Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  The ninth of the twenty-three writers to submit manuscripts was Richard Brautigan. Richard described himself this way: “The author was tall and blond and had a long yellow mustache that gave him an anachronistic appearance. He looked as if he’d be more at home in another era.” The novel Brautigan brought in was called MOOSE. “‘Just another book,’ he said.”

  While working on The Abortion, Brautigan plugged away at a task he found distasteful, sending out letters of inquiry to editors and agents. “Falling stars,” he called these mercenary missives. Don Carpenter, whose first novel, Hard Rain Falling, was published by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1966, had recommended Richard to his Hollywood agent, the legendary H. N. Swanson. Known to everyone as “Swanee,” the cultured ten-percenter numbered Hemingway, Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, J. R. R. Tolkien, Ross Macdonald, and Agatha Christie among his many illustrious clients. Once, when asked what form of writing was the most profitable, Swanson replied, “Ransom notes.”

  Don suggested to “Swanee” that A Confederate General from Big Sur might make an interesting project for Richard Lester, a director currently red-hot from his recent successes with the two Beatles films, Help! and A Hard Day’s Night. Brautigan immediately sent a copy of his novel to Swanson’s Sunset Boulevard office, mentioning conversations with Zekial Marko, who had “a strong interest” in Confederate General and “a good idea for a screenplay.”

  Early in April, Peter Desbarats, editor in chief of Parallel, a Canadian magazine published in Montreal, wrote to say that of the three stories Brautigan had submitted, he found “The Wild Birds of Heaven” to be “a blessed if brief deliverance [. . .] from all the muddled words and confused thoughts that silt down on my desk every day.” He wanted to use the story in his summer (July/ August) issue and offered $125 (U.S.) for the first serial rights. This was welcome news.

  As was a letter from H. N. Swanson later in the month. “Swanee” had read Confederate General and “found it highly amusing.” Although he thought “the market for this type of book [. . .] rather limited,” he wanted to try and sell it and asked Brautigan to send him more copies of the Grove edition. He inquired about Richard’s other novels, including the work in progress. As Richard had included no return address, Swanson sent his letter in care of Don Carpenter.

  Brautigan knew his days on California Street were numbered. In April, he dined twice without Janice at Andrew Hoyem’s apartment overlooking Golden Gate Park’s Panhandle, a green tree-lined strip eight blocks long and one block wide, running between Baker and Stanyan Streets. One occasion was a formal sit-down affair featuring fricasseed hare. Awaiting the inevitable, Richard plugged away on his novel and tended other unfinished business. He sent H. N. Swanson five copies of Confederate General, writing on the same day to Seymour Krim and to Sallie Ellsworth at the Partisan Review. The little literary magazine had held chapters from Trout Fishing for fourteen months without reaching an editorial consensus. Brautigan begged for an answer. “Please, pretty please with sugar on it, get me a decision on that stuff.”

  Early in May, Richard Brautigan read from his work at the Rhymers Club in Wheeler Hall on the Berkeley campus, opening the semester’s program. The organization, recently founded by Ron Loewinsohn; David Schaff, who once edited the Yale Literary Magazine; and graduate student/poet David Bromige (former editor of the Northwest Review), had published a single issue of RC Lion, their official mimeographed magazine. (“The Pretty Office,” a Brautigan short story, appeared in the second issue around the time of his University of California appearance.) Don Carpenter was among the audience for Richard’s Rhymers Club reading. Hearing “Revenge of the Lawn” for the first time, he recalled, “I laughed so loud I literally fell off my chair. Right there in public.” Andy Hoyem was also present for the occasion. Hoyem made no mention in his daily journal entry of seeing Janice there.

  The final breakup came four days later when Richard moved out, taking refuge in Hoyem’s second-floor apartment at 1652 Fell Street. For all of the emotional pain involved, the transition occurred without incident. Accustomed to a Spartan life, Brautigan traveled light and made himself at home with a minimum of effort. Space for his typewriter and a place to crash were all he required.

  Richard found an ideal roommate in Andy Hoyem, who thought at the time that his friend was only coming to stay for a week or so. A fine poet in his own right, the South Dakota–born Hoyem had graduated from Pomona, served in the U.S. Navy, and worked with Dave Haselwood at the Auerhahn Press, learning the craft of printing using hand-set type. He had recently entered into a partnership with Robert Grabhorn, “the consummate fine press printers in the country at that time,” forming the Grabhorn-Hoyem Press. A busy workday schedule kept him at the print shop for long hours, leaving Richard plenty of solitary uninterrupted writing space back at the apartment.

  Brautigan made good use of this time. He labored over the growing novel, transforming twenty-one pages of typewritten notes into many short cogent chapters. Everything went in, all the mundane details of the PSA flight, his dislike of San Diego, the old Mexican at the Greyhound station carrying his possessions in a Hunt’s tomato sauce box, the Tijuana Woolworth’s display window crammed with Easter bunnies and candy eggs, a middle-aged platinum-haired woman wearing a mink coat in the airport café. From these random observed details Richard wove the fabric of his inspired fantasy.

  It wasn’t all work and no play at the Fell Street digs. Hoyem greatly enjoyed Brautigan’s presence and took much pleasure in their witty literary conversations. He thought their time together “was good for both of us.” Near the end of May, the two friends hosted a party celebrating the shared birthdays of nineteenth-century French proto-symbolist poet Gérard de Nerval and Robert Grabhorn, who was turning sixty-six. Hoyem had published a translation of de Nerval’s Les Chimères that year. The two poets mailed out printed letterpress invitations. Jane Rades supplied an elaborately decorated cake, which the guests devoured while sipping punch à l’Aiglon, a Grabhorn recipe featuring Napoleon brandy. The master printer was a connoisseur of obscure beverage concoctions concealing a lethal kick.

  Hangovers rarely deterred Richard Brautigan, and no matter how much of Grabhorn’s insidious punch he had imbibed the night before, he most certainly was back hard at work on his novel the morning after the party. His steady approach paid off. Four days later, after six weeks at the Fell Street apartment, Richard finished a draft of The Abortion. Andrew Hoyem was the first person, other than the author, to read the manuscript. He thought the book “very good, going from allegory to reality, to harsh reality.” With the completion of his fourth novel, Brautigan capped one of the most remarkable creative streaks in American literature. Four utterly unique books in five years of work, together with innumerable poems and a distinguished group of short stories, not bad for a country boy come to town with his apple-picking money. Richard Brautigan did not write another novel for eight years.

  twenty-three: the museum

  FROM 1966 TO 1975, Richard Brautigan occupied a shabby apartment at 2546 Geary Boulevard, near Kaiser Medical Center. No one in Frisco ever referred to it as a boulevard, and Brautigan always wrote Geary Street as his address. The decrepit two-story wooden building stood in the middle of a block across from the Sears depot and just up from the Cable Car Drive-in, a greasy spoon on the corner that reminded Ianthe of a little red caboose. The front windows of the first-floor apartment looked out on the tunnel where Geary cuts through the hill from Presidio to Masonic. When he moved in Richard’s rent was $45 a month.

  Richard first heard about the place from Erik Weber, who lived in the house next door. In the summer of 1966, the current tenant, a painter named Ori Sherman, planned on leaving for a year and a half to travel around the world. There was no lease, and he wanted someone to “sublet” the apartment, holding it for him until he got back. Erik and Loie Weber suggested Richard. Near the end of June, Brautigan moved out of Andy Hoyem’s place on Fell Street and came to stay. When Ori Sherman r
eturned from his Wanderjahr, Brautigan refused to leave, citing squatter’s rights. “Richard was not giving up that apartment,” Loie remembered. “Ori was upset. He was angry, but that was the way it was.”

  On the afternoon before moving day, Brautigan had lunch with Robert Grabhorn whose press had proofed his manuscript of The Abortion. Andrew Hoyem and his wife, Sally, joined them. Afterward they celebrated with Pimm’s Cup on the terrace at Enrico’s and more drinks in the open arched window at the Condor (home of topless silicone-enhanced Carol Doda), on the corner of Broadway and Columbus. It was warm and clear, perfect for celebrity watching. “Bob Grabhorn panhandled seventy cents out of Allen Ginsberg,” Hoyem recalled.

  The evening ended in high good spirits at the Fillmore. They were entertained by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, along with Lenny Bruce, in his final public appearance. Hoyem deemed the comedian’s performance “lousy.” A month later, Bruce (age forty) died of a morphine overdose in the bathroom of his Hollywood home.

  Loie Weber thought of Brautigan as a friend who lived next door. “He was just this oddball character.” Nearly ten years younger, Loie found herself drawn to Richard in a maternal way. “I felt his fragility and his vulnerability and how easily hurt he was. How sensitive he was.” Right from the start, she did small favors for him. Not long after moving in, Richard, late for an appointment, asked Loie if she would leave a note on his door for his friend Frank Curtin, who had planned to stop by and read his new novel. She quickly jotted down a simple message. “Frank: come on in—read novel—it’s on table in front room. I’ll be back in about 2 hours. Richard.” Loie pinned the scrap of paper to Brautigan’s front door and thought nothing more about it. When Richard returned home the note still hung there, another piece of found art. He took the paper slip into his new writing room, typed up Loie’s words verbatim, and made them the dedication to The Abortion.

  Over the years, Brautigan, never before sentimental about material things, began to fill the cheap apartment with mementos and curious souvenirs. “You know what happens to artists,” the photographer Edmund Shea observed, “they become archivists of themselves.” Among Brautigan’s bizarre trophies were a rusting Nambu light machine gun, a quilted fish, an old-fashioned car horn (with a rubber squeeze bulb) hanging by the unused marble fireplace, a U.S. Army manual on trout fishing, several gold ore rocks from the Great American River on the mantelpiece beside his square inch of Texas and a certificate naming Brautigan an honorary Texas colonel. A laurel leaf crown fashioned by Margot Patterson Doss hung nearby. (Richard came to dinner to celebrate the publication of a new book one day when Margot had been picking bay laurel. She wove the crown for him, and he wore it all evening.)

  Loie Weber recognized the mythic importance these objects held for Brautigan. “He assiduously worked at creating his own style, his conscious creation of that apartment as a museum to the current culture then. He would just talk about every artifact. He loved it. The idea of it.”

  Richard’s oddest knickknack was a can of poisoned soup. Kenn Davis remembered a time either in ’67 or ’68 when botulism turned up in canned soup and San Francisco found itself in the grip of a health scare. Brautigan searched through supermarkets until he “found a can of this stuff with the proper identification numbers on the bottom that said, in effect, if you eat this you will die.” He positioned the can in a place of honor on a shelf in his kitchen. Whenever friends came over, he’d point it out and say, “Look, killer soup.”

  Don Carpenter described Richard Brautigan’s dreary apartment as “right out of Charles Addams.” The spooky aspects he observed included the ritualistic makeup of his friend’s antique brass bed, purchased around 1969, when Richard first began earning serious money. “Had a patchwork quilt on it, and he would lay out this calfskin, rawhide up, orange colored, and on top of that he would place these rocks.”

  Edmund Shea remembered Richard’s “brass bed with this weird arrangement he had on the top of it.” The bed was covered by a buffalo hide spread weighted down with totem objects. Ianthe wrote of this as “my father’s idea of a Buddhist shrine.” Sherry Vetter recalled “that little setup on the bed,” quartz rocks rescued from fishing streams, a marble, and “a little metal toy of some kind.” She also remembered a daily ritual. “When you got out of bed and you made the bed, you had to put these things back where they were.”

  From Don Carpenter’s perspective, the ritual enlarged to include the entire apartment. Whenever Richard left the place, “I would go outside and stand on the porch and wait, and he would come out and say, ‘Wait a second.’ He’d go back in the apartment, and I’d follow him back in, and he’d be doing exactly the same routine, checking out every rock in the place, going through the kitchen, making sure the kitchen was okay.”

  Richard Brautigan’s apartment provided sanctuary from the outside world, and his writing room was the Inner Sanctum. He worked in a tiny chamber off the main hallway. To Loie Weber, the room seemed like a cave. “It was so dark and dreary, totally unappealing.” The place was a cluttered mess. Keith Abbott referred to it as “that den of debris.” A torn blue bedspread screened the nondescript view out the window. Light came from a bare bulb hanging by frayed cord.

  A secondhand dining table, surrounded by cardboard cartons stuffed with magazines and miscellaneous papers, served as Brautigan’s desk. A squat tan IBM electric typewriter sat square in the middle, all other available space taken up by piles of books and manuscripts. Keith Abbott claimed this “was the one room that few were ever invited in.” A notable exception was Richard’s daughter, who slept here on “a special little bed” when she stayed overnight. Because she was afraid of the dark, her father always left the hall light on for her.

  In the front room/bedroom, the top two shelves of the recessed built-in bookcase, “curiously dust-free” according to his daughter, contained copies of Brautigan’s own books as well as the work of various friends. Volumes by Robert Creeley and Roxy Gordon (the authors’ photos decorating their front covers) stood facing forward like family portraits. The bottom shelf held a few records, his dial telephone, and a stereo system. On the shelf above, Brautigan displayed rusting keys; an old wire-bound seltzer bottle; many shells, rocks, and feathers; an open dragon-shaped switchblade wrapped in a rosary; a scrap of gold lamé (a gift from Janis Joplin); a card reading “You have been assisted by a member of the Hells Angels”; a strand of barbed wire; and a tooled leather plaque with embossed lettering: “Oh, Flap City. Oh, those leather wings.” According to Keith Abbott, this was a spontaneous Brautigan quip often quoted by Lew Welch. The rest of it went, “I didn’t get your cherry, and I don’t want your prune.” Welch later titled his series of absurd plays Leather Prunes, delighting Richard.

  In the opposite corner, a high-backed Gothic chair occupied a place of honor like a throne. The carved spiraling legs and fading woven upholstery made young Ianthe think of it as “the scary chair,” from a haunted house. No one ever sat in this chair. It was reserved for Willard, a three-foot-tall papier-mâché sculpture of an exotic bird. Vividly painted, with absurd round eyes, an enormous beak, long skinny legs, and a belly like a bowling ball, Willard occupied an active place in Richard’s fantasy life for years.

  The other large art piece in the room was a “collage” by Bruce Conner, who was the first to dub Richard’s cluttered apartment The Museum. “When I first walked in there,” Conner said, “it was as if I were walking into one of my collages.” He later gave Brautigan a wooden stepladder painted black with a hanging row of small red pompons tacked along the front edge of each step. The ladder stood at the foot of the brass bed. In many ways, it remained a work in progress. Richard used the ladder as a showcase for “sacred” objects, notably a copy of William Goldman’s shooting script for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, one of his favorite movies.

  Bruce Conner recalled another modification. “There was one of those little red pompons with red string that had fallen off, and I noticed that ther
e was an empty glass that the secretary [Loie Weber] had been drinking, a tall sort of cocktail glass type thing that was empty, except there was the red lipstick of the lips on it, and I put it over on the step of the ladder with this little pompon with a string which looked like a maraschino cherry with a stem and put it in there, and I told them, ‘Leave this here. This is part of the work.’ I felt it was appropriate, a sort of commentary on Richard and his drinking and his girlfriends and his ladder and everything else. But when I was there again, the little pompon was there but the glass was gone.”

  Conner considered the apartment “a classic cold-water flat,” yet told Brautigan that he wanted the place as a painting studio should Richard ever decide to vacate the premises. “It was not one of the greatest places in the world,” Bruce recalled. “The bathtub had this sort of brownish-red water. The pipes were so rusted and calcified that it would take about forty-five minutes to fill about six inches of water in the tub, a kind of reddish muddy lump, not very hot at all.” This didn’t matter as Conner had no plans to bathe in his new studio. Richard told Bruce that when he left “he was going to move out immediately.” Conner would have to get hold of the landlord right away. As it happened, Bruce had the flu when he got word that Richard was leaving. He couldn’t get out of bed for three or four days and felt this cost him his shot at Geary Street.

  Brautigan eventually moved out of the Museum in December of 1974 because the landlord informed him that the building was going to be torn down and all future repairs would now be his responsibility. Richard packed up his eccentric treasures. With the help of Keith Abbott and the trusty old Chevy pickup, everything went out the door, Bruce Conner’s stepladder collage included. After Brautigan’s death, Ianthe gave the stepladder to Tony Dingman, who later passed it along to actor/photographer Dennis Hopper. Conner remembered seeing the piece at Hopper’s place in Los Angeles. “I didn’t realize he had it. Dennis was really mystified as to why.”