Richard’s friends looked after him. Loie Weber always made extra when she brewed soup in her big cast-iron pot next door. “Richard at that time was so poor,” she remembered. He’d come over often “and just eat soup. He was hungry, and he didn’t have much.” Erik Weber recalled how “Richard would spend most of his time at our house because he had no phone and no money for food. He’d come down the back stairs, then in the house.”
When Brautigan moved into Ori Sherman’s apartment there was no refrigerator. Lew Welch and Magda Cregg found a secondhand fridge somewhere in Marin. Lew borrowed a truck, and they drove it over to Geary Street. “That was our gift to Richard,” Magda recalled. Other friends made sure the fridge didn’t stay empty. John Doss worked as chief of pediatrics at Kaiser across the street, and Margot often left “something in Richard’s refrigerator for him—a quart of soup or a pasta with a good sauce.”
Something about “the way he said yes and ate it,” stuck in Keith Abbott’s mind after he offered Brautigan a sandwich one day when the writer dropped by on his way to Golden Gate Park. “We would eat before we went on our rambles,” he wrote in his memoir. Keith was another struggling writer from the Pacific Northwest, also an Aquarius born in Tacoma, a connection that struck a chord with Richard Brautigan. Abbott had moved down to Monterey from Seattle the year before, becoming friends with Price Dunn. After Price brought him by Geary Street, Keith saw a lot of Brautigan, who soon included Abbott in his literary world, introducing him to Don Carpenter, Lew Welch, and Mike McClure.
“Richard loved the poems from Spicer’s book Language [published in 1965],” Keith Abbott wrote later, “and could recite some from memory.” Brautigan also introduced Keith to the short stories of Isaak Babel, the great Russian Jewish writer who rode with the red cavalry, and urged him to read Guy de Maupassant. Abbott recalled that his friend “revered” the “simple and clear language” in Sherwood Anderson’s story “Death in the Woods.” Other favorites in his sparse library (“a writer’s library, only literary works, very little criticism”) were By-Line, a collection of Hemingway’s early journalism, and a complete set of The Greek Anthology.
Keith and Richard often wandered the city together, trading stories. He recalled this time in Downstream from Trout Fishing in America.
In those days going around with Brautigan was like traveling inside one of his novels. With friends Richard talked just as he wrote. Outrageous metaphors and looney tune takes were commonplace; one-liners, bizarre fantasies, and lightning asides [. . .] He loved to improvise verbal games [. . .] deadpan, pretending to have no humor at all.
Often, they spent hours trading tough-guy Bogart movie quips or inventing comic parodies of ancient Chinese poetry. According to Abbott, Brautigan said that these routines “disappeared in their becoming.”
Street life provided an ever-passing carnival parade in the Haight, a people watcher’s paradise with the park waiting right around the corner. Brautigan described a favorite walk in “The Haight-Ashbury Crawdad,” an unpublished short story. “It’s beautiful where Haight Street meets Stanyan Street at the Golden Gate Park. I like to walk through the William A. McCavley Memorial Gateway late in the afternoon to sit and enjoy the last hour before sundown.” Richard had plenty of time for sitting. His only published novel sold fewer than a thousand copies. Three manuscripts drifted in a Sargasso Sea of rejection letters. Taking a break from long fiction, Brautigan wrote only short stories and poetry that summer.
A decade younger, aspiring writer Keith Abbott regarded Richard Brautigan as an old pro. Richard’s very survival, living off his writing, struck Keith as a triumph. Brautigan’s life seemed imbued with a “heroic aura.” Abbott found optimism to be “the one amazing constant” about his new friend. In spite of poverty and rejection, Brautigan maintained a positive outlook. Richard “clearly regarded his daily life as its own work of art,” Keith later observed. It was a simple, uncomplicated life. Morning hours Brautigan reserved for work. After a round of lunchtime phone calls, he spent the rest of the day in pursuit of happiness.
Haight Street had become an exotic bazaar. On any corner, one might observe neo-Edwardian dandies, paleface Indians, blanket-wrapped mock swamis, and a steady procession of guitar-carrying minstrels. At the beginning of the year, twelve empty storefronts haunted the shopping district. By the end of spring, they were filling up fast. In Gear (mod clothing), the Blushing Peony (boutique), Mnasidika (leather apparel), the House of Richard (Mexican ponchos), Far Fetched Foods (aka “Blind Jerry’s”), and the I/Thou coffee shop had all opened their doors for business. The old Haight Theater (formerly a neighborhood movie house, a gay porn cinema, and an Assembly of God church) had been leased in May and renamed the Straight Theater. By midsummer, even after large investments from acid king Owsley and the bands Quicksilver Messenger Service and Big Brother and the Holding Company, remodeling was not finished. The partners dreamed large, envisioning a block-sized cultural complex.
While the Straight Theater converted its seating arrangement into a dance floor, ex–Mime Trouper Bill Graham turned the Fillmore Auditorium into a theater, if only for a single evening in July, when he presented the second performance of Michael McClure’s The Beard. The capacity crowd greeted this amplified original-cast reprisal (backed by “an enormous and beautiful light show with everything from movies of horses running through liquid projections to other projections of movies of little girls skipping rope and clouds passing by”) with an enthusiastic ovation.
Graham canceled a second performance after the police informed him that the actors would be arrested and he would lose his license. The next performance of The Beard, several weeks later, was at the Committee Theater in North Beach. This time cops were in the audience, filming the cunnilingus scene at the play’s climax. When the house lights came up, they busted the two performers for obscenity. An element of the absurd attended the event, considering it was business as usual for the many topless bars in operation that night up and down Broadway.
Early in the year, Bob Dylan gave Michael McClure an autoharp. The poet had been writing songs although he thought himself “totally unmusical.” After letting the instrument sit for six weeks on the mantel, McClure started strumming, the first chords in what would be a year and a half spent learning how to play. “I bought an amplifier and stood for hours whanging on the autoharp.”
Richard picked up on this and started writing a few songs of his own. He had his pawnshop guitar yet spent very little time whanging on it. Victor Moscoso, the poster artist, who lived at the time with his wife, Gail, on Grant Avenue above the Tivoli Restaurant, remembered Richard dropping by in the evenings. Victor played the guitar, “old-timey Carter Family stuff and moderate bluegrass. Nothing very fancy.” Brautigan often fooled around with Moscoso’s guitar. “He could strum. He could play a couple of chords. Couldn’t sing. He was atonal. Couldn’t hold a key.” Victor thought Richard sang popular tunes or folk songs. “He didn’t sing any of his poems.”
Shortly after moving into the Geary Street apartment, Richard sent “Homage to Rudi Gernreich,” together with Erik Weber’s pet cemetery photographs, to Peter Desbarats at Parallel. In July, Desbarats turned the piece down, finding the subject not to his liking. July also brought a rejection letter from Andre Deutsch Ltd. in England. If Brautigan wished to have the typescript of In Watermelon Sugar returned, he must include the appropriate postage. Richard’s reply snidely requested that the novel be sent “to me in the cheapest way possible and bill me for the postage.”
The Grove Press contract for Trout Fishing in America expired on July 22. Nine days later, the publishers’ option period for The Abortion also came to an end. Brautigan had no word from Grove for three long weeks. During this time, he pondered his options, consulting with Don Carpenter and Michael McClure about all the various possibilities. On August 24, Richard wrote to Barney Rosset, terminating any future business relationship. “Grove’s lack of interest in honoring the thirty-day decision paragraph
in its December 3, 1965 letter to me has forced me to seek another publisher for my work.”
The same day, Richard posted a letter to Donald Hutter at Scribner’s. Under separate cover, he mailed the editor copies of In Watermelon Sugar and The Abortion. His letter said the new book “looks good to me. It is a novel utilizing the contemporary energies of California.” Richard went on to say that he had always “admired Scribners [sic] as a publisher” and had been “encouraged” by Hutter’s initial reaction to his writing. Brautigan hoped that “something can come from it.”
In the beginning of September, a postcard arrived from France. Tom Clark, a young American poet currently residing in Brightlingsea, Essex, England, had Brautigan’s address from Joanne Kyger. He was editing a serial magazine whose title altered slightly with each issue (Once, Twice, Thrice, Vice, Slice, Ice). Clark was preparing Nice, the latest in the series, for publication, and having read and liked “The Menu” and the chapters from Trout Fishing in the Evergreen Review, he wondered if Richard might send him something he could use. Brautigan selected “The Armored Car,” a surreal tale about his childhood paper route. He had written it during happier times with Janice a year or so before. The story was dedicated to her.
This submission remained a labor of love, as Brautigan knew acceptance brought no actual payment. Richard remained desperately poor that fall. Andrew Hoyem described him as “penniless” in his journal entry for September 10, after they dined together (Hoyem’s treat) at Des Alpes, a family-style Basque restaurant on Broadway in North Beach. In return, Brautigan promised to try to get his friend a reading at the Rhymers Club. Two days before, Richard mailed his short story “⅓, ⅓, ⅓” off to Charles Newman at TriQuarterly. He hoped for a quick sale.
The same day, Brautigan sent a copy of Trout Fishing to Donald Hutter at Scribner’s. Now the editor had all three of the author’s unpublished novels in hand. Financial necessity often provides a fertile breeding ground for innovation, and in his cover letter, Richard suggested an idea that demonstrated his uncanny perception regarding the marketing of his material. “What about putting all my novels together as one book?” he wrote. “I think it might be a good way of doing it.” Brautigan was years ahead of his time.
By September of 1966, the counterculture community of the Haight-Ashbury had taken on all the aspects, both good and bad, that intense media attention soon would make intimately familiar to the world at large. Hip shops had proliferated throughout the district. Drugs (pot, speed, and acid) were sold openly on the street. The burgeoning population and subsequent housing shortage resulted in overcrowding and ever-escalating rents. Many of the newcomers were destitute and homeless. Panhandling became an everyday problem. In spite of these troubles, a feeling of utopian optimism prevailed. The Age of Aquarius waited just around the corner.
A unique newspaper heralded the arrival of this psychedelic paradise. On Tuesday, September 20, the premier issue of the City of San Francisco Oracle appeared in the Haight. Bankrolled by Ron Thelin and edited by a short, bearded poet named Allen Cohen (with the assistance of Michael Bowen, a visionary painter whose studio served as an early office for the paper) the Oracle, with its swirling rainbow-hued headlines, looked utterly unlike any other journal on earth.
Volume 1, number 1, contained an article on the Provos, a Dutch anarchist group dedicated to revolutionizing contemporary consciousness. Among their civic activities, the Provos had gathered a number of used bicycles, painted them white, and distributed them across Amsterdam. The bikes were free for anyone to use. You simply pedaled to your destination and left the bicycle on the sidewalk for whoever needed it next.
Emmett Grogan had no love for the Oracle, which he felt “catered to the new, hip moneyed class,” but found much to admire in the stories concerning “the ‘Beatnik-Anarchist Provos’ in Holland.” Grogan’s longtime friend Billy Murcott, “the one he called ‘the genius,’” had arrived in Frisco from New York at the beginning of August, and the two often joined in after-hours political bull-sessions around a jug of cheap Cribari wine with Peter Berg, Bill Fritsch, Peter Coyote, Kent Minault, and various other Mime Troupe members. These discussions dealt with the new freedom to which young people aspired. All agreed that “one could only be free by drawing the line and living outside the profit, private property, and power premises of Western culture.” Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger rebellion became their model for achieving such lofty goals.
Many in the Haight community espoused universal LSD use as path to utopian ideals. Michael Bowen, busted along with Tim Leary at Millbrook earlier in the year by G. Gordon Liddy (then an assistant DA in Poughkeepsie), had earned the sobriquet “psychedelic ranger-man” for his efforts at turning on the world. Although they both enjoyed getting high, Emmett Grogan and Billy Murcott (Grogan’s “almost invisible companion”) envisioned a different solution. Toward the end of September, they started sneaking into the SDS office next door to the Mime Troupe loft late at night and appropriating the mimeograph machine to get their message out. The handbills the two ran off surreptitiously were the first of what later came to be known as the “Digger Papers.” As Grogan explained in Ringolevio, his fictionalized autobiography, “the Papers were an attempt to antagonize the street people into an awareness of the absolute bullshit implicit in the psychedelic transcendentalism promoted by the self-proclaimed, media-fabricated shamans who espoused the tune-in, turn-on, drop-out, jerk-off ideology of Leary and Alpert.”
At the end of September, Grogan and Murcott, the anonymous Digger duo, had published at least three of their confrontational Papers. Their ferocious honesty and surrealist verve captured Richard Brautigan’s imagination, distracting him from the everyday scramble of trying to earn a living. Tom Clark wrote from England. He liked “The Armored Car” a lot and was including it in Nice. The payment was two copies of the magazine. Clark mentioned that he was also “sometimes” poetry editor of the Paris Review (“—I mean I suggest poems they sometimes use—”). He asked Richard to send him any “uncommitted” chapters from Trout Fishing and said he’d pass them along to “the bigger editors.” Clark received no salary, but contributors were paid between $100 and $150. Brautigan mailed him a couple chapters the next day.
When the managing editor of TriQuarterly wrote to say that “A Short History of Religion in California” would be reprinted in a magazine called the Humanist, Richard answered with a request that he be paid for the second serial rights. When he heard back, it was bad news. Since Brautigan hadn’t stipulated any retention of second serial rights, TriQuarterly retained stewardship of the copyright. No payment was forthcoming, as the magazine had received none. On the bright side, Brautigan’s story picked up ten thousand new readers.
A letter from Donald Hutter dashed all hopes of a sale at Scribner’s. Hutter had read The Abortion, and although he thought it the best of the three Brautigan manuscripts and admired the “lovely, consistent quality,” in the end he felt “a sense of slightness, a feeling of scale too modest and ephemeral for hopes of impressing a general readership.” Following this rebuke, Hutter admitted other publishers might not agree with his opinion and offered “to forward the manuscripts to another house.” Richard wrote back, asking that the novels be sent over to Charlotte Mayerson at Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Amid the rioting and curfews following a fatal shooting in Hunters Point, Ken Kesey returned from Mexico, “as salt in J. Edgar Hoover’s wounds.” He turned up at Stewart Brand’s “Awareness Festival” at San Francisco State, flanked by a bodyguard phalanx of Hells Angels. The word was out: “Kesey’s back.” Five days later, at the time of a full moon, LSD possession became illegal under California law. The date, 10/6/66, caused many in the Haight to think ominous thoughts. The number of the Beast of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelations was 666.
What a bummer! To exorcize the demons, Michael Bowen and Allen Cohen had planned a big celebration for the sixth that they called the “Love-Pageant Rally.” The promotional leaflets
the Oracle printed contained a “Prophecy of A Declaration of Independence” and urged participants to “Bring the color Gold, bring photos of personal saints and gurus and heros of the underground . . . bring children . . . flowers . . . flutes . . . drums . . . feathers . . . bands . . . beads . . .” At two in the afternoon, seven or eight hundred new age citizens trooped into the Panhandle
At two in the afternoon, seven or eight hundred new age citizens trooped into the Panhandle waving banners and flags, beating drums and tambourines, joyously blowing trombones, tubas, and conch shells. A flatbed truck, newly painted red, served as a stage for the musicians. Three bands, Wildflower, Big Brother, and the Dead, played that afternoon while the assembly of free spirits danced with frenzied abandon under the eucalyptus trees. As Charles Perry observed in his history of the Haight-Ashbury: “It was one of those ideas people had been waiting for, like the Family Dog dances or the Trips Festival; a gathering to bear witness to the psychedelic life [. . .]”
The multihued Prankster bus stood parked nearby on a street flanking the Panhandle, flying a marijuana leaf flag designed by Mouse (Stanley Miller), the poster artist. Its owner, Ken Kesey, put in a brief appearance but split well before an undercover narc hopped on board asking to see him. The press was everywhere, reporters scribbling notes and five television film crews poking their cameras into the festivities, but the Love Pageant ended up not being the big underground story of the day. After all was said and done, Kesey stole the headlines in the Chronicle. In an “exclusive interview” with Donovan Bess, the fugitive talked about life on the lam and revealed his plans for an “LSD Graduation Ceremony” to be held at Winterland on Halloween night. Captain Trips upped the ante once again.
Michael Bowen and Allen Cohen watched the event from a vantage point on Clayton Street. The Oracle editors took pride in their achievement. Richard Alpert, Leary’s former colleague, came walking by, and Bowen waved him over to ask what he thought of it all. Alpert agreed that the rally was a great success. Allen Cohen suggested staging another similar gathering and wondered what Alpert would call it.
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