Brautigan kept his writer’s antennae fine-tuned for offbeat article possibilities and learned of a unique burial ground at the Presidio. He gave Erik Weber a call, asking him to participate. Erik had never heard of the military pet cemetery. It sounded interesting, and he agreed to go along. This was not to be a collaboration like their Christmas tree story. “It was Richard being very specific as to what he wanted,” Weber recalled. “I’d only been photographing for a year or two, and I wasn’t real confident about my own ability, so I followed what he said.”
Founded by the Spanish in 1776 to guard the entrance of San Francisco Bay, the 1,480-acre Presidio remained a military reservation for more than two centuries. In 1965, the place was still administered by the U.S. Sixth Army, in charge ever since the United States annexed California from Mexico. In its quaint pet cemetery every sort of household pet from cats and dogs to parakeets, canaries, and goldfish were interred. General “Black Jack” Pershing buried his horse there.
Richard and Erik obtained permission to visit the animal graveyard from the post provost marshal. Brautigan wore his “funny hat,” and “his getup was kind of strange.” He looked at Erik and asked, “Am I embarrassing you, the way I look and act?” Erik said no, but recalled that “everywhere you went with Richard, people looked, he was so strange-looking.” They wandered among the many miniature tombstones commemorating such departed furry friends as Willie (1954–1956), pet hamster of Lt. & Mrs. Davidson, and Old Brown Dog, a “Pal for 19 Years.”
With traffic clanging overhead on the freeway overpass leading up to the Golden Gate Bridge, Richard jotted down his first impressions in the same notebook he carried with him to San Quentin. Eric Weber followed along, taking pictures according to the writer’s instructions. Brautigan drew little arched childlike tombstone shapes, writing the quaint epitaphs within their boundaries. He listed pet names appealing to his fancy: “Socky, Diehard, Sad Sack, Tiger Sue, Chur, Satan, Caesar, Shorty Johnson, Jet, Duke [. . .]” In all, he took six pages of notes.
When Erik finished photographing he headed back to his car. Richard said he wanted to stick around for a few more minutes. Erik got in the driver’s seat and watched his friend staring at the tiny graves as two soldiers came down the hill, rifles slung over their shoulders. The soldiers approached the pet cemetery. One advanced on Richard Brautigan, who paid very little attention until the man jumped forward, his rifle at port arms, shouting, “Halt! Who goes there?” Erik was dumbfounded. “I just sat with my mouth open and watched it rather than photographing it. I thought he was in danger.”
Brautigan used the incident with the soldiers to end his story about the pet cemetery. He wrote the piece very quickly over the next week, prefacing it with a quote from fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, the gist of which was “if you’re bored, you go for the outrageous gesture.” Putting on the “graves and markers and flowers like a Rudi Gernreich coat” became a central metaphor. Richard titled it “Homage to Rudi Gernreich.” He mailed the story, along with a selection of photographs by Erik Weber, to Madeline Tracy Brigden at Mademoiselle.
A week earlier, Brautigan wrote Bob Sherrill, inquiring about “The Menu” and asking to be repaid for his expenses. Sherrill waited until the end of the month to reply. Everyone at Esquire had approved Brautigan’s story except for editor-in-chief and publisher Arnold Gingrich, who had the final vote. He voted no. Sherrill said he was “sorry it didn’t make it” and returned Richard’s manuscript, along with the $200 kill-fee and $7 for expenses, effectively stiffing him out of fifty-nine cents.
Brautigan got his four bits’ worth anyway. Sherrill had edited the manuscript, making various cuts (often whole paragraphs) and tightening several other sections. When “The Menu” was eventually published, first in Evergreen Review no. 42 (August 1966) and later as a chapter in The Tokyo–Montana Express (1980), Richard incorporated Sherrill’s changes. The edited version was the one he mailed to Susan Stanwood at the Saturday Evening Post and, after she turned it down, to Gerald Rothberg, editor-publisher of a New York–based magazine called Clyde.
Gainfully employed, Janice Meissner fit Brautigan’s bill regarding a woman who could support him, but she was not the sort to suffer a freeloader hanging around for long. Richard redoubled his efforts to make some money without actually having to go out and get a day job. Pass-the-hat public readings had long been a source of easy coin. Brautigan had already read from Confederate General twice and searched for a place to showcase his latest work of fiction.
The Buzz gallery was an artists’ commune on Buchanan Street in Japantown. Founded the previous June by painters Paul Alexander (a Black Mountain alumnus), Bill Brodecky, and Larry Fagin, Buzz had been planned to run for only a single year, like King Ubu more than a decade before. George Stanley came up with the name. “We didn’t even want to use the word ‘gallery,’” Alexander said. “We just called it ‘Buzz,’ period. Of course, everyone always called it ‘Buzz Gallery’ anyway whether we did or not.”
The gallery provided a residence for the artists as well as a public exhibition space. Nemi Frost, Tom Field, Bill McNeill, Fran Herndon, Jess, Harry Jacobus, and Knute Stiles all exhibited there. Graham Mackintosh printed the announcements and posters. Most of these people were friends and colleagues of Jack Spicer’s, yet he was annoyed by the gallery’s name, feeling it had been filched from one of his poems. (“I hear a banging on the door of night / Buzz, buzz; buzz, buzz; buzz / If you open the door does it let in light? / Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz; buzz, buzzz.”) Spicer avoided the place like the plague.
Richard Brautigan read all of In Watermelon Sugar at Buzz in two parts on two consecutive Saturday nights in July. Don Carpenter was among those attending on both evenings. “Everybody was packed in this little place while Richard read in the most monotonous voice in history.” Carpenter remembered seeing Don Allen, Jack Boyce, Joanne Kyger, and Bob Creeley in attendance. Kyger recalled Tom Parkinson laughing “in all the wrong places.”
Although he felt “a lot of people were bored by it,” Don was “fascinated by what [Brautigan] could do with these few words and ideas.” On the way out of the second reading, Carpenter asked Richard how many words he had used in his novel. “You used very few words,” Don said. “You only used a couple of hundred words in that whole book.”
“His eyes lit up, and he gave me a big hug,” Carpenter remembered. “I was the only one that had caught on that he was writing with an extraordinarily limited vocabulary.”
Earlier in the spring, Richard had begun work on a novel about his grandmother, “Moonshine Bess.” The idea came to him from an unfinished short story he called “Those Great American Dogs.” (“I’m thirty years old and live in America and it’s too late for me to do anything else now, so American dogs, look at my life. Maybe you can see something I can’t see.”) In this tale, Brautigan started to chronicle the lives of various canines he’d had as childhood pets. He ran out of steam after only three pages, concentrating mainly on the escapades of Pluto (left unnamed in the story but described as a “classic american hobo no-good dog”). Brautigan also described four other dogs, including the German shepherd he smeared with fecal matter when he was two years old.
Brautigan started a new story about his grandmother’s dog. He first called it “Mark: A 1920s Dog,” later amending it to “Mark: A 1930s Dog,” and finally just “Mark.” Richard began again and again, reworking the first paragraph many times but always using the same opening line, “I guess the only dog I ever loved was Mark, a 1930s American dog.” The story described how the big good-hearted police dog died painfully but with great dignity in 1937 when a neighbor lady fed him ground glass. The grandmother responded by pouring kerosene in her neighbor’s basement and burning down her house. Arriving at 2:00 AM, when the house was almost gone, the firemen stood around looking sleepy. “‘We can’t be everywhere at once,’ the fire cheir [sic] said.” Brautigan pasted a circular photograph of Mark, taken by his grandmother in 1933, at the head of the story.
Richard expanded his dog tale into a novel. Both Trout Fishing in America and A Confederate General from Big Sur began as sequences of short stories. He quickly came up with a working title, Revenge of the Lawn, and drafted an outline of possible chapters. “Mark” was to be chapter one. The second would be called “The Family Tree: the history of the family as related to the pear tree in the front yard. It is a rather strange and weird American family. Perhaps the photograph of a pear tree would be nice.”
Brautigan included several other theoretical chapters on his list. “The Neighbor: A very strange man with an unusual dog. The dog drinks trees. The Jewel: A history of the grandmother’s breast cancer. The Children: the children of the grandmother. Five girls, two boys. Both the boys die; one at 26, the other 16. The Classic 1930 Appetician [sic] Death: Coyote with comb, mirror and brush. An introduction [illegible] History of each child: this would be a chapter called four American children, and A history of the lawn, the house, the [illegible].”
Following a note, “The Indians that lived where the house was, write a chapter about them,” Brautigan listed these titles: “Indian Ghosts, Washington House Ghosts, The Ghosts belonging to my Grandfather and Fueds [sic] and Feats among the Ghosts.” The final two entries on his list were “Chocolate Cake: A flashback chapter to the Grandfather watching his mother bake a Chocolate Cake, and The Magic Power of the Lawn.”
Richard slipped the nine pages of manuscript and his outline into a manila envelope he marked “New Novel/Notes” and addressed it to Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books. He included a short note: “Lawrence, Give me a jingle on the electric telephone when you are through reading this. 567-2293 Richard.” Brautigan never mailed this to Ferlinghetti. The envelope remained in his personal archive until his death.
After completing his outline, Richard incorporated several elements from various suggested chapters into a single long short story. He borrowed from his memories of family history: his grandmother Moonshine Bess, her lover Frank Campana and his fear of bees, the pear tree, and the lawn. He started the story with the lines, “My grandmother, in her own way, shines like a beacon down the stormy American past. She was a bootlegger in a little county up in the state of Washington.” By Brautigan’s standards, it became an expansive work. He called the piece “Revenge of the Lawn,” a title originally intended for the novel in which the story was to be a single chapter. There was a psychic sea change simmering in the American unconscious throughout 1965. The baby boom, a vast population bubble recently come of age, sought enlightenment through mind-altering substances, experimenting with marijuana, mescaline, and LSD. United by rock and roll and postwar prosperity, agitated by the Civil Rights and Free Speech movements, inspired by Beat poets and Eastern mysticism, the Pepsi Generation awakened to a perceived sense of community young people had never known before.
In 1965, lysergic acid diethylamide was still legal and mostly unknown to the public at large in spite of active proselytizing by several charismatic prophets. Timothy Leary, a psychology professor at Harvard, began experimenting with psilocybin and LSD five years earlier, along with his colleague Richard Alpert (later known as Baba Ram Dass). Both were fired by the university in 1963. Leary cofounded a magazine, the Psychedelic Review, devoted to experimental drug use and set up shop as the Castalia Foundation in a huge gingerbread mansion on a 2,500 acre Hudson River property at Millbrook, New York, the family estate of a turned-on stockbroker named Billy Hitchcock.
Ken Kesey got his first hit of “acid” (his own terminology) courtesy of the CIA as a paid research subject in one of the Company’s clandestine spook projects. “Just say, thank you,” Kesey always maintained regarding drugs. These experiments took place in a veteran’s hospital, and Kesey used some of his experience working there as the background for his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The book was a huge success, and Kesey bought a six-acre retreat in La Honda, in the hills above Palo Alto, California, where the writer and a bunch of friends calling themselves the Merry Pranksters dropped acid, painted their faces with Day-Glo colors, and “freaked freely” in the surrounding woods. Kesey invited the Hells Angels to one of his psychedelic shindigs, turning the wild motorcycle outlaws on to LSD.
Leary and Alpert had recently published The Psychedelic Experience, an LSD user manual based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Millbrook approach to acid-dropping was Eastern: controlled, meditative, Zen-like. By contrast, the Pranksters were Wild West daredevils with a shoot-from-the-hip, no-holds-barred attitude regarding drug use.
In March 1965, Lyndon Johnson launched Operation Rolling Thunder, the U.S. bombing campaign in North Vietnam and sent the Marines to Danang. In July, LBJ ordered a military buildup that would lead to 185,000 pairs of American boots on the ground in Nam by the end of the year. On October 15, the country’s largest antiwar protest took place in Berkeley. Fourteen thousand demonstrators listened to speeches by Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Kay Boyle, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, marching to the jug-band beat of “Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” a tune by Joe McDonald (the demonstration’s musical director) and his band, Country Joe and the Fish.
For those on the vagabond fringes of society, 1965 remained a blissful time. The media had to lost interest in “beatniks” and had yet to turn their voracious attention on the new bohemians soon be labeled “hippies.” The Beats, who borrowed a good deal of their lingo from the world of black jazz musicians, found it cool to be “hip” or “hep” (as in hep cat) while a “hippy,” or “hippy-dippy,” was a pretender, some ofay square wannabe without a clue.
Richard Brautigan, who had rejected a beatnik label, would soon find himself in the curious position of being one of the godfathers of the hippie movement. He continued his life as an impoverished artist, his appearance and dress as much a matter of necessity as style. Richard was not immune to the social changes gradually transforming America. Smoking marijuana had emerged from the shadows of seedy basement jazz clubs into a fresh-faced collegiate environment, rivaling beer as the campus intoxicant of choice. Brautigan occasionally shared a joint or two with friends during this period.
Richard and Janice spent frequent evenings over at the Webers’ apartment on Geary, getting high and shooting darts. Often, they played all night. “We had a real English dart board,” Erik recalled. Brautigan “was really good. I don’t think I ever beat him. He was tall and long, and he could kind of reach out and just set the dart in.” Pot smoking was a novelty for all of them. One evening, they “got stoned and for something to do we went to Sears, which was across the street.”
The happy trio roamed the aisles of the Sears, Roebuck depot on Geary, gawking at the mountainous excess of American consumerism. Attracted by the jewel-like glitter of a button display, Erik and Janice worked their way back to the fabric department, where buttons of all sizes, shapes, and colors were housed in a cabinet crowded with tiny drawers. They began rummaging through them, stoned treasure-hunters marveling over the enchanted baubles. “Janice and I had these buttons all over the place, and Richard’s standing up, just frozen and afraid,” Erik remembered. “He got very upset that we were acting like this, and he was sure that we were going to get caught, sure that something was going to happen to us.” In the end, Brautigan’s paranoia got the best of them and they fled the store before being spotted.
Richard’s fears were justified. Back in April, armed with a search warrant, eighteen officers from the sheriff’s department crossed the narrow footbridge over La Honda creek onto Ken Kesey’s property and busted the famous author for possession of marijuana, a felony beef that made all the papers and provided a lively topic of conversation among the literary community. Everyone buzzed about whether Kesey was jailhouse bound.
Financing his bohemian life by writing fiction remained a precarious proposition for Brautigan. Along with the tales of Moonshine Bess he hoped to shape into a new novel, Richard worked on other short stories while still trying to place portions of his first three books with perio
dicals. On the same day, early in June, he wrote three letters to magazines. He requested that Ramparts and the Partisan Review return his novels if they didn’t plan on publishing selections from them and asked Charles Newman if he would be interested in considering some of his recent work for TriQuarterly.
For a loner, Richard maintained a wide circle of friends. After putting in his hours at the typewriter, he embarked on an active social life, always open to the possibility of meeting new and interesting people. A recent friend from this period was actor/poet Jack Thibeau, who had worked as a merchant seaman following a stint in the Marines. Three days after getting off a ship in Frisco, Thibeau walked into a rehearsal for Frank Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box (he knew the woman playing Lulu) and promptly landed the part of Jack the Ripper. At the time, Jack lived in a cheap hotel behind the opera house. With the Civic Center as his backyard, Thibeau began spending time at the main library. One afternoon, he met an attractive librarian named Ann Kincaid. They struck up a conversation, and she invited Jack to lunch. “We started hanging around together, and she took me down to Gino & Carlo’s and introduced me to Jack Boyce.” It wasn’t long before he met Jack Spicer there.
Thibeau remembered Gino & Carlo’s as “sort of a salon every Friday night of poets and musicians and painters and longshoremen.” Jack Spicer held court over round after round of drinks. One Friday night, he introduced Thibeau to Richard Brautigan. Around that time, Thibeau needed to find better digs than his $5-a-week hotel, and Jack Boyce brought him back to a big Victorian house on Lyon Street where he lived with Joanne Kyger. The place served as an informal commune and housed a number of transient refugees from Black Mountain. The rent was $125 a month, not a very large sum when shared by all the residents. At one time or another, these included Kyger and Boyce, Lew Welch, Bill McNeill (a Black Mountain painter), and a young artist/filmmaker named Ken Botto, who lived in the garret and used the two front rooms downstairs as his painting studio.
Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan Page 44