Willard lives on. One evening in the late seventies, Richard sat at his favorite table in Enrico’s enjoying a drink with his actor friend Terry McGovern, who played the part of the high school teacher Mr. Wolfe in American Graffiti. Terry lived in Hollywood, but an account for work in commercials kept him commuting back and forth to San Francisco every week. Brautigan had Willard with him, the colorful long-billed bird perched awkwardly on his lap. Every so often when the mood struck him, he dipped Willard’s beak into his glass of Calvados. “You have to dip his beak,” Richard explained.
“Willard’s great,” Terry said, just passing the time, and Richard Brautigan handed him the big bird. “No, Richard,” the actor protested, “I’m going back to Los Angeles tonight. What the hell am I going to do with this bird?”
Richard smiled. “Just take it,” he said. “Make sure to dip his beak.”
Later that night, McGovern rode in a cab with Willard down the Bayshore Freeway to the airport. On the flight to Los Angeles, Terry preferred sitting in the rear of the plane, where the seats faced one another and there was more leg room. It was also closer to the drink cart. The stewardesses were entranced with Willard. “They just thought it was the cutest thing in the world, and oh, isn’t this adorable and so on and so forth.”
After a bit, who should wander back to get his drink refreshed but State Assemblyman Willie Brown. “And he made a big fuss over Willard,” McGovern remembered. “And I explained to him that Willard has to dip his beak if you want to be a friend of [his].” The actor dipped the bird’s beak into the politician’s brandy, and the Willard brotherhood expanded its circle.
Today, Terry McGovern lives with his wife, Molly, in the comfortable Marin County town of San Anselmo, and Willard resides with them. By giving away Stanley Fullerton’s curious sculpture (just as the artist had donated the bird to Price Dunn, who passed it on in turn), Richard continued a process of liberation that had become an inherent function of the work itself.
thirty: brief encounter
BY THE SECOND half of the 1960s none of Linda Webster’s dreams seemed to be coming true. Her marriage to her boyfriend from high school had not turned out happily. For years, the relationship had been physically abusive. He started beating her when they first began going steady, but she stuck with him. Brutality and fear became the glue binding them together. One savage cut from a can opener left her leg scarred for life. The unseen wounds etched on her heart recorded more permanent damage.
The dysfunctional couple had moved with their daughter to Santa Rosa, California, where Linda, like so many other young women busy with the counterculture cottage-crafts of the era (macramé, decoupage, weaving, throwing pots, winding gaudy woolen god’s eyes), took up stringing beads. This eventually led to a successful career as a jewelry importer, but at the time it was simply a distraction from the misery plaguing her life. Over the years, her memories of Dick Brautigan’s chaste poetic courtship had evolved into an intense romantic fantasy. “It meant a lot to her to think someone cared that much about her at one time,” Linda’s sister recalled.
Linda Webster saved all the poetry Richard had written for her but not in its original form, fearing what might occur should her husband happen to discover it. She rewrote each poem in her own hand, substituting her husband’s name wherever hers appeared. Should he find and read one, he’d think she had composed it for him. Linda hid the clippings she cut from Herb Caen’s column in the Chronicle whenever he mentioned Richard Brautigan. She sent these to her sister Lorna, asking her to save them.
Every so often, Linda would sneak down into San Francisco without telling her husband. Her destination always remained the same. Linda headed straight for City Lights Bookstore in North Beach. She knew from the stacks of Richard Brautigan’s slim books on sale there that he was bound to show up sooner or later. She spent her time reading the announcements on the bulletin board, hoping to learn of public poetry readings or anything else she might find of interest about him.
One afternoon, hanging out on the Columbus Avenue sidewalk in front of the bookshop, she spotted Richard approaching from across the street. He looked quite different from the callow youth who had courted her a dozen years before, but she recognized the long hair and mustache from the cover photo on Trout Fishing in America. The stooped, loping walk remained fixed forever in her memory.
Just before he entered City Lights, she stepped up and asked, “Is your name Richard?”
And in a very quiet voice, he answered, “Yes.”
“Richard Brautigan?” Linda inquired.
“Yes.”
This was embarrassingly painful. After a pause, Linda got up her nerve to ask, “Do you remember me?”
Brautigan looked at her through his rimless glasses and very quietly said, “No. I’m sorry. I don’t.”
Linda Webster knew in her heart that there was no way he would recognize her after so many years. She wanted to say, “You used to pick cherries at my grandmother’s.” But her tongue couldn’t find the words. She didn’t say a thing.
“I’m sorry,” Richard repeated, quiet and polite. He stepped around her and headed for the bookstore entrance.
Linda turned and ran. She ran across Grant Avenue and up through Chinatown, running along the streets onto the steep slope of Nob Hill. She never looked back. She never saw Richard Brautigan again in her life.
thirty-one: summer of love
“IF YOU’RE GOING to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.” So went the Pied Piper lyrics of a tune hitting the charts with a bullet in June of 1967. John Phillips (founder of the Mamas and the Papas) wrote the song for his friend Scott McKenzie. The Diggers responded with a sarcastic broadside lampooning Phillips. Without AM airplay, their message did nothing to stem the rising runaway tide flowing toward Frisco.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band provided a more significant musical event that same month. There had been hints of the drug experience in both Rubber Soul and Revolver, but now it could no longer be denied: This latest Beatles record was full-on psychedelic. Rich with overdubbing and orchestration, the new songs spoke straight to the love generation. Everyone hip recognized the LSD in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Another track dealt with a teenage girl running away from home. The album’s message came through loud and clear: “I want to blow your mind . . .”
One look at the cover told the whole story. The Beatles positively glowed, resplendent in Technicolor marching band uniforms, sporting new facial hair and more epaulets and gold braid than a quartet of South American generalissimos. To drive the point further home, arranged behind them stood Madame Tussaud’s wax manikins of the Fab Four clad in their dark 1964 mod suits. The times indeed were a-changing.
When Richard Brautigan first heard the Beatles’ record, the off-kilter imagery in the lyrics about a woman who “keeps her face in a jar by the door” or a girl “with kaleidoscope eyes” validated his own tangled poetic metaphors. “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” the words taken down almost verbatim from an antique circus poster owned by John Lennon, mirrored Brautigan’s fondness for utilizing found art in his work. The Beatles were enormously popular, world famous. An audience receptive to Richard’s work was surely out there, ready and waiting.
With summer fast approaching, free rock concerts in the Panhandle became a regular occurrence. Emmett Grogan returned from New York at the end of April and promptly got a permit to stage the “Outlaw Mutation Boogie” after dark with colored lights strung through the trees and two giant kliegs beaming up into the night. He corralled Country Joe, Janis Joplin and Big Brother, and the Grateful Dead into performing. The Dead, beloved within the hip community as the people’s band, all lived together in a big Victorian house at 810 Ashbury. They could be called upon to play at free concerts and benefits anytime, night or day. When police arrested members of the band on drug charges early in October, Richard Brautigan commemorated the event with a poem, “The Day They Busted the Grateful Dead.”
He wrote it was “like hot swampy scissors cutting Justice / into the evil clothes that alligators wear.”
Poetry occupied most of Brautigan’s creative attention as spring exploded into summer. Knowing a collection was in the works started him sorting through a decade’s worth of manuscripts. He had planned to write a piece on the local scene for an issue of Coyote’s Journal being edited by Bill Brown and Joanne Kyger, but a balancing piece from the East Coast turned out “all wrong” and was rejected, thus letting Richard “off any ambiguous news hook.” The assignment, according to Bill Brown, had opened up, giving Brautigan “the freedom to go where you want, if you want, into whatever. OK. There is no hurry.”
During that spring, Brautigan made frequent trips to Santa Barbara to visit Jack and Vicki Shoemaker and spend time with Susan Morgan. Once, he took the babysitter up to the Maytags’ mountain home, where they ate burnt cheese sandwiches “and made beautiful love.” Afterward, while Donovan sang on the radio and Susan slept late, taking up the entire bed, Brautigan wrote “The Sitting Here, Standing Here Poem,” which was never published. When Morgan awoke, Richard had gone out. She found the poem sitting on her desk and wrote out a copy. “I felt like I was kind of snooping by looking at what he was working on,” she recalled. Brautigan later showed her the poem but never gave her a copy.
On another occasion, a conversation in the Shoemaker living room about the possibility of an “edible book” or a “disposable book” led to the genesis of Richard’s notion to print poetry on seed packets. The idea was to have them ready to give away at a “Digger-inspired” summer arts festival called the Santa Barbara “Free-in.” Planned as “an all-night affair” on East Beach opposite the Bird Refuge, the event was sponsored by the Unicorn Bookshop and a group known as The New Community. The disposable book project proved too complicated a notion to finish in time. Early in June, when Richard headed south with a “caravan of pickups,” accompanied by Lenore Kandel, Bill Fritsch, Jeff Sheppard, and numerous Diggers (who drove the com/co Gestetners down on a flatbed), it had been decided to print and hand out “broadsheets, slogans, and other graphics” in the manner of the John Dillinger Computer.
As the designated spokesman for the Free-in, Richard Brautigan was interviewed by the local newspaper and described the various semiplanned events. In addition to com/co’s “on-the-spot” publishing, poetry readings were scheduled, along with light shows by Aurora Glory Alice and Dry Paint and a “happening” directed by an artist known only as Annette. “One novelty will be the serving of food—hot dogs, fruit, soft drinks, etc.—at no charge,” the paper reported. Although Brautigan did not predict how many people the Diggers would be able to feed, an estimated crowd of a thousand gathered on the weekend of June 3 for the beach festival.
Susan Morgan, one of the event’s organizers, found Richard changed, “so lacking in the sweet quirkiness I had enjoyed.” In true Digger fashion, they set off in a VW bus to comb the supermarket Dumpsters for usable fruit and vegetables. Susan felt distanced from Brautigan, who struck her as “full of himself—cresting the wave of new popularity.” Her roommate was driving, and to drown Richard out, she and Susan began a loud, rude, speed-fueled conversation “about the price of cantaloupes.”
This was the last real contact Morgan ever had with Brautigan. Richard wrote her once or twice over the next couple years, letters lost on the winds of time. Sometime in 1969, when she was living in Bolinas, Susan ran into Richard downtown in the company of a real estate agent. “I greeted him warmly, and he pretended not to recognize me,” she recalled more than three decades later. “It was really bizarre and insulting.”
The Santa Barbara Free-in featured a huge bonfire. Much of the food prepared for the masses got cooked in giant trash cans. “A variety of local bands played spontaneously,” Jack Shoemaker remembered. These included Raw Violet, Underground Railroad, Haley Street Snack Factory, and Alexander’s Timeless Blooz Band. Mad River was among the headliners. They traveled down from Frisco with the Diggers, drinking and partying all the way, and played on the beach. Later, they crashed in the sand and slept until dawn.
The crowd had thinned by eight in the morning, but “there were still clusters of ‘free-iners’ on the beach. As promised by Brautigan, a cleanup committee gathered most of the accumulated trash left behind by the revelers. Even the police deemed the festival a success. Everything was “orderly, relatively quiet.” There were no arrests and only fifteen parking tickets handed out. “We hope they’re all like this one,” the assistant police chief said. The love generation had again staged a huge peaceful outdoor celebration. Here was another manifestation of new age consciousness, this time with Richard Brautigan front and center as the star of the show.
A week or so later, Brautigan escorted Margot Patterson Doss on a walking tour of “Hippie Hill” in Golden Gate Park, a gentle slope of green lawn rising above Kezar Drive and overlooking the Park Police Station. Groves of eucalyptus and oak framed the meadow on either side, providing a quiet retreat where residents of the Haight could sprawl napping in the sun, play their guitars, and pass joints around without any worries of getting busted despite the close proximity of the fuzz. Margot figured Hippie Hill would make good copy for her Chronicle column. Ever the attentive guide, Richard asked his friend to make sure she pointed out “the quietness and color of the scene.”
Jefferson Airplane’s single “Somebody to Love” climbed to number 3 on the national hit parade in June. The Oracle published its eighth issue, a hundred thousand multicolored copies sprayed with Jasmine Mist perfume and dedicated to American Indians. On the tenth, a local AM rock station sponsored the Magic Mountain Fantasy Fair on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. An estimated crowd totaling thirty-six thousand showed up over both days to hear the Airplane, the Doors, the Sons of Champlin, Country Joe, and the Steve Miller Blues Band, but the real action came the following weekend down in Monterey.
Inspired by the Be-In and numerous Digger-hosted musical events, John Phillips and record producer Lou Adler teamed up to present the Monterey International Pop Festival, a three-day extravaganza that the Diggers denounced as “a rich man’s festival,” the “old star/manager/booking agent syndrome.” Nearly 100,000 fans turned out to hear a galaxy of stars ranging from the Who, the Grateful Dead, and the Byrds to Booker T. and the MGs, Laura Nyro, Steve Miller, South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela, and sitar master Ravi Shankar. The festival was filmed by Donn Pennebaker. His footage transformed Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, and Jimi Hendrix from near unknowns to international superstars.
Always a diligent if minimalist correspondent, Richard Brautigan did not write a single letter that June and only one the previous month and in the month following. In all, he wrote just two letters between the first week of April and the second week in August. Something else was on his mind. In mid-June, Richard wrote a poem called “Love Ain’t No Tragedy” about the inevitable end of a love affair. With the publication of Trout Fishing pushed back until fall, Brautigan distracted himself with romance and poetry.
Unlike the Be-In, the Diggers’ planned solstice celebration would be another “Do-In” like the Invisible Circus. An Emmett Grogan manifesto called on the people to “build their courage [. . .] They will look to their brothers and not men who claim to be their leaders.” Around one thousand gathered on Twin Peaks, Frisco’s highest point, to greet the dawn on the morning of June 21. Later, they all wandered down to Speedway Meadow, joining the crowd near the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park, where the Diggers had set up stages and barbecued lamb. Charles Perry reported, “There were archers, magicians, jugglers and many freelancers playing whistles, flutes and guitars, and even a Tibetan liturgical orchestra complete with conch shells, Chinese oboes and six-foot-long trumpets. The Dead, Big Brother, Quicksilver and other bands played, using Fender speakers and amps surreptitiously borrowed by the musicians from Monterey Pop.” Richard Brautigan almost certainly joined in. The party marked the official start of the Summer of Love.
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Sometime toward the end of June, Richard Brautigan walked into a tiny storefront attorney’s office on McAllister Street, not far from the Hastings School of Law. Minimally furnished with an antique rolltop desk and a bright orange rug, the place was homey and inviting and as far removed from mahogany-paneled law office formality as its occupant, Richard Hodge, in his pink corduroy suit, was from the pinstriped mentality of mainstream attorneys. Hodge had gained a local reputation in the Haight for his spirited defense of several Mime Troop members, busted for singing Christmas carols and soliciting alms, and the pro bono work he did at the Free Legal Clinic established by Peter Berg. (Hodge later learned that he had once given free counsel to Charles Manson.)
Dick Hodge had already read Confederate General. When Richard walked in unannounced, Hodge immediately knew who he was. “Richard, I’m surprised you didn’t come in before now,” the lawyer said. Brautigan regarded Hodge “quizzically,” a look familiar to the writer’s friends. Richard needed legal help to get several Diggers out of jail. Dick Hodge had been recommended by David Simpson, a Digger who met Hodge when they both served in the Coast Guard. “One of my very first clients probably,” Dick said, remembering Richard Brautigan’s initial visit. “As we talked, he told me he wanted some help in his various publishing affairs.” It was a pivotal time for both of them: a young lawyer setting out on his own and a struggling writer on the verge of breaking through to fame and fortune. In time, Hodge came to regard himself as “Richard’s conduit to the world of reality.”
Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan Page 59