Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Either later that afternoon or sometime the next morning, Barbara was walking north along Willamette in downtown Eugene, when she spotted her brother across the street, heading in the opposite direction. She was taking care of the Guistinas’ kids and had seen Dick only once since his release from the hospital. B.J. remembered that he had seemed “just kind of laid-back and sedate and very quiet,” in marked contrast to his previous behavior, “always full of energy and things going on in his mind.” Brautigan had phoned a few times from up at the Bartons’ place to read B.J. his new poetry, but it wasn’t the same as before. Dick struck her as “aloof—more wary, standoffish.” They were no longer close.

  On that last day, Dick waved and called out, “Barbara!” to get her attention. He waited for the traffic to clear before crossing over. “Hi. How’re you doing?” he said, and they started talking. Barbara remembered that “he had on that brown suede jacket he really liked.” After a few moments of casual conversation, Dick said, “Well, I’m leaving.” He didn’t mention San Francisco or tell her about his long-range plans. “We didn’t hug or kiss or anything,” Barbara remembered sadly. “He said, ‘I just wanted to say goodbye.’ And we stood there looking at each other for a couple of seconds, and then he rambled back over to the other side of the street, and that’s the last time I ever saw him.”

  ten: family album

  WHEN EDNA WEBSTER expressed a curiosity about Dick Brautigan’s family, he brought over a box of old photographs his mother kept hidden in her bedroom. Dick found them one day when his folks were away and took them without asking. They portrayed Kehoes and Dixons. Mary Lou had not saved a single snapshot of Ben Brautigan. After going through the pictures, he gave several of himself as a kid to Mrs. Webster. When Mary Lou discovered the photographs missing, she immediately suspected her son and asked what he had done with them. Dick told her he burned the photos. Unaware of her mother’s inquiry, Barbara wanted to look at the pictures on another occasion. She had never seen several and was curious about them. Dick repeated the same story, telling his sister he had burned them all. And that was the last anyone ever said about the matter. This uniquely unsentimental family forgot all about the lost photographs.

  Richard had not burned the family pictures. They were packed in one of his cardboard boxes when he left Eugene, among the very few personal possessions he took away with him. Many years later, his daughter grew increasingly curious about her family’s history. Every time Ianthe asked Richard to tell her about the relatives she had never seen, he stalled with one excuse or another. She remained insistent, pestering him for information about her unknown uncles and aunts, wanting to know what her grandparents and great-grandparents looked like. Richard promised when she became an adult he would tell her everything she wanted to know.

  Richard assumed, given enough time, that his daughter would forget her curiosity. Ianthe never forgot. On her nineteenth Christmas, alone with her father in the huge echoing living room of his Pacific Heights apartment, she finally got her wish. Richard and his second wife, Akiko, had split up earlier in December (1979), and the painful legal thrust-and-parry of divorce had just begun. The near-empty apartment, so recently a proud symbol of Brautigan’s enormous literary success, now seemed a sad manifestation of the couple’s final unhappiness. Aki had taken the rug and the stereo and much of the furniture. The imitation leather couches and an odd octagonal table were all she had left behind. Even the lamps walked out the door with her. The only light in the room, aside from the flickering fireplace, spilled in from a hallway ceiling fixture.

  Richard had just given Ianthe a check for $150. They sat down by the fire for a quiet Christmas evening. Abruptly, Richard set his whiskey glass on the table and jumped to his feet. He left the room, saying he’d be right back. Ianthe fingered the check, contemplating her father’s distinctive spidery signature. When Richard returned, he carried a manila file folder. With the deliberate care of someone handling extremely volatile material, he pulled an old Polaroid snapshot from the file and handed it to Ianthe, telling her it was a picture of her grandmother.

  Studying the old photo of a sharp-eyed, middle-aged woman smoking a cigarette in the shade of a willow tree, Ianthe puzzled over how her father happened to have such a memento of someone he hadn’t seen in almost a quarter century. Richard never corresponded with his mother. It’s possible Mary Lou sent him the picture when his sisters attempted to reestablish contact in 1970. More likely he brought it with him when he left home for good. There were several other photographs, all family pictures. Ianthe stared at them, trying to absorb their essence, searching for a connection to link her to an unknown personal history.

  After a while, Richard asked his daughter if she was “done looking.” She said, “Yes.” And he wanted to know if she was sure. Ianthe nodded her head. Without another word, her father, this mysterious man who had so completely turned his back on his own past, took the family pictures from her, stepped over to the fireplace, and scattered the photographs into the flames like a handful of dry dead leaves.

  eleven: reno

  THE LONG JOURNEY taking Richard Brautigan from Eugene to San Francisco began when Milo Stewart set off for the Bay Area to visit his sister. He drove Highway 99 (mainly replaced by Interstate 5), south out of Eugene, all the way to Sacramento, then west on U.S. 40 to Oakland. Richard took this route with Gary’s father. He had always wanted to see Reno, so Milo dropped him off in Sacramento. Richard hitchhiked to Reno by way of the Donner Pass.

  On a warm summer day in June, he passed under the steel arch spanning Main Street welcoming him to “The Biggest Little City in the World.” Richard looked first for a place to bunk for a couple nights. In 1956, Reno had not yet become a sprawling metropolis studded with high-rise casinos. Bisected by U.S. 40, the Truckee River, and its primary dividing line, the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks, Reno back then was just another of the neon-bright honky-tonk oases brightening Nevada’s highways at distant intervals in the vast empty desert.

  At the time, very few buildings in Reno stood over four stories. Gambling establishments and most of the bars congregated along several blocks of Virginia Street and a rowdy strip on Commercial bordering the tracks from Sierra to Center Streets. The city fathers acted as if no one ever shook a pair of dice or bet on blackjack or cranked a one-armed bandit within the city limits. Reno retained the quiet ambience of its tree-lined neighborhoods. In the words of writer Walter Van Tilburg Clark, it was a “city of trembling leaves.”

  Brautigan found a cheap room not far from Route 40 in a rundown part of town near the railroad tracks. It was a tiny chamber furnished with a narrow cot in a ramshackle flophouse so depressingly decrepit that he feared leaving his few humble possessions and carried the two cardboard boxes along with him when he set out to explore the sights. The first place on his itinerary was a bookstore. Finding his way proved not too difficult. Reno boasted dozens of casinos but possessed only one bookstore.

  Checking the poetry section, Brautigan came across a copy of Brushfire, the University of Nevada’s literary magazine. Leafing through its pages, he found the work of a young poet named Barney Mergen. The “Notes on the Contributors” mentioned that the author lived in Reno. Surmising he had found a kindred spirit, Richard looked up Mergen’s address in the phone book: 112 Ridge Street, way over on the south side, a part of town far removed from the high-toned north-end university neighborhood. Brautigan gathered up his cardboard boxes and started walking.

  Barney Mergen lived with his mother and grandmother in what by his own account was “the only honest-to-goodness rickety tenement building between Chicago and Sacramento.” Formerly a hospital, the old wooden apartment house stood a few blocks from the Riverside Hotel. Nineteen-year-old Barney, having completed his freshman year at the university, worked a summer construction job. He had just gotten off and was taking a bath when Richard Brautigan knocked unannounced on the front door. Mergen’s grandmother, “scared half to death” by the unexpected appea
rance of this unorthodox stranger, rushed to tell Barney that he had a visitor.

  “There’s a strange boy asking for you,” she said. He climbed out of the bathtub and toweled off. Dressing quickly, Barney went to investigate. He immediately recognized the accuracy of his grandmother’s assessment. Richard towered in the doorway, “thin as a reed,” his long wheat-blond hair worn in Dutch-boy bangs cut straight across his forehead just above the eyes. Barney had never seen anyone like him. In those days, men in Reno and everywhere else in America favored crew cuts.

  “Hello,” the peculiar stranger said, looking straight at Barney. “I’m Richard Brautigan, and I’m a poet.” The younger man was very impressed by Brautigan’s attitude and the way he had said, in effect, “this is not what I do, but this is what I am.”

  “He had a sense of destiny about him,” Mergen recollected many years later. “That was easy to see.”

  Brautigan explained he was on his way to San Francisco and needed a safe place to leave his belongings while he looked for work. Glancing about the small cramped apartment, Richard immediately deduced that there was no room here for him. Barney agreed to watch over his two cardboard boxes. “One contained manuscripts, and one held some socks, shirts, and underwear.” This composed the sum total of Richard Brautigan’s worldly goods.

  The two young poets set out together that evening to take in the town. Barney was astonished when Richard told him he had always wanted to see Reno. Mergen was desperate to get out of Nevada and head east, certain all the action was located on some distant shore. Barney couldn’t understand why anyone would go even a single inch out of his way just to see Reno.

  Nonetheless, he found Brautigan’s endless curiosity about everything fascinating. “I loved the way he was sort of opening himself up to the rest of the world,” Mergen recalled.

  Barney remembered how he and Richard wandered around the main drag together that night, “getting bounced from the gambling clubs because I was underage.” In Mergen’s recollection “the hostility of the security force was directed more toward him than toward me, because he looked different with those blond bangs and this intense, slightly insane look on his face.” They ended up in the coffee shop of the Mapes Hotel, at that time one of the newest and grandest establishments in the city. (Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the fifty-three-year-old Mapes building was demolished by implosion on January 30, 2000.) When the waitress came to take their order, Brautigan asked for “a watermelon milkshake.”

  “You some kind of wise guy?” she sneered, sore feet and long shifts not putting her in any mood for whimsy.

  Richard smiled up at her “beatifically” and settled for coffee. Barney Mergen felt certain he had just caught a glimpse of the future.

  Over the next few days, Richard and Barney spent many hours together, both poor working-class kids setting out on the uncertain path of literature. They bonded further when Brautigan discovered Barney’s actual first name was “Bernard,” same as the father he had never seen. Quite naturally, they talked about writers, sharing a mutual admiration for the work of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. “Williams for his style. We agreed on the greatness of Whitman.”

  Barney told his new friend of his chance dinner with Saul Bellow the previous spring while the novelist was at Pyramid Lake waiting for a divorce to become final. For Brautigan, such conversation provided a welcome change from the sort of provincial book talk he had engaged in with friends and family back in Eugene, where Hemingway remained the only author most of them knew anything about. The two young poets discussed F. Scott Fitzgerald. By his midtwenties, Brautigan had read The Great Gatsby seven or eight times.

  Barney and Richard also talked about Hemingway. “He liked the spareness of the prose,” Mergen recalled. “That impressed him. He didn’t like anybody who was too ornate or baroque.” They discussed Truman Capote, hardly a household name two years before the publication of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. An autodidact, Brautigan expressed strong opinions about Barney Mergen’s scholastic view of literature. “He had a certain amount of scorn for my classroom approach,” Mergen said. “That I had done most of my reading of poetry on assignment, rather than because I loved it.” Richard mentioned Capote as someone who had eschewed the university, going to work as an office boy at The New Yorker straight out of high school. “He idolized Truman Capote for his audacity.”

  At some point, Brautigan opened his cardboard box and dug out his collected works. “He had these things he would show me that he called novels that were only three or four pages long,” Barney Mergen remembered. Richard had packed copies of his recent minimalist notebook experiments. Among them was the manuscript for “i love You.” Even after forty years, Barney clearly remembered one of the poems: “for easter / i will give You / a white kitten.” In his own work, Mergen was into Richard Eberhart and just discovering Wallace Stevens. “My poetry was totally unlike his. I was trying to write like Dylan Thomas.” Brautigan didn’t care for Dylan Thomas.

  What struck Barney Mergen most forcefully at the time was Brautigan’s fully developed “sense of himself.” Even in his seminal writing, Richard had articulated a distinctive individual voice. “A lot of his themes were already there. It came out in conversations with me,” Mergen said. “When I read those early books, too, Confederate General and Trout Fishing, it was like hearing him again. They were very evocative. They just sort of picked up where we’d left off in conversation.”

  Not all of their talk was about books and writing. Richard told Barney enough about his hard-scrabble existence to convince the younger man that “his life had been remarkably like mine, only rougher.” Brautigan made mention of growing up in “extreme poverty,” and living in the “slums,” and said that he had been “abandoned by his father.” A certain truth informed all his exaggerated claims. The process of personal myth-making had begun.

  In an essay written after Brautigan’s death, Barney Mergen recalled: He told me about the time a bunch of men from some service organization had taken him fishing. After an evening of drinking around the campfire, one of the men suggested that they take Richard to a whorehouse, an act of charity common enough in those days, but only if he could prove himself worthy by showing them 10 inches. As Richard told the story, I understand that there were two points to it: one; that he had demonstrated the necessary length; and the other, that the episode proved man’s inhumanity to man. Richard’s mordant humor was deeply rooted in his past.

  Mergen proved to be on the money concerning the sources of Richard’s humor, but the story Brautigan told him was mostly fiction. He never drank before leaving Eugene and remained a virgin at age twenty-one. However well-endowed Brautigan might have been, the only brothels he had ever visited were in his imagination. A poem he titled “Love,” from the unpublished collection “The Smallest Book of Poetry in the Whole God-Damn World,” currently “cooling its alabaster heels” at New Directions even as Richard boasted of fantasy exploits in Reno, ended with the lines “What this / kid needs / is a / meal ticket / at a / whore house.”

  Richard Brautigan hung around Reno, spending time with Barney Mergen every afternoon and evening for four or five days, until he got word of a construction job in Fallon and hitchhiked sixty miles east into the desert to seek it out. Located on Route 50 in the Carson Sink, Fallon is the county seat of Churchill County and even before Mike Fallon (the town’s namesake and first postmaster) built a crossroads store on his ranch in 1896, the place had been a stopover along the emigrant trail to California.

  In his memoir, Downstream from Trout Fishing in America, Keith Abbott recounted a story Brautigan told him about being so broke one spring in the late fifties that he traveled to Reno for a promised laboring job. Abbott related Brautigan was informed upon arriving that the job wouldn’t start for three days. “He had no money for a room and very little for food. On his first night he had a series of comic encounters with a Reno [sic] cop who kept finding him curled up on park benches
. Threatened with jail, Richard hiked to the outskirts of town and found an old easy chair abandoned in the corner of someone’s suburban yard.” According to Brautigan, he waited each evening for the lights in the house to go out and then slept in the chair, wearing all the clothes he had brought as protection against the chill nighttime desert air.

  This experience stayed with Brautigan for the rest of his life. Two years before his death, he wrote of his “romantic” fondness for neon lights. He liked them because “they remind me of Nevada.” Reminiscing about his time there in the middle fifties, he recalled the little towns with their neon lights, “and at night there was the cool crisp smell of sagebrush [. . .] mingling with the neon.” In his borrowed backyard easy chair, the flashing casino lights of Fallon glowed like the aurora borealis, a magical Technicolor omen of the future.

  After shivering through three cold nights, Brautigan finally started his construction job, and after his first day he received an advance on his pay. With jack in his jeans at last, Richard rented a cheap motel room. In the euphoria of having a warm bed to sleep in, he pulled his pockets inside out, scattering change and crumpled bills all across the floor in ecstatic celebration of his newfound solvency. This began a ritual Richard Brautigan continued for the rest of his life.

  The job in Fallon lasted a month or more. Solitary by nature, Brautigan found ample time to write in his off hours. From its earliest days, Fallon boasted two weekly newspapers, the Eagle and the Standard. One hot summer afternoon, Richard brought his poetry over to a single-story red brick building at 8 Center Street, climbing the pyramidal steps leading to a corner-alcove entrance. The Fallon Standard began as a six-column hand-set paper in 1907, the year the town was born. Claude E. Smith had been the editor since 1926, following a four-year stint at the Eagle.