Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  At the Human Be-In, Anderson and Hayward identified themselves as The Communication Company (later commonly abbreviated as com/co) and passed out printed poems and a list of cool places to trip. Three days later, Chester used the second half of his advance for The Butterfly Kid to make a $300 down payment to the Gestetner Corporation of California for a brand-new Gestetner 366 silk-screen stencil duplicator and a Gestefax justified electronic stencil cutter. With these amazing machines and an IBM typewriter on loan from Ramparts, they set up shop in Hayward’s apartment. Able to print up to 10,000 copies “of almost anything we can wrap around our scanning drum,” including halftones and art in four colors, The Communication Company was open for business.

  Com/co’s one-page purpose statement broadside said it all. “OUR POLICY: Love is communication.” The list of “PLANS & HOPES” promised to provide quick & inexpensive printing service for the hip community . . . to print anything the Diggers want printed . . . to do lots of community service printing . . . to supplement the Oracle with a more or less daily paper whenever Haight news justifies one . . . to be outrageous pamphleteers . . . to revive The Underhound . . . to function as a Haight/Ashbury propaganda ministry, free lance if need be . . . to publish literature originating within this new minority . . . to publish occasional incredibilities out of an unusual fondness for either outrage or profit, as the case may be . . . to do what we damn well please.

  The Communication Company lived up to all of these promises. They also pledged “to keep up the payments” on their “MAGNIFICENT” Gestetner machines but, after the initial three hundred bucks, the remaining $672 they owed was never paid. Claude Hayward’s mechanical skills (all the more remarkable as he was nearly blind and wore thick corrective black-lens glasses) enabled him to keep the Gestetners running without any technical support from the corporation. Com/co started making some money within a couple months, but the bulk of its support came from Owsley Stanley and various other charitable drug dealers. The Diggers did their part by supplying ream after ream of purloined paper. Com/co held up its end of the deal and printed anything the Diggers wanted. Soon, the neighborhood was flooded with their provocative handbills, a dramatic escalation of Grogan and Murcott’s earlier efforts. By the time Richard Brautigan got back to Frisco after his poet-in-residence stint, com/co publications were hitting the streets daily.

  On January 20, the Diggers’ Free Frame store on Frederick Street (along with Swami Bhaktivedanta’s Radha-Krishna Temple, which had set up shop next door in the same building) had a condemned notice posted on the entrance. When Timothy Leary appeared at Winterland a week later, in his one-man Buddha show, he was immediately denounced by a Chester Anderson com/ co poem circulated the next day. During a meeting between the HIP merchants and San Francisco police chief Thomas Cahill four days earlier, a new label was pinned on the psychedelic age. Gertrude Stein had famously named the Lost Generation, and Jack Kerouac came up with the term “Beat Generation.” Ironically, it was Frisco’s top cop who, in the course of this meeting, said to the gathering of hippie store owners, “You’re sort of a Love Generation, aren’t you?”

  Richard Brautigan looked the part (Claude Hayward remembered him always wearing his trademark navy peacoat and battered Stetson, “usually reeking of patchouli”), as did Chester Anderson, but they were both more than a decade too old to qualify for membership in the Love Generation. The two men shared a greater affinity as fellow writers than mere sartorial similarities. Brautigan felt attracted to com/co because of the Digger connection and their pledge to publish literature originating within the hip community.

  Trout Fishing in America proceeded through its various production phases, and Richard expected the book to be out before summer. In addition, with the help of Don Carpenter, who had written a letter to editor A. C. Spectorsky, Brautigan submitted a group of nine stories to Playboy, hoping to see them published “together as a group.” Although The Viking Press had rejected The Abortion, Bob Mills was “convinced the book deserves to be published” and resubmitted it to Arthur Fields at Putnam’s. Failing there, he had “a lot of other places in mind.”

  The planned Coyote Books collection of his poetry prompted Brautigan to work mostly in that medium. Citing a newly written poem, he jotted a possible title in his notebook: “Boo, Forever: Some Poems 1957–1967.” He’d also thought a lot about a new novel he planned on writing later that year. What he had in mind was a Western. He’d long loved Western movies, steeping himself in Hollywood quick-draw folklore at countless afternoon triple features and devouring the literature of the West, everything he could get his hands on, from Francis Parkman to Louis L’Amour. Brautigan wrote to Bob Mills about his plan. (“I’ve always wanted to write a Western and so that’s what I’m going to do.”)

  The landlord padlocked the front entrance of the vacated Free Frame of Reference, officially closed by order of the health and fire departments, and nailed a wire grate over the rear windows. By early February, the Diggers also had to deal with another problem. Their old Ford station wagon had given up the ghost, and it looked like the Yellow Submarine would soon follow it to the automobile graveyard. Without these vehicles, the Diggers had no way to round up the produce they needed for their free food program.

  Richard Brautigan came to the rescue. He knew a beautiful young heiress called Flame who wanted to make a donation to the Diggers. Pam Parker, a member of the fountain pen family, had money to burn, Emmett Grogan’s favorite pyrotechnic gesture. A “stunning” redhead with pale ivory skin, Flame had much more going for her than mere good looks. Peter Coyote later praised Parker’s “fearless humor” and “steel-trap mind.” The Diggers asked Brautigan if the mysterious beauty would “go for a pickup truck?”

  “Sure,” Richard replied without hesitation. Brooks Butcher had been eyeing a ’58 Chevy pickup in great condition with brand-new tires. He had Brautigan take him to see Miss Parker and returned that evening driving the coveted truck. The pickup saved the day and became the Diggers’ trusty workhorse. Flame in turn became Butcher’s “old lady,” moving in with him at a Webster Street storefront in the Fillmore District.

  The Diggers located a new and much bigger home for their free emporium at 901 Cole, a corner storefront at the intersection of Carl Street. Tall plate glass show windows faced both streets. A surrounding second-floor mezzanine balcony added needed space. The initial rent money came from a wealthy patron, and Peter Coyote, Sweet William, the Hun, and other Diggers cleaned the interior, covering the walls with a coat of donated white paint. Soon, the racks and counters overflowed with discarded clothing, secondhand kitchen appliances, used TVs, and hi-fi sets: a Salvation Army cornucopia of consumer culture throwaways.

  Emmett Grogan expressed surprise when Peter Berg signed the lease and began hustling rent money. The Hun had shown only a marginal interest in the two previous free stores, preoccupied with his work for the Mime Troupe. Before long, Berg took over the management of the new establishment, renaming it “The Trip Without a Ticket” and making it the focus for his radical ideas about “guerrilla theater.” His wife, Judy Goldhaft, ran a free sewing workshop and taught tie-dye techniques, launching an underground fashion trend that swept the country.

  The Hun resigned from the Mime Troupe and devoted all his time to The Trip Without a Ticket, viewing the store as a theater and all of its “customers” as “life actors” in dramas of their own invention. Berg developed his thoughts on the subject into an eight-page manifesto titled “Trip Without a Ticket” (“Guerrilla theater intends to bring audiences to liberated territory to create life actors”), which The Communication Company printed as a pamphlet and distributed for free throughout the city. Another Digger manifesto proclaimed, “the Trip Without a Ticket will be total theater and offer the store as a social art form.”

  Peter Berg’s ideas carried great weight with Richard Brautigan, who spent a good deal of time in his company during this turbulent year. Art Boericke, a professional gardener somewhat older
than the other Diggers, remembered seeing Brautigan at Peter and Judy’s little cottage in the Inner Mission “three or four times a month,” whenever Art came into the city from Marin. “I can hardly remember a single occasion when I was at their home when Richard was not there. I am sure he must have been there a good portion of the week, at least evenings.” Brautigan was already a life actor. Over the past decade, he had gradually created the character he inhabited. The Hun’s penetrating intellect and radical ideas validated this endeavor.

  Peter Berg remembered Brautigan as “very polite and meticulous. He never talked about poverty, the war, racism, or police brutality in his writing. He more or less forfeited political analysis to people like myself.” Richard hung out with the Diggers and felt sympathetic with their goals, but his attraction was emotional, not philosophical. As Berg recalled, “If you asked him about the class system he would reply, ‘There are no classes in a lake,’ his point being that nature is grander than classes.”

  All this time, the philosophical difference between the Diggers and the HIP merchants had escalated to the point where all sides agreed mediation would be beneficial. Seeking a neutral site for their discussion, they selected Glide Memorial Church, downtown in the Tenderloin at the corner of Taylor and Ellis. Though it had once been a middle-class neighborhood, years of neglect transformed the Tenderloin into a gritty slum where homeless winos huddled in doorways and prostitutes of both sexes plied their trade day and night. These outcasts became Glide’s new congregation. Under the dynamic leadership of Reverend Cecil Williams, an exuberant black man who knew in his heart the true meaning of Christian love, the venerable Methodist church opened its doors to the dregs of society. Glide offered a drug rehabilitation program, job placement, daycare, and a free lunch service that fed thousands every week. It was a church close to the Diggers’ hearts.

  Early in February, both sides gathered in the basement, the conference speakers seated on a circle of chairs surrounded by more than one hundred spectators. The main issue was the projected influx of over fifty thousand young people into the Haight-Ashbury once school let out for the summer. Because of the media attention attracted by the HIP-sponsored Be-In, the Diggers believed the Haight Street merchants had to take responsibility and make contingency plans for the newcomers’ welfare. All the store owners had to offer was a rehashed version of the Job Co-op (which hired runaway teenage girls at a buck an hour to sew up embroidered dresses for their hip boutiques) and a proposal by the Thelin brothers to turn the back room at the Psyche Shop into a “calm center” where kids off the street could come down from bad trips.

  This enraged Emmett Grogan. He jumped to his feet and launched into a vicious tirade denouncing the HIP merchants as “cloud-dwellers” and “motherfuckers.” Strutting like a movie gangster with his IRA cap pulled down over one eye, Grogan berated the long-haired shopkeepers before storming out of the church basement, accompanied by his Digger brothers. Several of the underground weeklies reporting the event (“CLASS WAR IN THE HAIGHT”) wrote that he had threatened to bomb any of the stores refusing to donate a percentage of their profits back to the community. The day after the angry meeting, Peter Krug, owner of Wild Colors at 1418 Haight Street, posted a sign in his shop window detailing his business expenses. With a $200 monthly net, the originator of the Job Co-op notion wondered how he might make his business more nonprofit.

  Richard Brautigan stayed abreast of the conflicts within the hip community from the safe remove of a perpetual observer. Of far greater interest to him was the February publication in Italy of Il Generale Immaginario (A Confederate General from Big Sur) by Rizzoli. Grove Press mailed him a copy that he found “very handsome.” Grove’s edition of the book had sold poorly, but here was another chance, a rebirth. Around the same time, Don Allen discovered a batch of Brautigan’s early poems among his papers. His enjoyment rereading them enhanced his enthusiasm for the Four Seasons’ planned publication of Trout Fishing. Don mailed them to Richard for inclusion in the Coyote Books collection along with a small gift as a “token of [his] admiration.” Allen inquired what the poetry books would be called, signing off, “Yours in the faith, Don.”

  Ramparts magazine came out on Valentine’s Day with a lead story on “The Hippies.” Stanley Mouse was pictured on the cover, the prototypical acid head. Another poster artist, Wes Wilson, designed a psychedelic title page. Jann Wenner contributed short memos dealing with historical background. The cover story was written by Ramparts editor Warren Hinckle III, poison pen in hand. “A Social History of the Hippies” utilized Chester Anderson’s thirty hours of interviews for a sneering put-down of the Haight-Ashbury scene. Hinckle called Ken Kesey “a hippie has-been,” referred to Emmett Grogan as Frodo Baggins (the questing Hobbit in The Lord of the Rings) and compared the counterculture to Fascism and the John Birch Society. Ralph Gleason, who had included a piece on his own observations of the youth movement, quit the magazine’s editorial board to protest Hinckle’s snide hatchet job.

  In spite of the bad press, the Diggers planned an event designed as their response to the Human Be-In. In company with the Artists Liberation Front, who had produced numerous street fairs the previous fall, the Diggers arranged for an organizational meeting at Glide Memorial, site of one of the ALF’s public events. Glide by its very nature remained hospitable to the notion of unorthodox community activity, having previously sponsored a liturgical jazz Christmas Happening.

  The meeting got underway in the Glide basement. Word went out earlier the same day among the close-knit artistic community. Mime Trouper Peter Coyote, serving as a courier for the event, stopped Richard Brautigan on the southeast corner of Ashbury and Clayton and told him to be there or be square. At the appointed time, Richard stood at the back of the room, taking everything in like an owl “seeking the sources of sound.” According to Coyote, the group was “animated by a healthy sense of competition with the Human Be-In, hoping to create an event that would more accurately demonstrate what a free city celebration might be.” The basement rang with “whoops of delight” at the outlandish suggestions. It was decided to divide Glide Church into “territories,” the various rooms devoted to different happenings, each designed to create, as Grogan put it, “scenes in which they themselves and others would be able to act out their own fantasies.”

  All present agreed to limit the advertising to word of mouth (“except for a few handbills”) and to extend the event for seventy-two hours over a three-day weekend “in order for it to be effective,” immersing those attending into “assuming freedom.” The officials at Glide were told as little as possible about the actual plans, being assured the Artistic Liberation Front intended to present “a carnival of the performing arts.” The free-flowing environmental happening had no rules, except (wink, wink) no drugs would be allowed. Before breaking up for the night, the rowdy group selected a catchy name for their big bash, calling it “The Invisible Circus: The Right of Spring.”

  Richard Brautigan loved the idea of keeping the location of the Diggers’ art carnival a secret until the last possible moment. He made it into a game. When Richard called Keith Abbott down in Monterey the day before the event, requisitioning Keith’s van for the Diggers, he revealed nothing about “why or for what. ‘Just come,’ he ordered. ‘You won’t want to miss it.’” Brautigan knew the secret was out in the open. Haight Street buzzed with word of The Invisible Circus. The Communication Company printed up a thousand eight-and-a-half-by-eleven red, yellow, and blue handbills featuring a stylized circus wagon to advertise their “72 hr environmental community happening.”

  Richard phoned Victor Moscoso, asking him to do a poster for the event. Any job for the Diggers was a donation, and Moscoso, currently working in color, scaled back his palette. He selected a black-and-white picture from an art book on surrealism and painted the lettering above it in a single evening. To Charles Perry, the image on Moscoso’s small handbill looked like “a human being with a rubber eraser for a face.”

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nbsp; Keith Abbott drove up from Monterey on a brisk February morning and hauled the com/co Gestetners, along with stencils and reams of paper, over to Glide from Claude Hayward’s apartment. At the church, he humped it all upstairs to the second-floor room Richard Brautigan christened “The John Dillinger Computer Complex.” The John Dillinger name, emblazoned on brown butcher paper illustrated with cartoon renditions of a smoking gat and a couple getaway cars, hung on the wall of the Digger newsroom. Claude and Chester got the machines running and a last-minute squiggle-lettered Invisible Circus poster rushed off the press, touting “The John Dillenger Computor [sic]” along with the Lion Priests and the Wind Spinners.

  There was even a playroom stocked with toys for kids of all ages. “Paper spaghetti and no rules.”

  Various factions among the art community claimed fifty rooms in the church and prepared them for happenings. There were rooms designed for confrontation and others reserved for theoretical peace and quiet. Down the hall from the John Dillinger Computer stretched “love alley,” a number of separate offices redecorated with mattresses covered by colorful Indian bedspreads and equipped with candles, perfumes, incense, and lubricating oils in preparation as “love-making salons.” Elsewhere, a room had been set aside for tie-dying classes, and another was designated as a sewing center. Lenore Kandel staked out her space, and Mouse had a setup for hand-painting T-shirts. Downstairs in the cafeteria dining room, the Diggers prepared to feed the expected masses.