Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Somewhere in the interim they passed out. Richard, Stan Fullerton, and several other cronies carried Price and his “date” naked and comatose from their love nest, depositing them in the bathtub. “A definite giggle session,” Fullerton said. Richard’s love for bizarre practical jokes came into play, and he poured several packets of green and red food coloring over the unconscious couple. “We woke up in the bath, screaming,” Price recalled. “Aaaaaa . . . !”

  Ginny found new secretarial work. Richard went back to his part-time job at Pacific Chemical, measuring out barium swallows formula two or three afternoons each week. To Richard, everything seemed “all right. Ginny is learning Russian and Ianthe is learning English.” The Brautigans returned the borrowed Royal portable to Mr. Lopez and rented an International standard for three months so Richard might continue working on his novel. In the evenings, Ginny neatly typed his notebook entries and rough drafts into legible chapters. When the term on the rental typewriter expired, Richard and Ginny coughed up $65 for a used electric IBM.

  After reading the back issue of Life magazine with news of Ernest Hemingway’s suicide, Brautigan began his first new work since returning from the trip, a chapter he called “The Last Time I Saw Trout Fishing in America.” The sudden loss of his artistic “father” triggered memories of itinerant fry cook Tex Porterfield (who first told him about trout fishing) and the winter they spent together in Great Falls, Montana, during World War II. Richard translated these emotions into a fantasy dialogue between the narrator and his eponymous title character. They discussed the narrator’s fear that the Missouri River would someday begin to resemble a forgotten Deanna Durbin movie he had seen “seven times” in Great Falls. Popular culture consumes our perceptions of reality, a parasite replicating its host. Fame ate the heart out of Hemingway. Richard Brautigan recognized the symptoms of this insidious social disease yet remained unable to diagnose them when he was himself infected.

  Another new chapter (“In the California Bush”) grew out of weekend trips Richard and Ginny took that fall across the Golden Gate Bridge to visit Lou Embree and his girlfriend, who lived in the hills above Mill Valley in a rented cabin overlooking San Francisco Bay. Their isolated rural world, eventually erased by four decades of relentless development, was still a tranquil rural place back before the million-dollar homes crowded in under the redwoods. Shielded by eucalyptus trees, Embree’s cabin had a cool basement, where Ianthe slept. Richard and Ginny, fresh from a summer-long camping adventure, bunked down outside under an apple tree, rising only when the morning sun rose high enough to bake them in their sleeping bags.

  The two couples enjoyed long breakfast conversations, fueled by cup after cup of strong black coffee. Brautigan called Lou “Pard” in his new chapter, recounting Embree’s exotic international upbringing and heroic war experience. Richard unleashed his refining eloquence in describing the natural world at Embree’s cabin, “the warm sweet smell of blackberry bushes along the path” where he jumped coveys of quail and watched them “set their wings and sail on down the hill.” Brautigan conveyed a stronger feeling for nature in a suburban setting than in his observations of the wilderness backcountry along the River of No Return. The “strange cabin above Mill Valley” remained a magical place where running deer startled Richard awake in the dawn.

  By Christmas of 1961, Richard Brautigan’s first novel was nearly complete, yet he instinctively felt something was still missing. A trip down to Big Sur early in 1962 solved the problem. Price Dunn had returned to the area in the fall of 1961, taking up with a woman with a nine-year-old daughter. He was looking for an affordable home and heard about an abandoned estate high atop a ridge in the Santa Lucia Mountains south of Gorda. The place at Lime Kiln Creek had been built in the 1920s by Victor Girard, an early Los Angeles land developer who Price thought had been a silent movie star. Back before Highway 1 was completed there were no roads along this remote coastline. Girard and his guests came by boat to San Simeon and rode over the same mountain trail used to pack in construction materials for his remote rural retreat.

  Forty years later, when Price Dunn wandered up the switchbacks, the land developer was long dead and his palatial “cabin” had burned to the ground, leaving only a fireplace and tall white river-boulder chimney. Brautigan saw it as “a sort of Carthaginian homage to Hollywood.” A roofless redwood servants’ cottage remained more or less intact along with several convict shacks at the bottom of the hill at Henderson Creek, remnants of the prison labor used to build the highway. It was a beautiful spot. The view from the high promontory was staggering. “You could see all the way to San Simeon—really gorgeous.” To Price, the old ruin was a squatter’s paradise.

  One problem remained. The abandoned homestead had no water. Price Dunn searched around and located a man over in the Livermore Valley who had a donkey for sale. Price bought “Old George,” and the burro packed the water Dunn’s makeshift family needed to survive on their ridgetop hideaway. George also carried up a cookstove and other supplies, including a metal roof Dunn purchased in sections at the Cleveland Wrecking Yard in San Francisco. Price nailed the roof on the servant’s cottage, snug inside with his woman and her child before the winter rains came.

  Richard Brautigan wrote to Dunn asking if he and his friend Ron Loewinsohn might come to Big Sur for a weekend visit. Price agreed and arranged a rendezvous, heading down from his mountaintop to meet them on the highway. “Naturally, we had a jug of wine,” Dunn recalled. “I’d been drinking beer, anyway.” It was a thirty-minute walk back up the hill along a steep switchback, and suitably fortified, the trio followed the path parallel to Lime Kiln Creek. “We all stopped to take a piss, and we’re looking down into the creek, and goddamn, right down there were these two huge steelhead. Big as my leg!”

  The trout were holding in a deep pool gouged into the narrow creek. Crazed with excitement, the three young men hurried to dam the lower end with boulders, blocking any possible escape. Leaving Richard and Ron to stand guard, Price rushed home and returned with a garden rake and his machete. Using branches, they drove the fish out of the deep water into the shallow end of the pool. Price waded in, wielding the rake, and somehow managed to stun one of the steelhead. The other got away. Price hacked the huge trout into submission with his machete, and they dragged it onto the shore, carrying their trophy up to the ridgetop cabin. They feasted that night. After a summer in Idaho, where a two-pound cutthroat ranked as a memorable catch, this enormous steelhead struck Richard Brautigan as auspicious.

  Price Dunn’s colorful cracker patois (“whips and jingles”) supplied Brautigan’s book with a hangover description. Richard was less impressed with his friend’s secondhand metal roof. He thought it “looked like a colander.” Not much help with the Pacific rains drumming down outside. Watching leaks drip down around them, Price told Richard he’d bought the roof at the Cleveland Wrecking Yard. Intrigued by a demolition company selling dismantled houses in bits and pieces, Richard peppered Price with questions as they drank their way through the night. A vision of used trout streams sold in sections by the foot sparkled in his imagination.

  A few weeks later, back in San Francisco, Brautigan boarded the number 15 bus on Columbus Avenue and rode over to the Cleveland Wrecking Company on Quint Street to check things out. He took careful notes about a thousand different doors and hundreds of toilets stacked on shelves. He observed the discounted laundry marking machine and gallons of “earth-brown enamel paint” selling for $1.10 per can. Richard Brautigan was a stickler for research. He got it all down exactly and described the wrecking yard with minute precision in Trout Fishing in America. The place provided a realistic background for his surreal vision of a dismembered trout stream for sale in a junkyard, one of the most striking images in American literature. With this chapter in place, Richard Brautigan knew he’d completed his first novel. It was mid-March 1962.

  nineteen: the fastest car on earth

  “BRAUTIGAN’S WRITTEN A great poem!” Jack Spicer
proclaimed, praising Trout Fishing in America in the bars of North Beach. Spicer had supported Richard’s book from its very inception, going over the manuscript with him, suggesting revisions and cuts. “Jack was absolutely fascinated with Trout Fishing,” Ron Loewinsohn recalled, “and spent a lot of time with Richard talking about it.” Spicer’s advice became subconscious editing. Donald Allen didn’t believe any of Brautigan’s books was ever edited. “Any time you can get Richard to accept criticism is an unbelievable accomplishment,” Loewinsohn observed. “He is so defensive, and so guarded; and Jack was able to get him to make changes.”

  Jack Spicer also provided introductions to powerful and important literary figures, urging them to read Brautigan’s book. Copies of the manuscript went out to local editors Donald Allen and Luther Nichols, and to Malcolm Cowley, far off in Sherman, Connecticut, while Richard Brautigan slaved part-time at Pacific Chemical (which had moved to 41 Drumm Street). Brautigan kept a copy of Hemingway’s short stories hidden in the basement of his workplace under an unused pile of old sheets, blankets, and pillows. He’d sneak down and read, sitting on an empty chemical drum, surrounded by “over 100 barrels of barium sulfate.”

  On his way to work, Richard often stopped off for lunch at one of his favorite cheap cafés, and on March 12, 1962, he began writing what he hoped would be a new novel. He called it“The Island Café.” It was a book about lunch. Subtitled “Part of a Short History of Bad Movies in California,” the brief unfinished work tapered off into a chronicle of film titles (two weeks of the daily billings at the Times Theater) but remained mostly about eating. Based on the Star on Kearny and the triangular US Café at the intersection of Stockton and Columbus, the Island Café was a place so ordinary it verged on the generic.

  Day by day, Brautigan recorded what he had to eat and described the other customers seated at the counter, workingmen, mostly Asians. There was no conversation. From week to week, nothing happened, strangers eating cheap food in silence. The stasis in the entries and a lack of dialogue evoked time’s monotonous passage. In this commonplace world, small everyday objects assumed extraordinary beauty: “I also noticed that next to the cash register right up by the flowers in the window there’s a toaster and next to the toaster there’s a Geritol box. One of those high alcoholic vitamin tonics. The whole arrangement struck my fancy.”

  Brautigan’s observations wove between detailed dietary entries (“March 16 [. . .] boiled beef and noodles, a boiled potato, clam chowder, the same lettuce salad with the French dressing [. . .] and some corn and some crackers and two slices of white bread and two pats of butter and some cream for my coffee and it cost me sixty-five cents”), a poor man’s hash house diary reflecting the author’s concerns: experimental fiction, the common man, ordinary everyday objects, and the meticulous keeping of lists. Jack Spicer appeared obliquely in the entry for Saturday the twenty-fourth. Saloon-hopping “down on the Embarcadero,” the narrator gets drunk and doesn’t eat at the Island Café. “For lunch we ended up getting some hamburgers from the bake shop and eating on the grass at Aquatic Park. A quart of beer and somebody with a radio listening to a baseball game.”

  After fourteen typewritten pages, the difficulties of sustaining this chronological exercise in torpor took its toll. Triple-features from the Times Theater began creeping into the menu entries. Brautigan inserted glimpses of his life among the lists of grade-B movies. One cold day in March, he turned down three films he’d never seen, “the first good bill on at the Times since this work was started,” because “a friend is coming over and we’re going to talk about a novel he’s written. I’ve had the manuscript for three weeks now.” Richard had been working on “The Island Café” about as long. A few entries later, Brautigan slipped his typescript into a manila envelope labeled the Military Industrial Supply Company that he found at work, wrote “Never finished Novel” on the back, and went on with other things.

  After leaving Bread and Wine, Pierre Delattre left North Beach and worked for a time as a cabinetmaker. In the fall of 1961, he got a call “from the head of the experimental department of missions of the Presbyterian church,” who told Delattre about St. David’s, an abandoned church for Welsh immigrants on Fourteenth Street between Guerrero and Valencia in the Mission District. Would Pierre be interested in doing something with the building? Their brief conversation marked the birth of the 14th Street Art Center.

  The empty church was huge. Among the dusty pews, Delattre found a number of old hymnals printed in Welsh. “The Welsh always love to sing and perform,” Pierre recalled, “and so they actually had two really wonderful stages.” The art community got behind Delattre’s efforts, helping him brighten the place with a fresh coat of paint. Soon, the center had a sculpture garden and a fledgling film department under the auspices of experimental movie makers Ron Rice and Agnes Varda. Pierre wanted to establish a program of readings like the one he’d had at Bread and Wine. With that in mind, he dropped in on his old pal Richard Brautigan in North Beach.

  Richard seemed a bit discouraged about the prospects for Trout Fishing in America. He hadn’t heard back from Don Allen. “In order to get Donald Allen to publish anything you have to be part of a gang that was really kind of fawning over [him],” Delattre remembered Brautigan saying. “He was joking about what he’d have to do to get Allen’s attention.” Trying to build up his friend’s confidence, Pierre “talked Richard into giving a reading” at the 14th Street Art Center.

  Brautigan read through his entire manuscript over two consecutive evenings. Ron Loewinsohn, in attendance both nights, remembered that Richard “did a good job. There was a good deal of reaction to the humor—people did laugh in funny places at the wit. Richard’s a good reader. He read clearly. He knew where the punch lines would come in. The pieces are short, so there was a little bit of a break between the pieces. I was absolutely taken with the resonance of the short serious passages, things like ‘The Towel,’ and the humor, the wit that was there, and was completely taken with the metaphor of trout fishing in America.”

  No record survives of the exact dates of Richard Brautigan’s extended reading of Trout Fishing in America. Pierre Delattre’s best estimate placed it either toward the end of 1962 or early in 1963. The latter date is more likely. “The place was jammed, and they were almost all North Beach poets and aficionados. It was the local artistic community that came,” Delattre said.

  Ron Loewinsohn recalled things differently. “I would say a sparse crowd, maybe twenty-five, thirty people. And a lot of them were some of Jack’s disciples and people who knew Richard and people who were part of this art center.” Both Spicer and Robert Duncan were in the audience. Donald Allen did not attend. No admission was charged. Brautigan passed the hat after reading for an hour and fifteen minutes.

  Delattre remembered the immediate response as wildly enthusiastic. “They loved it,” he said. “I felt that it told Richard that he had a terrific book.” Again, Loewinsohn differed in his assessment; Ron found the audience reaction “very mixed, very mixed.”

  Not long after, the excitement generated by the 14th Street Art Center caught the attention of higher-ups in the Presbyterian Church. “They had a meeting, and these social worker ministers started saying that we were giving all the attention to artists when there are all these people out on the streets who are hungry and drunk and so forth,” Delattre said. The authorities demanded half of St. David’s be turned back over to them. “In the end, we had to give them the lower floors of the church.” Discouraged, Delattre resigned his position and took a job on the waterfront as a longshoreman. He remembered having persuaded Richard Brautigan to read from Trout Fishing in America as “one of the things I most congratulate myself on.”

  The Dancers’ Workshop Company of San Francisco continued performing The Flowerburger at irregular intervals. After a performance that the Brautigans attended with Tom and Shirley Lipsett, the audience cried out “Author! Author!” Painfully shy, Richard slouched down in his seat, pushing hi
s friend up in his place. Tall, lean, and fair, Lipsett wore similar horn-rimmed glasses and looked a lot like Brautigan. Tom took a bow, a surrogate receiving the accolades meant for someone not yet accustomed to praise.

  Inspired by his first accidental collaboration with Anna Halprin’s company, Brautigan set to work creating a new dance for them. He called it “a ballet idea” and worked it out first in his notebook, later typing a quick rough draft. Richard described the piece, “Plumbing, Etc.,” in a letter to Halprin: “It is about a man who has a great liking for poetry [. . .] he decides to take the plumbing out of his house and replace it with poetry [. . .] I think it’s a pretty strange idea.” (In a sly dig, Allen Ginsberg replaced the toilet.) “Poetry cannot perform the functions of plumbing, so the man decides to take the poetry out and replace it with plumbing, but he runs into still another trouble, the poetry does not want to go [. . .]”

  Brautigan described the stage setting as “a huge pile of plumbing stuff.” He envisioned the dance beginning with John Graham sitting in a bathtub center stage, wearing the torn remnants of overalls and hip boots with swim fins attached. “He would then relate the history and events leading up to the present state, one of complete frustration, futility and defeat.” At this point, Anna Halprin and A. A. Leath make their entrance, “representing the poetry that doesn’t want to leave.” The plumbing ballet was never performed. Richard recycled the idea several years later in a short story he called “Homage to the San Francisco YMCA,” eventually included in his collection Revenge of the Lawn.

  In the spring of 1961, Robert Duncan and Jess moved back to the city from their retreat in Stinson Beach, taking an apartment in the Mission District. Duncan began hosting a weekly “salon.” Richard Brautigan met fellow poet Jory Sherman in North Beach (usually at Vesuvio) and they walked downtown every week across Market Street to Duncan’s apartment. At his salon, Robert Duncan sat in the corner of the main room on a raised platform, reading and talking about literature. “Richard was always quiet at these things,” Sherman remembered, “but from our walks together I knew he was brilliant and did not think along ordinary lines.”