Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  After buying the Bolinas house in 1972, Brautigan commissioned Erik Weber to photograph the Museum. “He said to me, ‘Erik, I want you to come and document the apartment. I want you to document everything in it.” Weber ended up shooting twelve or thirteen rolls of film. He took pictures from every conceivable angle. Exteriors of the building, front, back, and both sides. Long shots down the narrow hallway. Wide angles of the front room and kitchen. Close-ups of just about everything.

  Weber found it a bit peculiar. “He said, ‘Erik, I don’t want anybody to see these photographs. Nobody to see these while I’m alive.’ It is kind of strange to think about. He had me go around and photograph, complete coverage of the place. No one was to see them. And no one did see them. I just left them as contact sheets.”

  Ianthe Brautigan felt “everything changed” once her father left Geary Street for good. In her memoir, she wrote, “Sometimes I fantasize that if he had never moved, he wouldn’t have killed himself. He could have holed up there with his cheap rent and continued his life.” Keith Abbott interpreted the move as Richard’s need to disengage from his old life once he encountered wealth and fame. Leaving a shabby slum for a newly remodeled apartment at 314 Union Street, on the slope of Telegraph Hill above Washington Square, meant stepping up in the world. Over the years Brautigan lived in the Museum, his rent rose to $75 a month. The new apartment’s $365 monthly rate, close to a five-fold increase, represented a dramatic measure of his improving status.

  “In his dank apartment the anachronism of Richard’s hippie past was all too evident,” Abbott wrote. “Young and eager acolytes had passed through, leaving their gifts. A stuffed cloth trout, naive childish calendars, and a handmade quilt for his brass bed were still there, along with mimeo Digger Dollars and ‘God’s eyes.’” Brautigan never abandoned any of these things. He packed it all in boxes and took it with him after Erik Weber photographed every last detail for some unknown posterity.

  Brautigan’s departure from the Museum was more gradual than any implied break with the past. Richard had not lived full-time in the Geary Street apartment for years. Toward the end of 1960s, he began keeping company with a number of beautiful, intelligent, self-sufficient women who all had attractive homes of their own. Marcia Pacaud’s apartment in Sausalito and Valerie Estes’s flat at 1429 Kearny in North Beach were in every way more pleasant places than the Museum. As Keith Abbott recalled about Geary Street, “his dump became a priest hole for him, used only for writing and time away from his social life.”

  A lingering nostalgia for the Museum haunted Brautigan long after he departed. In March 1979, a little more than a year after his marriage to Akiko Sakagami, Richard moved to a grand Pacific Heights apartment on Green Street. It was a long way from Gino & Carlo’s dive on the same thoroughfare in North Beach. Showing Keith Abbott around the huge sunlit place, Brautigan indicated a spacious closet situated at the top of the stairs. “In the old days,” he said, “that would have been my writing room. I probably wrote better without a view.”

  twenty-four: the emperor’s new clothes

  SAN FRANCISCO HAS always been fond of eccentric behavior. Back in the 1860s, Bummer and Lazarus, a pair of mangy mongrel mutts, had the run of the city, roaming freely through the streets, welcomed in all the eating and drinking establishments along the red-light district known as the Barbary Coast, where the pampered canines received ample handouts from every burly apron-wrapped proprietor. Tough men who’d slip their mothers a Mickey and shanghai their own brothers wept when the dogs died (Lazarus in October 1863; Bummer, two years later, November 1865). Huge crowds followed their funeral processions through the streets of town, and a public monument was eventually raised in their honor.

  The most renowned San Francisco eccentric was Joshua A. Norton, a British-born businessman who arrived in the city with the forty-niners, prospered for a time, and suffered a mental breakdown after his financial affairs collapsed. Following a long absence from Frisco, he returned in 1857, convinced he was of royal birth and proclaiming himself Norton I, emperor of the United States and protector of Mexico. The city happily went along with this curious charade, San Franciscans tipping their hats as the Emperor Norton walked the streets in his shabby uniform, plumed top hat, and tarnished epaulettes. In those early days, his majesty was often accompanied on his daily perambulations by Bummer and Lazarus, who became his constant companions.

  Norton I issued numerous proclamations over the years, which the local newspapers duly reported with their journalistic tongues firmly in cheek. Two of Norton’s decrees were nearly a century ahead of his time. He proposed dumping landfill in the shoals off Yerba Buena Island to create a manmade island there. Another Norton idea called for building a bridge from Oakland to San Francisco by way of Yerba Buena Island. Considered zany at the time, both projects (Treasure Island and the Bay Bridge) have since come to pass. An edict ordering the city to erect a Christmas tree for children in Union Square every holiday season remains in effect today.

  A friendly print shop produced the Emperor’s spurious currency, which was honored by all the area merchants. Free seats were reserved for him at first-night openings at every legitimate theater, and the audiences rose to their feet in honor when he entered. His imperial majesty was also welcomed in Sacramento, where he would occasionally address the state legislature. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors amended the city charter to grant Norton I a lifetime allowance so that he need not appear in public wearing a tattered uniform. The Emperor ruled magnanimously, handing out free candy to children and worshipping at both Jewish and Christian services to promote religious tolerance. When he died in 1880, after a twenty-one-year reign, ten thousand “loyal subjects” turned out to mourn Norton I, filing past the ornate rosewood casket where his body lay in state. The citizens of Frisco truly loved their mad monarch.

  Artists are often eccentrics by nature, and many of San Francisco’s more peculiar citizens came from the ranks of the city’s literary population. Wild-bearded as an Old Testament prophet, poet Joaquin Miller (born Cincinnatus Hiner Miller in 1837) claimed to be a former Pony Express rider and costumed himself like some outrageous dime-novel hero in jingling spurs, high boots, broad-brimmed sombrero, and a flowing kerchief. Gelett Burgess, in contrast, dressed like an Edwardian dandy, wrote of purple cows, coined the word “blurb,” and was fired from his teaching position (topographical drawing) at UC Berkeley for toppling a cast-iron statue of the equally eccentric teetotaling dentist Dr. Henry Cogswell after an all-night revel.

  Memorialized by a tiled bench in Ina Coolbrith Park, atop Russian Hill not far from where Burgess lived, George Sterling, “Pagliaccio of the Water Lilies,” Greek-profiled protégé of bitter Ambrose Bierce, cut a wide swath through the bohemian exuberance of the early twentieth century. Once, he stripped off his clothing and dove into a moonlit lake in Golden Gate Park to pick a water lily for a female friend. Stirling’s boon companion, Jack London, began his career at sixteen as the “Prince of the Oyster Pirates,” sailing his sloop Razzle Dazzle on late-night raiding voyages into the oyster beds of the Bay. He later worked in a jute mill, shipped on sealing expeditions off Siberia, marched with Coxey’s army of the unemployed, served a stretch in the Erie County penitentiary, and joined the Klondike gold rush of 1897. All these adventures transpired before he was twenty-two and started writing in earnest.

  Richard Brautigan became a natural heir to Frisco’s tradition of artistic eccentricity. In tandem with the sixties penchant for dressing up (Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and their outlandish comic book costumes, rainbowed Jimi Hendrix, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Tiny Tim, and Wavy Gravy), Brautigan evolved his own bizarre sartorial style. “Richard always dressed the same,” Michael McClure observed. “It was his style, and he wanted to change it as little as possible.” Also involved with his own image-making, McClure considered this an attempt to achieve “the exact style of ourselves.”

  In Loie Weber’s opinion, “Richard was a tragic rom
antic.” From her point of view, his sense of personal style grew out of that disposition. “He had this idealization, admiration for Hemingway,” she recalled. “He would periodically just talk about Hemingway. He had a real romantic investment in the lifestyle of Hemingway, the outdoorsman, the seeming he-man. He always talked about his life, image, style, being.” Brautigan instinctively understood the futility of imitating Ernest Hemingway’s lifestyle. He determined to create a style of his own, one that would indelibly identify him in a reader’s mind.

  Brautigan’s personal image evolved gradually throughout the early 1960s. The duffle coat and flat-brimmed hat he fancied at the start of the decade gave way by 1966 to his trademark apparel, pinstriped suit vest and strands of beads, the high-crowned Western hat and rimless glasses.

  Michael McClure described it: “Richard’s style was shabby—loose threads at the cuff, black pants faded to gray, an old mismatched vest, a navy pea-jacket, and later something like love beads around the neck.” The surplus store navy coat (made famous by Erik Weber’s cover photograph for Trout Fishing in America) was for cold weather, a not uncommon climatic occurrence in San Francisco. On milder days, Brautigan wore his pinback-studded vest and a turtleneck shirt, sometimes adding a secondhand suit jacket. “Like Baudelaire, Richard is a refined Dandy,” wrote McClure. “The impoverished Dandy dresses in the most carefully chosen stylish rags of no-style.”

  The Mime Troupe ushered in an era of acting out private fantasies in public. The ever-expanding psychedelic-street-people community gathering on Haight Street provided the perfect stage. Along with many of his literary contemporaries, Richard Brautigan gravitated toward the Hashbury. By early 1967, he started showing up in the neighborhood carrying a large shard of mirror. “Have a free look,” he told the passing hippies and tourists, holding up the broken mirror so they might study their reflections. “Know thyself!”

  Brautigan’s mirror came from a trash can full of broken fragments salvaged by the Diggers, who gave pieces to local street kids. “One of the things I liked most about Richard was that he was the real poet of the Diggers,” wrote Michael McClure. “He was often on Haight Street passing out papers from the Digger Communications Company [. . .] Richard was doing it because he believed in it.”

  Richard handed out mimeographed Digger leaflets to runaway flower children showing the location of the nearest VD clinic. He soon started giving away his own broadside poems on the streets of the city. Peter Cohon (who would change his last name to Coyote late in 1967), a Mime Troupe actor who had participated in numbers of free park productions, celebrated this Digger-inspired influence. “One had the sense that you were part of a community of extraordinary people,” he said. “And that you were with people that were winners and gifted and gilded and loyal, even though unrecognized. And so the fact that they would give their gifts away for nothing changed the whole perspective on what nothing was worth [. . .] everybody is giving their best for nothing, and it was better than what you could buy.”

  Brautigan’s poetry handouts led to his most fanciful and elegant publishing project, Please Plant This Book, a glossy cardboard folder containing eight seed packets, each with a poem printed on one side and planting instructions on the other. Michael McClure thought it “a new image of the book” and “a true poetic act.” Brautigan gave them away for free, not just in the Haight but at locations all over Frisco. He stood on crowded downtown street corners in his distinctive hat like some homeless man distributing advertising flyers. “Plant this book,” he called to the anonymous passing strangers, holding out a copy as they hurried past. “Please, plant this book.” The Emperor Norton would have approved.

  twenty-five: digger daze

  “YOU NOBLE DIGGERS all, stand up now, stand up now, You noble Diggers all, stand up now.” These lines were written around 1650 by Gerrard Winstanley, an agrarian communist who, together with his comrade William Everard, assembled twenty poor spade-carrying farmers on St. George’s Hill, Surrey. Winstanley and Everard called their commune the Diggers. They proceeded to work the land, abjuring force, believing in “making the Earth a Common Treasury for All.” The Diggers saw no use for money, seeking instead to “neither buy nor sell.”

  Three hundred and fifteen years later, a group of Mime Troupers rekindled their utopian spirit in San Francisco. In August 1965, the San Francisco police descended on Lafayette Park and stopped the Mime Troupe’s public presentation of Giordano Bruno’s Il Candelaio in midperfor-mance. (The Italian Renaissance philosopher was himself a troublemaker, burned at the stake in 1600 on the orders of the Inquisition.) The play had been adapted from Bruno’s writings by former “Quiz Kid” Peter Berg, an intense young writer/director nicknamed “the Hun.” Described by a fellow Mime Trouper as “mercurial, charming, coercive, subliminally menacing and intellectually uncompromising,” Berg believed in a “guerrilla theater” transforming the audience from spectators into participants to create social change.

  The Mime Troupe’s director, R. G. (Ronnie) Davis, ignored the orders of the Recreation and Park Commission, which had revoked his group’s performance permit on the grounds of obscenity, and staged his show in the park on the scheduled date. Davis was arrested along with two of his actors. On May 2, 1966, the Mime Troupe, led by Davis and “dressed in a variety of costumes from minstrel to commedia,” crashed the first luncheon meeting of the newly created Arts Resources Development Committee at the Crown Zellerbach Building.

  Composed of “twenty-six prominent business people and civic leaders” and chaired by paper tycoon Harold Zellerbach, president of the Arts Commission, the committee advocated building a huge new cultural center in the center of town. Ronnie Davis read a manifesto to the gathered big shots protesting that no actual artists had been included in their organization. When Davis finished, Zellerbach ordered him and his motley crew to leave his building. Two days later, the annual awards from the Hotel Tax Publicity and Advertising Fund were announced by the city’s chief administrative officer. The Mime Troupe, which had received $2,000 over the past two years, was cut off “without a dime.”

  The following week, over one hundred San Francisco performers, poets, artists, and writers gathered in the Mime Troupe’s Howard Street loft to form a “poor man’s art commission.” The group named itself the Artists Liberation Front, an overtly confrontational political gesture invoking the Communist insurgent National Liberation Front in Vietnam. This boisterous gathering came the day after Richard Brautigan moved into Andrew Hoyem’s Fell Street apartment. Richard became an active participant in many ALF functions in the months to come. The meeting was chaired by state assemblyman Willie Brown, who at this stage in his political career sported an Afro and colorful dashikis instead of the $3,000 Brioni suits he later came to favor.

  Present among the supportive college professors, architects, doctors, and lawyers were Mime Troupers Davis, Peter Berg, Peter Coyote, and a new recruit named Grogan, recently discharged from the Army, who had simplified his Catholic baptismal moniker from Eugene Leo Michael to Emmett. Lean and angular, his freckled face the map of Ireland, Emmett Grogan moved “through a room with the detached concentration of a shark.” In Peter Coyote’s excellent memoir of the period, Sleeping Where I Fall, Grogan was also described as having “developed a sense of drama in his bearing, his cupped cigarette, his smoky, hooded eyes, which declared him a man on the wrong side of the law, a man with a past, a man who would not be deterred.”

  Peter Coyote had invited poet Lenore Kandel to the meeting, and she arrived with her lover, William Fritsch (aka Sweet Willie Tumbleweed), “dressed, respectively, in bright red and cobalt blue leather Levi’s.” Having met at the East-West House, they made a charismatic couple, her long black braid and lustrous glowing skin complimenting his beveled Aztec features and no-nonsense macho presence. A year or so later, “Tumble,” a man who clearly expressed his fierce sense of honor in his poetry, became a member of the Hells Angels and roared off into violent karmic alternatives.
r />   Ralph Gleason covered the evening for the Chronicle, calling it “one of the most important events in San Francisco’s cultural history.” Mime Troupe member Barbara Wohl observed, “There were never more anarchists in the same room at the same time.” The Artists Liberation Front held its third organizational meeting at the Fillmore on the final day of May. Two weeks later, they met again at the Committee Theater. In mid-July the ALF staged a benefit at the Fillmore with Garry Goodrow of the Committee acting as emcee. Sopwith Camel and Bob Clark’s jazz group supplied the music. Allen Ginsberg read “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” a new poem. The Committee and the Mime Troupe performed. In his column three days later, Ralph Gleason described the event as “a Mardi Gras, a masked ball, with people in costumes, painted with designs, carrying plasticene banners through the audience while multi-colored liquid light projections played around them.”

  Freshly funded, the Artists Liberation Front continued meeting throughout the summer. At a press conference held in the band shell in Golden Gate Park in July, plans for a five-day arts festival in September were discussed. In August, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the ALF denounced Mayor John Shelley and the Arts Resources Development Committee. By September’s end, when the Front announced its plans for a series of public fairs in October, word about the happenings on Haight Street had spread through the psychedelic subculture. The Hashbury had become a magnet, attracting fresh arrivals daily. A new community developed overnight like a boomtown.

  Richard Brautigan quickly became a nonresident member of that gypsy population. Haight Street pulsed with the immediacy of the new. The Thelin brothers, Jay and Ron, opened the Psychedelic Shop on New Year’s Day, and by summer it had become a refuge and a gathering place, providing much the same community bulletin board service as City Lights did in North Beach. At first, Richard went over to the Hashbury to see his friends. Michael McClure had lived in the neighborhood for years. Keith Abbott, a new pal introduced to him by Price Dunn, shared a dingy apartment on Haight Street with his girlfriend, Lani. Although the 38 Geary bus ran every fifteen minutes, Richard almost always walked the twenty blocks from his new place to save the fifteen-cent fare. By the summer of 1966, the feeble trickle of Brautigan’s income dried up completely.