Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Richard and Sherry started driving around with a Bolinas real estate salesman from the Sharon Agency downtown. “Looking at all these fancy houses,” Sherry said, “the straight people houses.” When the Realtor showed Richard number 6 Terrace Avenue and told him the story of the Chinese girl’s ghost, Sherry tried talking him out of buying the place. “He wanted to get it because it was relatively cheap compared to the other places and it was huge.”

  When Richard and Sherry first visited the house she found it eerie and dark, but she thought all the old furnishings original to the place were “cool.” Sherry noted many bouquets of ancient dried flowers displayed everywhere. “Hibiscus, old and fragile like pale crinkled crepe paper in white jugs,” she wrote in her journal, “hydrangea, flower heads, perfectly preserved like mummy flowers in blue Ball jars.” They evoked the spirit of Mary Elizabeth Parsons, who lived there at the turn of the century. Alfred B. Parsons, current owner of the house, was her direct descendant. Parsons, a hay merchant, lived south of Sacramento, in the tiny town of Clarksburg. Earlier that July, he leased his “summer bungalow” out for a year. Another improbable six-degrees-of-separation coincidence: David and Tina Meltzer became his tenants.

  Richard began seriously considering purchasing 6 Terrace Avenue in late October of 1971. The sale of the house included furnishings, and Mr. Parsons had the Sharon Agency prepare a partial inventory in November, listing kitchen appliances, numerous beds, dressers, tables, lamps, and several antiques: a piano, a pair of rocking chairs, two marble-top dressers. The Meltzers, who had been in the house for only three months, hadn’t expected to have their home sold out from under them quite so soon. When the actual sale appeared imminent, David and Tina made an effort to convince Richard to let them continue living in the house.

  They invited Richard and Sherry over for a dinner party. Brautigan and his girlfriend drove out from the City and took a room in Tarantino’s tiny motel, tucked behind Smiley’s. The Meltzers were vegetarians. Tina slaved all afternoon to make a tomato and tofu quiche, the sort of meal they considered a feast. Everybody sat around a big round table in the main room, the two couples and the Meltzers’ two children. “Cute little leany-beany scrawny kids,” Sherry recalled.

  Once the food had been served and Richard well plied with wine, David broached his plan, how they might stay on as caretakers, making sure the pipes didn’t freeze, keeping the house aired out and stocked with provisions. If Brautigan wanted to come for the weekend, all he had to do was call ahead, and “they would just split and stay somewhere else.”

  Richard paid close attention to David’s proposal. The food wasn’t to his liking, and he wasn’t preoccupied with eating. Sherry found the vegetarian tomato-tofu quiche almost inedible. “I ate my piece, but Richard didn’t touch his. I mean, he touched it, but like one bite.” Later, when they were lying in bed in the little motel room with the kitchenette, Sherry asked him, “Well, are you gonna do it? You know, let them stay?”

  “No,” Richard replied. “I’m not going to let them stay. That food was horrible.”

  “It was the food that killed her,” Sherry later observed. Tina Meltzer’s culinary efforts spoiled any chance of remaining in the house on Terrace Avenue. The Meltzers quickly modified their plans, deciding to leave the country once their lease was up. “We were going to emigrate to Europe,” David Meltzer said. “We were exiling ourselves.”

  Early in December, Alfred Parsons came by the Sharon Building in Bolinas and modified the inventory before signing it. He had decided to keep the studio couch, the two rocking chairs, an oval mirror, one of the marble-top dressers, and the andirons in the fireplace. The Realtor wrote to Brautigan about these changes, suggesting the items were “easily replaceable” and “not worth ruffling [Parsons’s] feathers over.” He sent along the inventory, together with a copy of the original 1890 deed.

  In mid-December, Richard put down $1,000 in earnest money, and Parsons and his wife signed a Bill of Sale, a Grant Deed, and an Assignment of Lease transferring the remaining portion of the Meltzers’ lease over to Brautigan. Richard deposited the money he’d need to close into his checking account and flew down alone to Monterey for New Year’s Eve with Price, staying at Borg’s Motel in Pacific Grove. He returned to Frisco on the second, writing a personal check for $31,799.55 to the Western Title Guaranty Company two days later. Payment in full.

  When Bruce Conner heard Richard bought a house in Bolinas, he was “dismayed.” Conner thought Brautigan’s motivation grew out of his “competitive tendency with other writers, you know, drinking at bars and hanging out at bars where writers hung out.” Bruce considered Bolinas a literary hotbed crammed with “poets and writers and editors.” It seemed Richard “was going to one-up them and have a bigger house than anybody.” Knowing Brautigan couldn’t drive and didn’t own a car, Conner asked his friend why he planned on living “way out there in Bolinas.”

  “I bought it. I’m gonna go there when I retire.”

  Conner felt even more dismayed. “Richard, writers don’t retire,” he said. “There’s no way you are going to retire.”

  “Yeah. I’m going to retire there in my old age.”

  Bruce Conner saw this in a different light. Artists don’t retire. Conner thought Brautigan picked this remote house as somewhere to go when it was time to die.

  Home ownership did not mean immediate occupancy. The Meltzers’ lease still had six months to run. David made sure his $150 rent check arrived on time each month. Richard recorded the sums in his income notebook, adding them to a running tally of royalty payments and foreign rights advances. He took out a $50,000 insurance policy on the Bolinas house in January.

  Jayne Palladino wrote to Brautigan in early February. She went by the name of Walker now. Her last love affair had ended painfully. She had passed her PhD exams. Freed from academic pressure, she felt life to be good once again. Jayne hoped to get together with Richard sometime soon.

  Sherry often came by Geary Street in the afternoons after school with stacks of fifth-grade papers to correct. Richard assisted with the homework, marking errors in the young girls’ writing assignments. Once the phone rang and Brautigan wandered from the room, dragging the long cord behind, engaged in an intimate conversation. A few minutes later, “a really pretty woman” arrived. She was beautifully dressed and sat on the bed opposite Sherry, who was correcting papers. The woman took off her boots and slipped off a pair of “silky knee-high stockings,” cuddling back onto the bed. “What is going on?” Sherry thought. She was twenty-one and considered herself a straight girl. “The idea of ménage à trois was something I had seen in the movies,” she said. Sherry started “getting a little picture here of something.” She excused herself, grabbed up her coat, papers, and car keys, and bolted out the door.

  Brautigan called her the next day. He was furious. “Why did you do that?” he demanded. “That was so rude! What did you think was going on?”

  Sherry shouted, “I never want to see you again,” and slammed down the phone. A couple hours later, Richard arrived at her apartment door, carrying a frozen duck under one arm and a shopping bag containing cans of escargot and a hardback copy of the Larousse Gastronomique. “This was his apology,” Sherry recollected. “Will you please cook this duck? And here’s the cookbook, and here’s the escargot. I remember saying to him, like, never do that to me again. Never try that again. And that was all that was ever said about it. I cooked canard à l’orange and the escargot and everything was happy again.”

  Whenever Sherry spied a hard brick-shaped inedible loaf of what Richard called “hippie bread” lying on his kitchen table, she knew it came from a rival. Brautigan would say to her, “I met this girl on the bus, and then she took me to her house, and we made love, and then she gave me this bread.”

  Outraged, Sherry responded, “God, you probably got a disease from her, and now you’ll give it to me!” Although he called her “his main old lady,” Sherry knew “there would be all these other o
nes.” She remembered Richard’s attitude when he told her Bob Creeley was “dumping Bobbie” and running off to Majorca with a young blond. He boasted to her of the times he and Edmund Shea boarded a city bus and bet each other a dollar who could pick up a girl first. “Get into her pants first,” Sherry elaborated. “I mean, that was exactly the way they phrased it. Whoever got laid first.”

  Bad boy grab-ass philandering didn’t always bring Brautigan much joy. Ron Turner, founder of Last Gasp Comics, recalled an evening in March of 1972 when things weren’t going so well for Richard. Ron, an ex–Peace Corps volunteer, had met Brautigan at The Pub, a bar at Masonic and Geary, a gathering place for artists where Richard often hung out. Allen Ginsberg was in town, on his way to Australia for a monthlong trip with Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

  That night, Allen was visiting with Richard at the Museum, while Ron hosted a huge Last Gasp party at The House of Good, an old deconsecrated synagogue. This beautiful building, located a few blocks further downtown on Geary, had been converted into a dance hall by Jonas Kovach (aka John Kovacs), an Auschwitz survivor and former Haight Street gay bar owner hoping to compete with Bill Graham’s Winterland. Turner hired several bands for the Last Gasp event and had all his comic publications displayed for sale.

  Shig Murao, manager and co-owner of City Lights, came with his girlfriend, among fifteen hundred partygoers at The House of Good. As the evening settled into its groove, Murao’s girlfriend, tripping on acid, returned after leaving and confronted Turner near the front entrance. “Shig’s had an accident! Shig’s had an accident!” she blurted. Ron asked what he might do to help and soon found himself on a street corner a block away from his big party. “The car was a mess, and [Shig] was a mess, and they took him into jail,” Turner recalled. “And so, I’ve inherited his girlfriend who is stoned out of her mind.” Trying to help, he asked where she and Shig had been going.

  “To see Allen over at Richard’s house,” the girlfriend replied.

  He was shorthanded that night and didn’t want to leave the Last Gasp shindig, but Ron did the right thing and loaded Shig’s girlfriend into his van, driving her over to Brautigan’s place. Richard met them at the door, beverage in hand. He looked depressed, mumbling, “So, you want something to drink?” shambling into the kitchen to pour them both whiskey. Ensconced in the front room, Allen Ginsberg sat “all dressed in robes and white,” reading his poetry to a group of about fifteen devoted young men, who were “just hanging on every word.”

  Brautigan seemed dressed in a peculiar fashion, uncharacteristically wearing a necktie. While Ron attempted to describe the predicament: Shig’s accident, his own giant Last Gasp function, how Allen seemed obviously engaged—“I don’t know what to do here”—the girlfriend noticed Richard’s necktie for the first time. Entranced by the vibrating colors, she exclaimed, “That’s the most beautiful tie I’ve ever seen in my life!”

  Brautigan burst into tears. “That’s the nicest thing anybody has said to me in days,” he sobbed.

  Shig’s girlfriend embraced Richard. “He’s bubbling away,” Ron said. Turner finally caught Ginsberg’s attention. “Allen,” he said, “We’ve got a problem. Shig—”

  “I’m staying with Shig,” Ginsberg interjected.

  “Not unless he gave you a key!” Ron told him about Shig’s accident, told him Shig was in jail. Ginsberg went into immediate action, manning the phone, calling various police stations, “bing, bing, bing,” until he located Shig. “He’s thinking really fast,” Ron recalled. “The bail was something like $500 to $800, and I said, ‘I don’t think I’ve got that kind of money on me.’”

  “No problem,” Ginsberg said, pulling up his white gown to reveal a bulging money belt containing his Australian travel stash. “He must have two grand in there,” Ron thought, watching Allen count out the bail money. They bundled into Ron’s Ford van, gloomy Richard, Shig’s tripping girlfriend, all fifteen Ginsberg fans, and Allen “sitting on the engine mount.” After dropping the fan club off on Polk Street, they proceeded to the cop shop on Ellis. Always the loner, Richard went off on his own then, vanishing into the night while Allen Ginsberg found himself surrounded by a crowd of autograph-seeking policemen. “Only in San Francisco,” Ron Turner said.

  Robert Creeley used to stop by the Geary Street apartment to visit Brautigan and hang out at the Museum either before or after teaching his class at San Francisco State. “Those were really terrific times,” he recalled. Creeley remembered one occasion when he and Brautigan were “together in some classic gathering in drunken company.” They started sneaking out of the room. Brautigan “looks back at all these people variously plopped about and says, ‘Let’s leave them with a “Gentle on the Mind” number.’ Most happy times.”

  Brautigan started seeing Jayne Walker again from time to time, cooking her occasional meals at Geary Street or going out for late-night ribs at soul food joints in the Fillmore. Other times, he took her to restaurants in Japantown, a dozen or so blocks down Geary from his apartment and to his favorite sushi bar in the Japan Center. Brautigan made it “perfectly clear” that he had been previously married and felt “that sort of exclusivity was a terrible mistake.” He told Jayne he would always have many partners, and at the time, she thought, “Maybe that’s a good idea.” True to his word, Richard maintained his relationship with Sherry Vetter and continued prowling Bay Area bars in search of a random piece of strange.

  One afternoon, Brautigan wandered into the Trident in Sausalito. Located at the end of a pier out in the Bay, the Trident was an upscale restaurant by day and a classy jazz club at night. Richard spotted some friends having a late lunch and joined them at their table. The journalist Mark Dowie (later an editor at Mother Jones who wrote the award-winning exposé of the Ford Pinto) sat with his fiancée, his sister, Ann, and her boyfriend, a married artist named Dugald Stermer. Brautigan knew the Dowies and Stermer. He pulled up a chair, sitting between Dugald and Mark’s girlfriend, Mary Ann Gilderbloom, a tall, willowy young woman who, at five eight, weighed only 103 pounds.

  Mary Ann, a fan of Richard’s work, was fascinated by the way the staff (“beautiful women in diaphanous blouses”) fawned over him as he entered. Brautigan ordered a drink, and she noticed he was staring at her. “He has this way of looking at women when he’s in his cups,” she recalled. “And he was looking at me.” Mary Ann was “kind of like oblivious” during this period of her life, a naive trait she felt was part of her charm. Richard was certainly charmed. He leaned in closer and asked, “Can I ask you out on a date?”

  “Thank you very much,” Mary Ann replied, “but I am engaged.”

  “Well, should you break up with the gentleman, then can I date you?”

  “That’s lovely,” she said. “Certainly. You’ll be the first to hear.” Nothing more was said of it.

  Early in April, feeling a need to get out of town for a while, Brautigan caught a Continental flight to New Mexico and traveled up to Santa Fe for two weeks. This time around, Richard stayed at La Fonda, at $21 per night a much classier establishment than his previous lodging in that city. As always, he got together with the Gordons, Jorge Fick, and other friends in the area. Partied out after a week, ensconced in room 422, Richard began his first work in months, writing a sequence of eight poems.

  Throughout the spring, as the term on their lease for the house in Bolinas was about to expire, the Meltzers maintained an amiable correspondence with Richard. David wrote regarding the regular bills, garbage pickup, propane, etc. Brautigan stayed away but arranged to have the roof mended. David, Tina, and the kids left at the end of June, and Brautigan drove out to Bolinas with Sherry Vetter in her little blue VW bug to take possession of 6 Terrace Avenue. On the way, they stopped at a hardware store, stocking up on brooms, mops, and about a dozen kerosene lamps, shoving them into a little car already stuffed with sheets, towels, and pillows. As Sherry busied herself cleaning the house, sweeping away cobwebs and removing squirrel nests from the outdoor cooler in the kitchen
, she heard Alfred Parsons drive up in his white Mercedes.

  Richard went out to greet him. Sherry watched from the deck balcony as Richard counted out money from his pocket into the old white-haired man’s hand. Brautigan later told her that he was paying for the house in cash, $30,000 in hundred-dollar bills. As the purchase had been made by check back in January, this clearly wasn’t true. What Richard actually paid for and just how much money he really gave to Mr. Parsons remains a mystery, his illusionary transaction another curious practical joke.

  Richard and Nancy Hodge were among Richard’s first Bolinas visitors, spending a weekend there shortly after he took possession of the place. Brautigan had a strange woman with him on that occasion. She wasn’t familiar to Brautigan’s attorney and his wife, who both knew Sherry Vetter. Richard had gone out to the house with Sherry a few days before, cleaning, moving furniture, and preparing a guest bedroom for the Hodges “with fresh flowers and fresh sheets on the bed.”

  At a Page Street dinner, Brautigan had asked Nancy Hodge to make curtains for the Bolinas house. Prior to their visit, Nancy bought the material (“he told me what he wanted”) at a fabric store on Geary Street. Nancy brought her little portable sewing machine and spent “about ten hours” stitching up the curtains.

  Tina Meltzer had gotten in touch with Richard before the end of May, sending news of their upcoming June rummage sale. At Brautigan’s request, she sent him a list of the larger household items (braided rugs, bookcases, and antique dressers) they had for sale. Among the offerings was an “autoharp with case $20.” Richard wasn’t interested. Having gone through an unsuccessful guitar phase, he had no further aspirations for an alternate career singing folk songs in coffeehouses. He left the autoharp strumming to his buddy Michael McClure.

  Richard and Michael were not friends much longer. “It was Richard buying the house that David and Tina lived in right out from under them and their two children that was the straw that broke my camel’s back,” McClure wrote in 1985 about why he quit speaking to Brautigan. David Meltzer emphatically denied any such assertion. “There are all kinds of stories that like Richard threw us out and all that,” he said, “That’s absolutely not so. These stories I think were generated by friends in Bolinas.”