Once, after Donald Allen fired her, Valerie and Richard went on a trip to Kirkwood Meadows, an isolated spot in the Sierras near Carson Pass, where Barden (“Bart”) Stevenot, her new boss, owned a mountain retreat he planned to turn into a ski area. Crews of loggers and dozer operators were already at work in a high valley with the greatest variety of wildflowers in all California. At the time, the only structure on the place was the Kirkwood Inn, a venerable log building along what once was the Kit Carson Emigrant Trail. Built in 1864, the old inn had seen some wild times. The saloon and a kitchen were downstairs, with places to bunk above. Stevenot asked Valerie and Richard to move to another bed at the far end of the building because their raucous sex kept him awake at night.
One evening following an afternoon’s fly-fishing on Caples Creek, Stevenot took Valerie and Richard to dinner at the J&T, a Basque family-style restaurant in nearby Gardnerville, south of Carson City across the Nevada state line. After their meal, they walked up to the Overland Hotel for a drink. An old woman saw them passing and, fearing a hippie invasion, phoned the sheriff’s office. When the deputies arrived at the Overland bar, they spotted Richard playing the slots, the only longhair in the place. A tough local lawman looked hard at Brautigan and asked, “How long ya been here? How long ya stayin’?” He made his meaning clear. Hippies weren’t welcome. Bart Stevenot was furious, threatening to call his lawyer. “They gave that the consideration of asking us to leave town at our earliest convenience. They had never run into the likes of Richard yet, with the granny glasses and Buffalo Bill hair.”
Back on Kirkland Meadow, the Outcasts of Gardnerville went over to June Roof’s bar, a two-hundred-square-foot establishment where Stevenot’s construction crew did their drinking. At first, “the guys had regarded Richard with suspicion,” Bart recalled, “but after several nights hoisting drinks with him they had bonded to the extent that no one was going to throw their new best friend out of some Nevada lowlife town, and they volunteered in their somewhat impaired state to go down and clean up the deputies.” While appreciating their motives, Stevenot and Brautigan politely declined the offer.
A letter came near the end of July from Roger L. Stevens, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Brautigan had been selected to receive an award of $500 under the Literary Anthology Program, established in 1966 “to give greater circulation to work that originally appeared in magazines with limited circulation.” Robert Duncan, Anne Sexton, and Louis Simpson were the final poetry judges this year, and Richard’s poem “It’s Raining in Love,” published originally by Hollow Orange, was one of twenty-nine they selected to receive the award. The $500 came in the form of an unsolicited grant and did not have to be declared as income to the IRS. The poem would be published the following year by Random House in an anthology edited by George Plimpton and Peter Ardery. Two weeks later, Phillip Burton, the congressman from the Fifth District of California, wrote Brautigan to offer his “personal congratulations.”
Back in June, a memorandum had arrived from Gordon Ray, president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Ray had written to inform Brautigan that Josephine Miles, poet and professor of English at UC Berkeley, had suggested Richard might be interested in applying for a fellowship. Accordingly, he enclosed an official statement and a set of application forms. There was no great rush in submitting the paperwork, which wasn’t due until autumn. Anticipating a fall publication date for Watermelon and The Pill, Donald Allen, West Coast editor for the Evergreen Review, arranged for Richard’s five-year-old piece about abandoned Christmas trees to appear in the December issue. Brautigan received $100 from the magazine. Around this time, Richard asked Dick Hodge to draw up the papers to dissolve his marriage to Ginny.
That spring Brautigan wrote a series of radio ads for KSAN to help out his pal Lou Marcelli. Richard and Lou often started their days together with coffee at the Minimum Daily Requirement. Kendrick Rand remembered them as being “great buddies.” Three or four days a week they’d leave his place and head for the “double bill for a dollar movie theater on Stockton in North Beach.” He recalled that “they had their special seats.”
Marcelli recently expanded the musical offerings at his North Beach bar to include a weekly dance program out at Muir Beach. Lou hosted bands such as Time and the Cleveland Wrecking Company at the community lodge (now the popular Pelican Inn) for a $1 admission charge. These Muir Beach dances proved so successful that he soon also offered programs on Friday and Saturday nights at 8:00 pm.
Brautigan’s radio spots took the form of military recruitment ads for the “DenoCarlo Naval Base.” The featured band was announced as providing “drill instruction [. . .] It’s a chance to serve your country, by dancing and playing in the sand.” Another advertisement featured an “interview” with Chairman Mao of the Chinese People’s Republic. The lodge at Muir Beach saw plenty of good times during this period. Lew Welch wrote his much admired poem “Wobbly Rock” while seated on a stone nearby. Magda Cregg hosted a big party at the inn to celebrate her lover’s achievement. “Everything had gone off perfectly,” she remembered. “There was enough food. The music was great. Everyone was dancing. Everyone was high. Everyone was having a wonderful time.” At that point, Brautigan picked up a brick and threw it through a window.”
“Richard! Why did you do that?” Magda scolded. “You sonofabitch! You ruined my party!”
Brautigan turned to her and said, “I don’t want things to be predictable.”
For some time now, Michael McClure had been playing autoharp and making music with Hells Angel Freewheelin’ Frank. McClure wrote “Oh Lord, Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz,” an offbeat little song that Janis Joplin liked to sing. It became the final track she ever recorded. In August of 1968, Joplin released Cheap Thrills, her last album with Big Brother and the Holding Company. The cover art was by R. Crumb, who “took speed and did an all-nighter.” Crumb “wasn’t crazy about the music” but “liked Joplin OK” and did the work for $600. “My comics appealed to the hard-drinking, hard-fucking end of the hippie spectrum,” the cartoonist later wrote, “as opposed to the spiritual, eastern-religious, lighter-than-air type of hippie.” Joplin and Brautigan lodged firmly in the former camp.
Richard had been familiar with R. Crumb since the artist did the poster for Bedrock One the year before. Victor Moscoso, who worked on Zap #2, provided a stronger connection. Valerie Estes remembered going with Richard to visit the artist and his buxom first wife, Dana. Their apartment struck her as one of the dirtiest places she’d ever seen, quite an achievement in those funky crash pad days. Brautigan took note of the Crumb/Joplin/McClure axis. Richard liked the idea of transforming his poetry into song lyrics. When Janis suggested she might try a couple on her next album, Brautigan immediately began gleaning his work for suitable selections.
Keith Abbott, recently moved back to the city to attend San Francisco State, remembered stopping by Richard Brautigan’s Geary Street apartment around this time. Richard enlisted him and his 1951 Chevy pickup to drive over to Janis Joplin’s place in the Haight. Brautigan told Keith about his plan to deliver two poems to Janis for her to sing. Abbott didn’t say anything, remaining skeptical. Sensing his friend’s enthusiasm, he kept his mouth shut on the subject. “He was quite high about this chance,” Abbott recalled in his memoir.
The two poems Brautigan had chosen were “The Horse That Had a Flat Tire” and “She Sleeps This Very Evening in Greenbrook Castle,” both surrealist fairy tales. When they arrived at Joplin’s Victorian house, the singer wasn’t at home. Richard and Keith were greeted by two of Pearl’s “tough, leather-clad girlfriends” who took Brautigan’s poems “with thinly veiled contempt” and showed them to the door. Janis never used either.
The month of August also saw the publication of The Digger Papers, a compilation of many of the handout broadsides the Diggers had distributed through the Haight over the past year and a half. The twenty-four-page pamphlet appeared in two different versions. Paul Kra
ssner distributed it as issue no. 81 of his magazine the Realist, which sold for thirty-five cents. In return for this, Krassner printed an extra forty thousand copies, all given away without charge by The Free City Collective, the Diggers’ new name for themselves. None of the contents was copyrighted, and all contributors were anonymous. Those in the know recognized who was who.
The stellar lineup included Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder (“A Curse on the Men in Washington, Pentagon”), Lew Welch (“Final City, Tap City: Crack at the Bottom of It”), and Richard Brautigan (“All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”). Peter Berg contributed his revolutionary diatribe “Trip Without a Ticket.” His “1% Free” Tong hit men poster graced the back page. Kirby Doyle’s account of the birth of Digger Batman was included, along with a “Free Huey” collage/ advertisement by Natural Suzanne. Taken together, the Papers provided an accurate compendium of the Digger ethos.
Richard Brautigan saved copies of The Digger Papers for the rest of his life. The ephemera from this fleeting period remained potent in his memory long after the utopian dreams they chronicled faded like rainbows in the mist. For Emmett Grogan, whose seminal handouts jump-started the whole thing, the dream died every time he stuck a needle in his arm. By his own confession, he was his own worst enemy, no longer any good at finding and distributing free food, no use to his long-suffering woman.
Scag has a way of sneaking up and taking over when you’re too stoned to pay attention. To kick his forty-pound habit, Grogan took refuge out in Marin County at a hideout commune Peter Coyote and a friend named Bob Slade had established on a three-hundred-acre ranch near the tiny crossroads town of Olema. Brautigan wrote a poem, dedicated “For Emmett,” called “Death Is a Beautiful Car Parked Only” about his friend’s cold-turkey agonies. (“You hotwire death [. . .]”)
The Democratic convention in Chicago that August took street theater to a bizarre new level. Several underground characters performed upon the world media stage provided by the riots. Abbie Hoffman took a star turn in a Digger-inspired role. The Diggers held Hoffman in low esteem. Emmett Grogan called him “Abbott.” One morning, Abbie woke Peter Berg by pounding on his door and shouting, “I bet you think I stole everything from ya, dontcha?”
“No, Abbie,” Berg replied, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “I feel like I gave a good tool to an idiot.” He closed the door and never spoke to Hoffman again.
Sometime that summer, Leonard Cohen showed up in North Beach. The Canadian poet/songwriter /singer had recently enjoyed considerable success from his recordings of “Suzanne” and “Bird on a Wire,” hit singles providing a much larger audience than counterculture poets usually enjoy. Cohen happened into the Minimum Daily Requirement and took a liking to Kendrick Rand. He began bussing tables as a lark. The place was packed. “You need help,” the poet said, “You’re too busy here.”
“Well, good help is hard to find,” Rand replied.
“I know how to work.” Leonard Cohen put on an apron.
“I didn’t pay him a penny,” Kendrick recalled. “He just loved it. And he worked his ass off.”
Leonard Cohen worked for free at the MDR for a week or two. This was great for business. Word quickly spread, and the usual crowd grew to unusual proportions. According to Kendrick Rand, Leonard “was stalking Richard.” Brautigan didn’t come by the coffeehouse for the entire time the Canadian poet worked there. Rand regarded Leonard Cohen as “handsome, very personable,” and thought “Richard was a little jealous of that.” Richard probably avoided the Minimum Daily Requirement because of Cohen’s close friendship with Marcia Pacaud.
Earlier in the spring, Kendrick Rand rented an apartment on Vallejo, half a block up from Grant Avenue. He wanted it so he could have a place where his two young kids could come and stay. Kendrick gave Richard a key to the long narrow railroad flat. “He used to hang out there a lot during the afternoon.” It gave him a retreat in North Beach to escape to and write “or whatever he did.” Rand made sure there was always “a jug of burgundy” on hand.
Kendrick had a friend named Paul Lee, who taught at UC Santa Cruz and was involved with Tim Leary’s Psychedelic Review. Through Lee, Rand arranged for Brautigan to give a reading in Santa Cruz, and they drove down together in the big Coupe de Ville, taking Kendrick’s kids along for the ride. This trip involved a lot of preparation, “checking the best way, when should we leave, what should we wear. That was how Richard operated back then.”
As fog-bound San Francisco summer moved into the warmth of fall, Brautigan busied himself with his Guggenheim application. For his references, he lined up Josephine Miles (who had initiated the process) and novelists Kay Boyle (introduced to Richard by Don Allen), Herb Gold, and Stephen Schneck. His statement of project was particularly concise: “I would like to finish a book of short stories.” Brautigan listed his marital status as “divorced,” although legally this was not yet so, and when asked to give a summary of his education, he once again stated, “I have no education that can be listed here.”
Asked to supply a brief account of his career, Brautigan began, “It’s hard for me to write about my ‘career’ because it doesn’t seem like a career to me at all. It’s just what I do with my life and what I choose to write about and what happens then.” After summarizing his publications, readings, and awards, Richard concluded, “the thing that I have enjoyed the most was writing and putting together 5,000 copies of a book of poems printed on seed packets. The book is called Please Plant This Book, and it was given away free. There are now thousands of gardens growing from this book, and that pleases me.”
Early in October, a letter arrived from Luther Nichols, who wrote that “there are two exceptional younger writers on the West Coast—you and Tom Robbins.” Nichols described Robbins as a former art and music editor, a columnist, “and a beginning novelist” who had avoided reading Brautigan at first, afraid of being influenced by writing he’d heard might have an affinity to his own. Finally, he succumbed and read a copy of Trout Fishing.
“Read it?” Tom Robbins wrote to Luther Nichols,
No, I didn’t read it. I inhaled it as if it were Acapulco gold, I sucked it as if I were an infant prince and it were the royal wet nurse, I licked it as if it were the frosting left on the spoon that iced the Cake of the World. Now I carry it with me everywhere I go; close to my heart as if it were a love letter from the Only One. Any publisher who would refuse to print TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA is a candyass cretin, a study in imbecility. For Richard Brautigan is, to use the vernacular, where the new literature is at! He is the writer of the future.
It pained Nichols to know his own publishing house was among the dozen or so to have rejected Trout Fishing. The imbecile cretins continued rejecting Brautigan’s work. Two days later, a distressed Blair Fuller of the Paris Review returned Richard’s short stories, saying “George Plimpton did not take to them.” Fuller sent his sincere regrets, adding that he had just seen Irwin Shaw, who was “very enthusiastic” about Trout Fishing, and that Kay Boyle mentioned Brautigan “with enthusiasm” in an interview Fuller had done with her for the Paris Review series.
Boyle’s published enthusiasms greatly enhanced Brautigan’s prospects for winning a Guggenheim. Also in early October, Apple Records contacted Richard via Barry Miles, asking if he’d be interested in working on a spoken word album. Brautigan wrote back, suggesting his idea for the record and offering to send Miles a tape of himself reading “The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster.” Miles was off in Italy, but Apple responded that Richard’s idea was “exactly the type of thing he wants to do.”
One October evening, Richard and Valerie took a cab to the airport (“a big splurge”) to pick up her friend Bunny Conlon, who flew in from Las Vegas the day after the funeral of her husband, Jack. Valerie had worked for John Francis (“Jack”) Conlon in Washington, D.C. back in 1962, when he was chief of staff for Nevada Senator Howard Cannon. Richard and Valerie brought the new widow to her suite at the Mark Hopkins and joined Bunny for
dinner. Instead of going to the Top of the Mark, they ordered room service and ate in Bunny’s suite. Brautigan sat on the floor, pulling a book of verse from his pocket. “Richard read poetry to me,” Bunny recalled, thinking it was something Persian, Rumi perhaps. She found it very sweet and comforting. “All evening he read this beautiful poetry to me. And I didn’t know who Richard was. But, I thought he was a lovely person.”
The next day, Richard and Valerie invited Bunny over to the apartment on Kearny Street for brunch. Bunny took a cab down from Nob Hill to North Beach. When she gave the driver the address, he said, “Oh, that’s where Richard Brautigan lives.”
“You know Richard?” Bunny asked, somewhat perplexed.
“Everybody knows Richard,” the cabbie replied. “He’s had his picture on the cover of Time magazine.”
Bunny was shocked. Who was this famous guy her friend had hooked up with? Although Brautigan’s picture never graced the cover of Time, the cab driver’s wisecrack had the eerie ring of prophesy. Richard and Valerie “got a big laugh out of it” when Bunny told them what the cabbie said. Such praise didn’t qualify for a baronhood, but it provided a giddy glimpse of what the future might hold.
When Halloween rolled around, Valerie didn’t buy any candy because she was certain no trick-or-treaters would ever come. Richard felt differently. Her apartment was on Telegraph Hill, an Italian neighborhood populated by families with a lot of kids. He became so adamant that Valerie ran down to the store, returning with a carton full of little boxes of Chiclets. To celebrate the occasion, they bought two pumpkins. While Valerie prepared dinner, Richard carved his into a jack-o’-lantern with “one round eye and one triangular eye and a not-very-bright witchy smile.” Valerie carved her pumpkin while the food cooked. She took a “modernistic” approach. Richard thought the end result looked “like an appliance.”
Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan Page 65