Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  For a reunion feast, they all went to Durgin-Park, a Boston landmark since 1827, still doing business in a decaying and disreputable part of town. A noisy place with famously rude waitresses, tin ceilings, bare lightbulbs, and long wooden communal tables, the restaurant had been a favorite of Valerie’s ever since she traveled up from DC on weekends seven years earlier to visit her fiancé, a student at Harvard Law.

  The morning of March 25, Richard and Valerie took another historic tour, driving up to Lexington and Concord (Valerie remembered visiting these revolutionary battlegrounds had “probably” been her choice). They drove on to Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau built a rude hut on his friend Emerson’s land and lived for two years and two months without gainful employment. When Brautigan surveyed the scene, he described an empty paper box in the snow in his notebook.

  That same night, presented by the Quincy Poetry Forum, Brautigan read his work in the dining hall at Quincy House, a venerable Harvard undergraduate residence on the banks of the Charles River. A modern architectural “behemoth” had been added on in the sixties, and the influx of new inhabitants gave the place a reputation for rowdy exuberance. Admission was $1, and Richard received $270 for his performance. Valerie stole the show at Quincy House with her homemade outfit, a fur miniskirt and vest constructed from a thrift shop mink coat. It was one of her “favorite hippie outfits.”

  In the morning, they traveled back to New York by train and again checked in to the Chelsea. Although their room had no view to speak of, it came with a kitchen, and Richard and Valerie cooked their own breakfasts. The current residents of the old hotel included Gerome Ragne of Hair, artists Claude Pelieu and Mary Beach, filmmaker Sandy Daley, pornography writer Florence Turner, as well as Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, both young and unknown, and Leonard Cohen, who was keeping company with Marcia Pacaud.

  In one of life’s awkward coincidences, Marcia occupied a room upstairs from Richard and Valerie. She was in town “on a long-term basis” for EST training. “I was always incredibly jealous of her,” Valerie said, “because she was blond and she was beautiful and she was all these things that I wasn’t and Richard, it may have been unconscious, but Richard didn’t hesitate to talk about Marcia and how blond and beautiful she was.”

  It was Brautigan’s practice to introduce each new girlfriend to her successor. (“My lovers become my friends.”) Valerie remembered they “ended up being a threesome in some of our roamings.” At some point during their stay, Marcia even fitted Richard for a new pair of Levi’s. Valerie managed to anesthetize her feelings (“we were drunk so much of the time”), but after a week of uncomfortable togetherness, she exacted a small measure of revenge when they all went out to eat at Max’s Kansas City. At this point in time, Richard’s favored libation was the Brandy Alexander, a cocktail composed of cognac, crème de cacao, and heavy cream. Valerie recalled that they drank “lots and lots. I was stupid enough to drink along with him.” After dinner, awash on an ocean of brandy, they drifted out of the restaurant and hailed a taxi. “Richard got in on one side of the cab and I got in on the other,” Valerie said, “and I shut the door and left Marcia outside.” They roared off with Miss Marcia Pacaud of Montreal, Canada, standing alone and inebriated on the curb.

  On the evening Richard and Valerie returned to Manhattan from Cambridge, Brautigan read his poetry at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, his second reading in two days. The cornerstone of St. Mark’s was laid in 1795. Located on Second Avenue between East Tenth and East Eleventh Streets and enclosed by an iron fence, the old churchyard, with its trees, grass, and weathered eighteenth-century tombstones, remained a rare pastoral oasis amid a concrete urban wasteland. Richard read on the altar of the barrel-vaulted sanctuary on the same program with Aram Saroyan, son of William Saroyan, one of Brautigan’s favorite writers.

  In the eight days remaining on their trip, Richard and Valerie took in the town. They went to see Dracula, checked out the Old Masters at the Metropolitan Museum, and spent time with J. D. Reed, a twenty-eight-year-old poet whose first book, Expressways, had just been published in hardback by Simon & Schuster. Something of a wild man, J. D. Reed distinguished himself from the herd mentality through bizarre fits of unpredictable public behavior.

  On Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s introduction, Richard linked up with Claude Pelieu and Mary Beach, an art-scene couple in residence at the Chelsea. Mary, an American heiress raised in France, began painting at an early age and had been interned for a time by the Nazis during World War II. She was a relative of Sylvia Beach, proprietor of Shakespeare & Co. and the first publisher of James Joyce. Claude, fifteen years younger, was born in France and had his premier show in Paris at the Galerie du Haut Pave, under the purview of Henri Matisse and Raoul Dufy. He met Mary Beach in 1962 and they traveled together to San Francisco, where they formed creative liaisons with Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Plymell. Claude worked in collage, wrote poetry, and translated the Beat writers into French. He gained a measure of notoriety in New York after he pissed in Norman Mailer’s pocket at a party in the Dakota.

  Pelieu and Beach accompanied Richard and Valerie on a visit to Ed Sanders’s avant-garde Peace Eye Bookstore, housed in a former meat market on East Tenth Street. Sanders had preserved the original Hebrew lettering painted on his show window: strictly kosher. Brautigan harbored no ill feelings from his Halloween party four years earlier when the Fugs took a shine to Janice.

  Richard and Valerie went to the Met during the afternoon. They had dinner at Levine’s, a few blocks uptown on Park Avenue South from Max’s. Billed as a “Jewish/Canadian” restaurant, Levine’s featured closed-circuit TV cameras focused in all directions. Every booth had its own small-screen set so the customers could all watch one another watching wach other.

  On March 29, Bunny Conlon traveled up from DC and took a room at the Chelsea. She had lunch with Valerie. By nightfall Estes felt sick. Bunny and Richard went out to eat, leaving Val with the color TV, promising to bring back deli food. They went to a restaurant near the hotel. Brautigan drank “a lot of beer.” After they ate, the waiter brought the bill. Richard said, “Okay, let’s go.”

  “What about the ticket?” Bunny asked.

  “No. It’s taken care of,” Brautigan said. They walked out the door and down the street.

  Somebody yelled at them. Bunny turned and saw the waiter running in their direction. “You forgot to pay for this check,” he shouted.

  Richard looked at the man “like there was something wrong with him,” and said, “Well, I don’t have any money.” The waiter didn’t find this a plausible explanation. “Don’t you know who I am?” Brautigan demanded.

  “I don’t give a damn who you are,” the waiter snarled, “this is what you owe me.” Bunny paid for their meal on the street, and settled the matter.

  The day after Richard’s reading at St. Mark’s Church, he met with Helen Brann. He told Valerie the purpose of their trip was for him to sign a contract with the Sterling Lord agency, but Richard had no formal arrangement with Helen until December of 1973, when she started the Helen Brann Agency. On the day Richard was scheduled to fly back to San Francisco, Helen was on the phone with Seymour Lawrence, hammering out the a deal.

  Sam wanted to publish a hardback edition with all three books in a single volume. This had been Brautigan’s vision for some time. Helen Brann asked for $20,000 in advance for the hardback omnibus edition of Trout Fishing, The Pill, and Watermelon Sugar, agreeing that Dell could simultaneously publish the three titles separately as trade paperbacks with a 14 percent royalty going to the author. (Don Allen would get 1 percent until a hundred thousand copies of each had been sold, after which Brautigan was to receive 15 percent.) The other terms were also advantageous to Richard. He kept 60 percent of any paperback or book club sale, instead of the usual 50 percent, and retained the right of approval of book jacket design and typography. It was an incredible deal for an author with absolutely no national track record.

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nbsp; Instead of Pete’s Tavern, Helen Brann took Richard and Valerie to lunch at Maxwell’s Plum, a trendy expensive East Side restaurant. (Valerie considered it “an in-crowd place.”) Helen told her new client of the progress she had made in her negotiations with Sam Lawrence. The posh surroundings, fine food, and expensive wine provided Brautigan a preview of the literary fame he’d spent so many years pursuing. Later in the afternoon, Richard and Valerie boarded a plane and flew back to San Francisco.

  Life took a different turn for Richard and Valerie after their return. She started graduate school over at Berkeley the very next day, enrolling in three classes. Brautigan went to a party. The weekend before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Bill Brown hosted a big bash at his house up on the Bolinas Mesa. Coincidentally, J. D. Reed had come out to visit Tom McGuane, a classmate from Michigan State, who moved to Bolinas in the fall of 1967 after completing a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. Aspiring young writers, McGuane and Reed were drawn to the gathering at Brown’s place to mingle with what Tom described as “the then very vivid San Francisco literary scene.” Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg were among the guests. Freshly harvested mussels in seaweed provided the main fare. The party lasted though the afternoon and late into the night with everyone getting enormously drunk. McGuane remembered running amok and nearly driving his Land Rover off a cliff when a Zen Buddhist asked him to help return a live crab, discovered among the mussels, to the sea. A fan of Trout Fishing, McGuane encountered Brautigan for the first time at Bill Brown’s party. “I remember specifically telling [Richard] the moment I met him how much I admired the book and him for writing it,” Tom recalled. “Above all his graciousness and his pleasure in being admired and his good manners.”

  Brautigan had been disappointed five years before when Grove Press published Confederate General and his dreams of a New York success were rudely shattered. His advance had been small and the book poorly promoted. Once Helen Brann called to say that Seymour Lawrence had accepted their terms, he knew things would never be the same again. The advance against royalties was $20,000.

  Brautigan’s total income between 1965 and 1968 came to less than $7,000. Richard didn’t want the Internal Revenue Service to gobble up his good luck and asked that the money be paid out in four annual payments: $5,000 each January 1, beginning in 1970. Knowing he had almost four years of financial security ahead provided a nearly incomprehensible life change. For Valerie’s twenty-eighth birthday (April 9), Richard took her for drinks at Enrico’s and then on to dinner at the Mandarin, an expensive restaurant in Ghirardelli Square. He gave her a poem (“Valerie’s Birthday Poem”) written that afternoon.

  The next day, Brautigan embarked on a blitzkrieg mini reading tour. First stop, Cañada College, a two-year school in the hills near Woodside above Redwood City, thirty miles south of San Francisco. Richard spent the morning in Palo Alto, hanging out at the Free You with Ed McClanahan and Gurney Norman, another young writer from Kentucky. The You was a Digger-inspired free institution of higher learning operating within a stone’s throw of Stanford. Richard gave the Free You “All Girls Should Have a Poem” to print in their giveaway magazine.

  Kent Crockett, an English professor at Cañada College and a friend of McClanahan’s, had invited Brautigan to kick off the “Holy Moly Reading Series.” He arrived in Palo Alto to drive Richard and Ed up to the new college auditorium, still in the final stages of construction. The college was not yet a year old. Brautigan was the first to perform there. Worried that noise from the construction backstage might disrupt the reading, Crockett got permission from the college president to tell the workers to take off for an hour and a half. Kent Crockett introduced Richard, and the poet looked out at the audience of colorfully dressed young people, smiled, and said, “Ohhh . . . you’re all so beautiful.”

  Five minutes into Brautigan’s reading, in absolute silence, a large wooden frame slid down behind him from the set storage loft overhead. This provoked slight tittering from the audience. Looking “a little perturbed,” Richard continued with his reading. After another five minutes, the wooden rectangle rose silently back up into the flies. The audience laughed louder this time. Angered, Richard carried on his reading. For a third time in fifteen minutes—the workmen were testing the stage equipment—the big frame made another silent appearance. When the renewed laughter subsided, Brautigan was clearly annoyed. “Well, I think this reading is over,” he said. Seated in the audience, Ed McClanahan thought Richard “behaved in a sort of ugly fashion.”

  “It was high tension at that point,” Kent Crockett recalled. “This audience had come in just expecting the most easygoing guy in the world, and by this time there was a tension through the entire [crowd].” Crockett went backstage and had a word with the workmen, who apologized and agreed to knock it off. Crockett assured Brautigan everything was going to be fine, and he resumed his reading. A malevolent fate continued to plague him. Five minutes later a stray dog wandered down the main aisle, metal tags jingling, all the way to the stage. “The dog scratched and made a lot of noise,” Kent said, “and walked out, which caused another titter of laughter.”

  Once decorum had been restored, a second dog repeated the previous canine’s performance. At this point, Richard declared a recess, and everybody took a break for a few minutes. When the audience returned, Brautigan resumed reading as if nothing had gone wrong, “and as it continued,” Kent Crockett remembered, “the tension that had been in the air, the sort of palpable tension, diminished and diminished and disappeared, and by the end of the reading everybody in the audience was much in love with Richard. And he with them.” The students talked about the experience for months afterward.

  Later in the afternoon, Brautigan went with Crockett, McClanahan, and a number of students for a picnic lunch at the Pulgas Water Temple, a circular neoclassical structure built in 1938, a few miles north on Cañada Road. The temple marked the spot where water from the Hetch Hetchy in the High Sierras spilled out of the aqueduct into Crystal Springs Reservoir. Richard relaxed beside a tranquil reflecting pool while the students “smoked dope and played Frisbee.” Ed McClanahan found Brautigan at the picnic to be “just in the best form. In a weird way, he made up for his misbehavior.” Ed had always considered Richard to be “volatile, he was a Jekyll and Hyde kind of thing.”

  The poet had a 6:30 pm plane to catch. Kent Crockett raced him down the Bayshore Freeway to the airport in his ’57 Chevy. Brautigan was scheduled to read in Isla Vista at 8:00 pm. The First Annual Spring Renaissance Faire at the University of California, Santa Barbara had started off with a parade four days earlier. Intended to be “experience-oriented,” the faire provided pottery wheels, clay, and rolls of butcher paper for finger-painting. Participants were encouraged to come in costume. After musicians and folk dancing, poetry readings rounded out each evening’s entertainment. Lew Welch and David Meltzer read Monday night, Gary Snyder on Tuesday, Brother Antoninus on Wednesday, and Richard Brautigan brought the festivities to a conclusion Thursday at eight.

  Richard was met at the airport and whisked straight to the University Methodist Church in Isla Vista. After remarking he’d been back east for about three weeks, Brautigan said, “It’s so great to be back in California” and began with recent poems. He read “April 7, 1969” and the one he wrote for Valerie’s birthday the day before, and “Third Eye” (for Gary Snyder), along with other work composed during his recent trip. Richard had serious competition for the UC student audience. Canned Heat, fresh from their hit rock single, “On the Road Again,” performed in Robertson gym at the exact same hour, sharing the bill with Poco as well as the Ace of Cups, an all-girl band. There was one thing in Brautigan’s favor: Admission to the concert was $2.50, while the poetry came for free.

  The next day, while Valerie had lunch in San Francisco with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Richard read again at Santa Barbara City College. The school’s Forum Committee had been “enthusiastic” when they first approached him before his trip east,
but as a junior college that had “lost its last three bond elections,” they had no funds left in their 1968–1969 budget, according to Lorraine Hatch, on behalf of the college. The Associated Students, who did not sponsor forums or readings, “agreed to siphon $100 out of some unidentified fund” and hoped Richard might do “a short program” for that amount. “He showed up on time and read like an angel,” Hatch enthused afterward.

  Back in Frisco, Brautigan’s professional life shifted into higher gear. To counterpoint all the high stakes business correspondence from New York, a short letter from Charles Bell in New Mexico awaited his arrival. It contained a check for $30, official payment for his reading at St. John’s College, along with Bell’s apology for the paltry size of the fee and his assessment of Valerie as “the tenth Muse lately sprung up in America.”

  Richard earned another small sum in April, when he sold “Not the Way,” the poem he had withdrawn from Poetry, to the Rolling Stone for $10, a 25 percent paycheck improvement over the other periodical, which paid only fifty cents per line. Around the same time, annoying news arrived from Christopher Cerf at Random House, who wrote to apologize for “the very regrettable error” in The American Literary Anthology, Number 2, which had just been published. The editors were “all dreadfully embarrassed” to have omitted the last thirteen lines of Brautigan’s poem “It’s Raining in Love.” Cerf promised to correct the mistake in the second edition if the first sold out (it didn’t) and to print the entire poem again in full in volume 3 of the Anthology (which never appeared).

  The contracts from Dell were ready by the middle of the month when Helen Brann sent them to Richard for signing. Sam Lawrence wrote Brautigan saying they planned to release the one-volume hardback edition in “late-September–early October,” requesting a biographical note. Richard phoned the requested catalog material in to Helen Brann. Sam and Helen had discussed a possible new title for the hardbound edition “at some length.” Brautigan was adamant on the phone “that there not be a title.” What Richard wanted was the front dust jacket to simply list the titles of his three books, prefaced by “Richard Brautigan’s.”