to date, including “The Chinese Checker Players” and “The Castle of the Cormorants.”
He took his title, Lay the Marble Tea, from an Emily Dickinson quote, which he used as his epigraph. (“The grave my little cottage is, / Where, keeping house for thee, / I make my parlor orderly, / And lay the marble tea [. . .]”) Brautigan arranged the poetry in a cyclical framework; the first (“Portrait of the Id as Billy the Kid”) being mentioned in the last (“The Twenty-eight Cents for My Old Age”) as a poem he once read in a San Francisco bar. Baudelaire makes an appearance in these poems, as do Hansel and Gretel, Moby Dick, John Donne, Harpo Marx, and Kafka.

  Brautigan’s long interest in book design, typography, and layout showed its playful side when he arranged seven poems sideways on the page. He and his wife worked together on all aspects of the book’s production, paying special attention to the cover. “Richard fussed over every little detail,” Ginny recalled. He enlisted Kenn Davis to provide the cover art, an austere ink drawing of a couple seated on tombstones facing one another in a graveyard. A teapot, cup, and saucer rest among the scraggly weeds near the woman, a veiled Emily Dickinson. Davis included a small tombstone with the date of his birth: “RIP 1932.”

  The man clings to a leafless tree for support. Davis recalled how he and Brautigan had great fun designing the tree as a phallic symbol. “Richard was always looking for something to kind of gently throw in the public’s face. Trees are notoriously phallic. And the thing I thought would make it more phallic than anything else was to have the male’s arm around it. The fingers kind of coming out from the side.”

  The Brautigans contracted with Roger Neiss’s Litho Art company (his slogan: “When you want another NEISS job—call YUkon 2-6268”) to type the copy and print five hundred books. The charge, including sales tax, came to $94.25. “Astronomical,” Ginny recalled. The founders of Carp Press made a down payment of $40 to Litho Art in late April 1959 and paid off the balance when they picked up the finished books on the first of May.

  Richard and Ginny decided to charge seventy-five cents for Lay the Marble Tea. They sent out consignment copies in batches ranging from five to twenty to local bookstores: Discovery, City Lights, Tides, and the UC Corner. Ginny typed formal letters to each. “I think nobody ever expected anything to sell,” she recalled. You just do it for the love of doing it.”

  One early evening in North Beach, Kenn Davis assisted them in delivering copies. “It was getting toward that blue hour,” he said. The three friends wanted to see Room at the Top, the new English film starring Laurence Harvey and Simone Signoret, but lacked the price of admission. Kenn took fifteen or twenty of the chapbooks “and just hit the bars and started peddling them. Sold one to a traffic cop.” Kenn had prior experience in street sales. “Whenever I would get really desperate for money I would do some drawings of the local characters around North Beach and I would try to peddle [them] to tourists.” After an hour, Davis collected the admission for all three. Lacking bus fare to Larkin Street, rather than sell more copies, the trio walked through the Broadway Tunnel all the way to the Larkin Theater.

  Michael McClure, not yet a friend of Brautigan’s, thought Lay the Marble Tea “unprepossessing,” but found the new little book to be a graceful “katydid hop” forward from The Galilee Hitch-Hiker. He felt Richard was “clearly quite literary” and later wrote that “the poems are inexplicable artifacts and penetrating insights into childhood.” Philip Whalen, another of the Six Gallery poets, had a different reaction to Lay the Marble Tea. “I was very impressed at that time,” he recalled. He thought it “really wonderful. The first book from somebody who had his own voice, his own vision, which was quite terrific. It was just totally authentic feeling. It’s not like student work or amateur wannabe stuff; it was really there—created material that was on the page.”

  Like many penniless poets with time on their hands, Richard Brautigan wandered the streets of North Beach, filling his days with chance encounters. One morning in 1959, he ran into Stanley Fullerton, a character as unique and eccentric as himself. Fullerton, a painter living in a $30-a-month room at the Mary’s Tower Hotel, had his own survival credo: “rent first, food 2nd, paint & paper, then alcohol.” Half coastal Indian on both sides of his family, Fullerton led a hard-scrabble youth and joined the Marines at seventeen, serving in the Korean War as an ordnance disposal man. “There was an extra $75 per month for doing this job plus another seventy-five for doing it under fire.” Fullerton left that conflict with a metal plate in his head. After a few months at the Bethesda Naval Hospital and a year at Oak Knoll, in Oakland, California, he was discharged with total disability pay.

  Stan Fullerton’s wound affected his mind. Once, the metal plate sent him a signal to go out and rob a bank. Fullerton walked into an Oakland savings and loan waving a toy pistol “with a picture of Dick Tracy on the side that made a ferocious Boing, Boing when the trigger was pulled.” He got away with a sack of money. After running several blocks, Stan wandered around, forgetting what had just occurred. Attracted by a commotion outside the bank building, Fullerton joined the curious crowd, still clutching the toy gun and his loot. He was immediately apprehended. “I was run through the process of California law and put back in the locked ward of Oak Knoll.”

  The morning Stan Fullerton met Dick Brautigan began when Fullerton bought two gallons of red wine for a buck each at a little store near the Co-Existence Bagel Shop. “I carefully hid one bottle and started for Telegraph Hill with a pocket full of salami and cheese and a sketch book. On the lower part of the hill, I noted that I wasn’t alone and that a very tall skinny guy with whitish-blond hair and glasses was taking these great swooping steps to come alongside. He guessed that I needed company to protect the wine from muggers.”

  Stan remembered seeing Brautigan hawking his poetry chapbook in front of the Coffee Gallery, so they talked and he shared his lunch with the hungry writer. Richard seemed impressed when Fullerton told him several small San Francisco galleries carried his drawings and small wire sculptures of birds. “I found that he had not taken any food for some time and was not in real good shape. Richard needed a certain amount of being looked after, and he very early in his S.F. tenure built a troop of support that involved many folks I never even saw or knew, so our kinship/ acquaintance, or whatever it was, was sporadic.”

  Finances remained tight. Not all the Brautigans’ literary endeavors focused on art with a capital “A.” Richard, Ginny, and Kenn decided to enter the field of popular fiction. Davis recalled “there were a lot of original paperbacks running around loose and pretty good money made from them for a writer and we thought, why don’t we just whip one out and send it off and see if we can sell it.” They kicked ideas around the kitchen table at night, eventually coming up with a plot about heroin addicts. The story featured “a lady villain” who died “rather horribly” at the end. Their working title was “Snow White.”

  Using the pseudonym T. T. Bears (The Three Bears), the team set to work separately. “I typed up a bunch of pages,” Kenn said. “Richard typed up a few pages, and of course, we all passed the stuff back and forth correcting our English, correcting our punctuation, correcting the story line and so forth. It was abominable.” After about twenty pages, the T. T. Bears team gave up, disgusted with their potboiling efforts. “We never did a thing with it.”

  During this period, the Brautigans spent many evenings at Bread and Wine in North Beach. There were two poetry readings a week and music every Saturday night. Mimi Fariña and Joan Baez played at the Bread and Wine. Dave Van Ronk dropped in whenever he was in town. Lord Buckley (who influenced Lenny Bruce) performed nearby at the hungry i and the Coffee Gallery, sending an advance delegation of “these gypsylike women” over to the Mission. They stormed through the door shouting, “Lord Buckley—The Nazz!” before the comic monologist, wearing a white dinner jacket and pith helmet, upturned mustache bristling, arrived to perform his bop-talk routine about the life of Christ.

  Along with pass-the-hat entertainment, Bread and Wine served free spaghetti dinners to all comers every Sunday night. “We went man
y times,” Ginny remembered. “Free spaghetti nights,” Kenn Davis reminisced enthusiastically. “Oh boy, did we go to those.” By Pierre Delattre’s estimate, the Mission fed about three hundred hungry guests each week. “People would come and volunteer and bring in all sorts of stuff. We had great meals.”

  Richard Brautigan’s reading career in North Beach picked up steam. He and Robert Duncan were among four poets engaged to read weekly at the Coffee Gallery on a rotating basis. The pay was $25 per reading, a princely sum in 1959. Also, the implied prestige of sharing the billing with Duncan must have felt sweet indeed. Less than five years earlier he had curtly dismissed Brautigan’s written request for a forum in the claustrophobic world of San Francisco poetry.

  During one of Brautigan’s turns at the Coffee Gallery, Ron Loewinsohn came up before the reading and said he had something to give him. Richard didn’t care very much for Ron at the time and told him to “save it for later.” Loewinsohn sat next to Jack Spicer. After Brautigan read his poetry, he handed Richard a poem he had written, saying he always gave a copy to the person to whom he’d dedicated the work. Richard made no reply, remembering the earlier deleted Loewinsohn dedication. “What a chicken shit way to fuck around,” Brautigan thought. Was Ron “completely out of his goddamn mind?”

  Before the reading, Richard and Frank Curtin had stepped out into the alley for a little taste of “sneaky pete.” Afterward, they bought another bottle of “rot gut wine” and headed up the street to the end of Grant Avenue, where they could “crouch under the stairs and drink.” Ron Loewinsohn followed them. He wasn’t interested in drinking but just wanted to hang out. Richard put him down. Frank had no idea what was going on. He was a friend of Ron’s and didn’t say anything. Later, Richard read the poem Loewinsohn had given him. It concerned the discarded illuminated medieval manuscript. Richard had similar feelings for Ron’s new poem and promptly lost the gift copy.