Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Michael Bowen and Allen Cohen watched the event from a vantage point on Clayton Street. The Oracle editors took pride in their achievement. Richard Alpert, Leary’s former colleague, came walking by, and Bowen waved him over to ask what he thought of it all. Alpert agreed that the rally was a great success. Allen Cohen suggested staging another similar gathering and wondered what Alpert would call it.

  “It’s just being,” Dick Alpert said. “Humans being. Being together.”

  “Yeah,” said Bowen. “It’s a Human Be-In.”

  Later that night, Bowen and Cohen elaborated on this notion in the “meditation room” at the rear of Bowen’s apartment. Plans began to coalesce for a huge public event, something way bigger than the Love-Pageant Rally, a “gathering of the tribes.” Over in Berkeley, Emmett Grogan and Billy Murcott appeared in a weeklong Mime Troupe coffeehouse production of In-Put, Out-Put, a one-act “comedy-farce” written and directed by Peter Berg. The short run ended about the same time as their unemployment checks. Dead broke, Grogan saw nothing “soulful about panhandling.” He resolved to find a way to improve their sorry situation while at the same time benefiting the common good.

  Billy Murcott owned a ’55 Ford station wagon, and the two men drove to the San Francisco Produce Market on the edge of town. In an hour’s time, Emmett’s fluent Italian and his experience as a kid in New York City working with an uncle who trucked wholesale produce in Greenwich Village resulted in a jalopy packed with crates of food. Back at Grogan’s apartment around eight in the morning, the pair transformed their haul, “tomatoes, turnips, green beans, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, onions, eggplant, squash, potatoes,” and fifty pounds of poultry parts into an enormous stew, using two purloined twenty-gallon milk cans as kettles.

  By early afternoon, Billy worked the street, handing out several hundred newly mimeographed leaflets: “FREE FOOD GOOD HOT STEW RIPE TOMATOES FRESH FRUIT BRING A BOWL AND SPOON TO THE PANHANDLE AT ASHBURY STREET 4PM 4PM 4PM 4PM 4PM FREE FOOD EVERYDAY FREE FOOD IT’S FREE BECAUSE IT’S YOURS! the diggers.”

  Billy and Emmett drove over to the Panhandle and set two steaming milk cans of stew and cartons of ripe tomatoes and fruit on the grass just before four, a block from where the Love Pageant revelers had frolicked. A hungry crowd of fifty stood around waiting, and an equal number soon showed up, tin bowls dangling from their belts. For the next week, Murcott and Grogan hustled wilted produce and day-old bread, boiled forty gallons of stew, and provided free food in the Panhandle every afternoon at four. This turned out to be very hard work as well as a brilliant bit of political street theater. Grogan and Murcott’s Mime Troupe compatriots all felt attracted to the project. Peter Berg loved the idea. “Try to keep it going for another week, if you can,” he enthused, “and you’ll really get your point across.”

  Volunteer help was soon on the way. A group of young women, some sharing a Clayton Street apartment with a large kitchen, offered to assume the cooking chores. Mime Troupers took over daily delivery of the food to the Panhandle in a yellow VW bus known throughout the neighborhood as the yellow submarine. Blessed with considerable charm and guile, Emmett Grogan continued rounding up the discarded produce every morning.

  Two weeks later, Berkeley’s left-of-center underground newspaper, the Barb, ran “a quasi-journalistic story” on the free Digger Feeds written by none other than Emmett Grogan, who signed himself “George Metevsky,” an allusion to George Metesky, the infamous “Mad Bomber” who terrorized New York City a decade earlier. About the same time, Billy Murcott “hustled some dough” and Grogan rented a one-story six-car garage on Page Street. The place was stacked inside with old window frames in various sizes. The Diggers nailed them to the wooden front of the garage and gave the establishment a name: the Free Frame of Reference.

  Murcott bolted four two-by-fours together, creating a thirteen-foot-square aperture taller than the former garage it leaned against. Painted a bright golden orange by Emmett Grogan and dubbed the “Frame of Reference,” the structure was carried over to the Panhandle every day at four o’clock and propped upright between twin oak trees. When the cans of food arrived, everyone waiting to eat had first to step through the frame before being served, all performers in an elaborate piece of street theater.

  Richard Brautigan began hanging out with Emmett Grogan and the Diggers. He took note of Grogan’s angry poetic broadsides, the audacious food program, and the opening of the Free Frame of Reference. From its inception, the Diggers’ free-for-all emporium became a magnet not just for the needy but also for anyone curious about the mechanics of social change.

  Abbie Hoffman visited, taking note of the Diggers’ tactics for his own later use in highly publicized political shenanigans. (In August the following year, Hoffman identified himself to the press as “a Digger” after throwing dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.) Allen Ginsberg showed up a bit later after the Free Frame relocated to Frederick Street, bringing Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. A group of young runaways chanted “You don’t turn us on!” at them.

  When Paul Krassner, irreverent editor of the Realist (the first true underground publication) came to Frisco, a visit to the Free Frame of Reference stood high on his itinerary. The store, like the food program, was a radical political statement. Everything in it was free. People took whatever they wanted. Whenever anyone asked who was in charge, the answer was always, “You are.” Ever the skeptic, Krassner maintained the free store was nothing more than old-fashioned “social work.” One of the Diggers told him to give Emmett Grogan ten bucks to see the difference. Nearly always broke himself, Paul offered up a sawbuck, and Grogan immediately set it on fire with his cigarette lighter.

  This sort of outrageous gesture tickled Richard Brautigan’s fancy. It wasn’t long before he established a strong connection with the revolutionary group. Keith Abbott was puzzled by his friend’s link to the Diggers. He wrote that their “anarchism attracted him the most, but he admired their public idealism, too.” Keith recalled a day when Brautigan asked to borrow both him and his truck to run a Digger errand. Richard regaled him with a story about “a socialite woman” who came by the Free Frame of Reference to make a donation. Brautigan pantomimed all the parts as he told Keith how the wealthy woman wrote a check and handed it to Emmett Grogan, who promptly tore it to pieces. Abbott learned later that Richard had not actually witnessed this event. “Typical of Richard’s involvement with the Diggers, which was fueled by equal parts of fantasy, idealism and self-promotion.”

  Brautigan needed Abbott’s truck to pick up a load of pants. When the Diggers wouldn’t take her check, the socialite asked what else she might provide. “Clothing,” Grogan told her. She arranged for a shipment of factory seconds to be delivered to her address. Richard and Keith drove to her palatial Jackson Street home and picked up the bulky garment cartons, trucking them to the Diggers’ free store. The goods didn’t last long. Keith Abbott remembered “the word got out on the street, the hustlers descended, and armloads of pants were hauled off, probably for resale in Golden Gate Park.”

  Jack Thibeau recalled visiting the Free Frame of Reference with Brautigan and Ianthe. They encountered a group of hippies carelessly throwing the free clothing around the store. Offhand remarks revealed the “shoppers” planned on taking the best of the donated goods over to the park and selling them to newly arrived runaways. “You know, Ianthe,” Brautigan told his daughter, “I don’t like these people because they don’t have any manners.”

  “He had a thing about manners,” Jack recalled.

  Richard was attracted to the Diggers as much by Emmett Grogan’s style and panache as the social causes he espoused. Grogan liked that Brautigan referred to his poems as “tidbits.” Their friendship developed at a time when Richard and Erik Weber “were pretty close.” Too poor to afford a television, Brautigan brought various members of the Diggers over to Weber’s place. Erik’s TV provided a big attraction for the Diggers. “They would always come over to watch t
hemselves on the news.”

  Price Dunn met Emmett Grogan at Richard’s Geary Street apartment. “I immediately recognized him for what he was,” Dunn recalled. “A real street-smart hustler, a con man—a real opportunist.” Price and Emmett were both larger-than-life figures, rival cocks in the barnyard, but the Confederate General “didn’t have anything much to say” on the occasion of their initial meeting. Price remained friendly and listened as Grogan outlined his utopian ideals, noting that Richard had fallen “under his spell.” Later, talking it over with Brautigan, Dunn maintained that the Digger philosophy was “totally contrary” to their shared values. How was it possible to get something for nothing? “You believe in work,” Price said to Richard, “and I do, too.”

  Early in October, at Don Carpenter’s suggestion, Richard Brautigan got in touch with Robert P. Mills, Don’s New York literary agent. He sent several reviews of Confederate General with a letter providing a career background. “If all three of the novels were published together as a single book it would give a better picture of what I’m trying to do,” he wrote. Mills responded immediately, impressed with the reviews. The agent promised a decision once he had read Richard’s manuscripts.

  Other correspondence involved Tom Clark and writer David Sandberg, who lived under the redwoods in Boulder Creek near Santa Cruz with his girlfriend, Phoebe. Sandberg, thought by some to be “suicidal,” owned a reputation as a consummate hustler. Once, he and a friend stripped an abandoned sports car and trucked the parts to San Francisco for resale. Another time, David and Phoebe convinced their parents back east that they planned on getting married in a traditional Jewish ceremony. Checks and gifts flowed in. It was all a ruse. The marriage never transpired.

  David Sandberg had edited a single issue of a mimeograph magazine called, variously, Or, O’er, Oar, or Awwrrrr and was “looking forward to getting 2 or three poems from [Brautigan] in my morning mail delight” for the forthcoming OR2. Richard, chagrined to find himself thirty-one years of age, sent a humorous poem he’d recently written about his nose growing older, along with two others. Sandberg connected with Richard’s work. Sometime in the fall he embarked on a project to republish The Galilee Hitch-Hiker, out of print for nearly a decade.

  Tom Clark wrote to say copies of Nice were on their way. Lawrence Bensky, editor of the Paris Review, (“he, too, is crazy, unfortunately”), sent back the chapters from Trout Fishing, and Clark wanted to print them in Spice, which he’d be editing “before long.” Richard thanked him and asked for the return of his manuscripts. Tom Clark’s magazine arrived the third week of November, and Richard mailed a copy to Janice, his final gift the story in it dedicated to her.

  October 20, one half hour after a prerecorded interview was broadcast over a local station, authorities spotted Ken Kesey in a bright red truck, heading south with the afternoon rush hour on the Bayshore Freeway. Apprehended after a chase (including “a brief run on foot”), Kesey soon got out on bail and announced his Halloween Acid Test Graduation would go on as scheduled. At the last minute, Bill Graham changed his mind, denying the Pranksters the use of Winterland for their festivities. Kesey scaled back his plans and held the graduation at the Calliope Warehouse, south of Market on Harriet Street. To Emmett Grogan, “after the hoopla died down” it didn’t amount to much more than a “by-invitation-only, private party [. . .] with a lot of booze and plenty of group analysis.”

  The Diggers threw a Halloween party of their own out on the streets, calling it Full Moon Public Celebration. They passed out fifteen hundred leaflets advertising the event and carried the wooden Frame of Reference over to the corner of Haight and Ashbury, where it leaned against a lamppost. The Digger women, Phyllis, Natural Suzanne, Nina, Sam, Judy, Mona, and Julie, made several dozen yellow three-inch wooden squares, passing them among a gathering crowd soon grown to six hundred. Look through the tiny aperture and change your reference point. Many wore the little frames on cords around their necks like medallions.

  The Mime Troupers showed up with two eight-foot puppets made by Roberto La Morticella, the stocky bearded sculptor who called himself La Mortadella. It took two men to manipulate each puppet. Grogan and Peter Berg, Brooks Butcher and Kent Minault worked the controls. Using the Frame of Reference as a makeshift proscenium, they performed a playlet called “Any Fool on the Street.” When the police arrived to break up the crowd, a disturbance ensued and five Diggers were arrested.

  The quintet (Grogan, Berg, Minault, Butcher, and La Mortadella) appeared before a judge on November 27, and the case was dismissed. On their way out, a newspaper photographer asked to take a picture on the Hall of Justice steps. The Mime Troopers all struck extravagant poses, hamming it up for the press. The next morning, the photo ran on the front page of the Chronicle. Emmett Grogan upstaged all the others, sauntering toward the lens, tweed cap at a rakish angle, cigarette dangling from his smirk, forefingers raised in the backward “V,” meaning “Up yours!”

  Another actor, Ronald Reagan, the former movie star, had been elected governor of California on the eighth of November. A week later, the Psych Shop got busted for pornography (Oracle editor Allen Cohen manning the cash register), and copies of Lenore Kandel’s book of poetry, The Love Book, were seized. While the case against Michael McClure’s The Beard moved sluggishly through the court system, the poet made music with an outlaw biker. “Freewheelin’ Frank” Reynolds, secretary of the Frisco Chapter of the Hells Angels, played harmonica. McClure whanged on his autoharp. He and Frank made the music scene with various groups around the Bay Area, while McClure wrote Reynolds’s as-told-to “autobiography.”

  Richard Brautigan sent a letter to Bob Sherrill at Esquire, telling him of McClure’s project. “I think the results of this collaboration will be very important [. . .]” Always quick to plug a pal, Richard called his friend “one of the finest poets and playwrights in America.” Michael’s autoharp playing challenged Brautigan to keep on writing songs of his own.

  Late one night early in November, a friend came over to Geary Street with a tape recorder and Richard sat down in front of the mike with his guitar to cut a few tracks for posterity. He wasn’t much on technique, tunelessly strumming the same three chords for every song. Brautigan’s lyrics possessed a blatant deadpan monotone banality. In a song about riding his horse “to the break in the road,” the third verse mournfully begins, “Only got half a horse now.” Another song consisted entirely of the word “Hello,” sung over and over.

  Here are the complete lyrics of two brief Brautigan songs: “Don’t touch what you can’t see or you might cease to be, / Look around the corner twice; / Turn the light on three times,” and “I’ve been in Idaho. / Drove one afternoon from Rocky Bar to Atlanta, / Had a piece of pie and some coffee / In a café in Atlanta, Idaho.”

  At times, Richard played for his friends. Joanne Kyger recalled a lengthy party over on Lyon Street at the home of painter Bill McNeill when Brautigan “strummed the guitar and made up very long and winding, aimless songs.”

  Among the listeners was Helen Adam, the Scottish-born poet whose work in the ballad form impressed Robert Duncan. She had published three books of poetry before moving to the United States in 1939. With her sister, Pat, she wrote The City Is Burning, a play adapted into the successful musical San Francisco’s Burning. “Oh, that one was lovely,” Helen Adam said as Richard came to the end of yet another monotone melody. “Can you play that one about grasses on the lawn again?” But the song was lost, an ephemeral bit of improvisation gone in the moment.

  Another evening, Keith Abbott remembered Joanne Kyger asking Brautigan, “Richard, whatever happened to your guitar?” Brautigan seemed “extremely embarrassed,” Abbott said, “and tried to shut Joanne up,” saying he didn’t want to talk about that phase of his life. Richard got rid of his guitar not long after the impromptu recording session. Ianthe has no memory of ever seeing the instrument in the apartment once she started spending weekends at Daddy’s place.

  On the cold Nove
mber night Brautigan made his tape recording, he had plenty of reasons to sing the blues. Charlotte Mayerson had written asking for more time to reread Brautigan’s manuscripts, but in the end Holt, Rinehart and Winston rejected all three novels. Mayerson praised his “writing ability” and “flashes of marvelous humor and style” but called In Watermelon Sugar “mannered and ‘writy’” and thought The Abortion “too derivative of the kind of atmosphere that we’ve seen so often in Saroyan-like books.”

  Donald Allen had a friend, a successful attorney, who established the Four Seasons Foundation to publish contemporary writers, particularly the work of San Franciscans. In his new capacity as Four Seasons’ editor and publisher, Allen had at last found a vehicle to validate his early enthusiasm for Trout Fishing in America. He got in touch with Richard, offering to publish the novel in the coming year.

  Soon after that, Richard’s friends Bill Brown and Jim Koller got into the act by suggesting they bring out an edition of In Watermelon Sugar under their Coyote Books imprint. They had published Philip Whalen, and books by Michael McClure were in the works. At first, Richard resisted the idea. He had a New York agent. Sooner or later, Bob Mills was bound to make a score. Koller and Brown upped the ante, proposing an additional volume of Brautigan’s poetry.

  Richard, always slow to make decisions, continued dragging his heels. Bill Brown sealed the deal by mailing Brautigan a card quoting a recent Philip Whalen letter: “Coyote would be performing a Great Service Etc. if they would publish THE COLLECTED POEMS OF RICHARD BRAUTIGAN. Dick is a better poet than anyone wants to allow. His books of poetry are all unobtainable—& all of them are very good.” Flattery did the trick. Richard agreed to the offer from Coyote Books. Both publications were to be pilot editions with Brautigan retaining all subsidiary, reprint, and option rights. The arrangement called for the size of the editions to be limited to a few thousand copies. Richard would receive a straight 10 percent commission on all sales.