Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Andrew Hoyem arranged for Basil Bunting to give a reading in San Francisco at the end of April. Sponsored by the Poetry Center, Bunting read the complete Briggflatts (published the previous year) at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Afterward, the Frisco poet community wanted to show him a good time. A small group got together at the home of John and Margot Doss. Lew Welch was there, along with Don Allen. Andrew Hoyem brought his girlfriend (later his wife) Judy Laws. Richard Brautigan came with Lenore Kandel.

  They all smoked pot (Richard included) and went out for dinner in Chinatown. Sitting around a big circular table for eight at a Grant Avenue restaurant, waiting in a cannabis afterglow for the food to arrive, the group invented an impromptu game of stud poker, using knives, forks, and spoons in place of cards. “We just made it up as we went along,” John Doss recalled. Basil Bunting told a war story about the time his Doberman pinscher ate his commanding officer’s toy poodle and got the whole group singing a jingoistic imperial military song. “An old British-army or service-person-overseas kind of song where everybody gets screwed,” according to Dr. Doss. The Chinese waiters looked on impassively as the strains of “Troop Ships Are Leaving Bombay” lilted discordantly through their establishment.

  After the meal, when the bill was paid, Brautigan and Lenore Kandel “went skipping down Grant Avenue.” The Dosses assumed they were headed for a romp in the sack, forgetting that no sane man deliberately cuckolds a member of the Hells Angels. According to Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Brautigan told her that Kandel was one of a quartet of women “he thought of as friends, very distinct from women he thought of as drivers, cooks, lovers.” The other three were Joanne Kyger, Joanna McClure, and Hawkins herself.

  At the end of April, the Communication Company moved out of the Haight-Ashbury to an office far off in the Richmond District. The new address (742 Arguello Street) was not made available to the public, and community participation dropped off. Chester Anderson had fallen out with com/co over what he felt was a betrayal of the McLuhanite vision he espoused at the start of the enterprise, four months earlier. He and Claude Hayward were no longer speaking.

  The hard-core faction in the Diggers demanded that com/co attend mainly to their own political agenda. Digger announcements and flyers occupied an ever-increasing proportion of the available printing time. In addition, the Diggers insisted on donating com/co’s services to the newly formed Black Panther Party over in Oakland. The first issue of the party’s newspaper was printed on the Gestetner. In May, com/co’s output “shrank by more than half.”

  The huge billboard in front of Brautigan’s house on Geary Street advertised Australia that May, with a gigantic picture of a kangaroo. Watching the big marsupial at night made Richard ponder the vitality of the written word versus the raw power of graphic imagery. He noted that the lights on the billboard switched off at midnight and wondered what time it was down under.

  After his first two trials ended with hung juries, Ken Kesey pleaded nolo contendere on May 2 to “knowingly being in a place where marijuana was kept,” a lesser charge carrying a ninety-day penalty. That same afternoon, Brautigan went to see Billy the Kid versus Dracula, a horror movie playing in a cheap theater on Market Street. Both men were a long way from the Heilig Theater in Eugene.

  At high noon on the fourth of May, the Diggers offered free spaghetti to office workers on the steps of City Hall. When asked what they wanted City Hall to do for them, the Diggers answered, “Eat.” Later that month, strange five-foot-high posters appeared all over town, picturing two Chinese tong hit men lounging on a street corner above the slogan 1 % FREE. The posters were designed by Peter Berg and stencil artist Mike McKibbon. They borrowed the “1 %” from the Hells Angels, who wore the symbol on a patch sewn to their “colors.” The motorcycle club referred to themselves as the original “one-percenters.” Together with a bunch of other Diggers, the Hun and McKibbon spent the night plastering their work to city walls, fences, and freeway columns. Soon afterward, the tong image appeared as a com/co handbill and in place of George Washington’s portrait on a flood of newly minted “Digger Dollars.”

  Alvin Duskin, the clothing mogul, introduced a plain shirtwaist minidress boldly decorated with large peace symbols in May, creating an instant hit in the local boutiques. On the fifteenth, the Gray Line canceled the Hippie Hop bus tour, even though it had grown so popular there were two trips each day. Traffic congestion on Haight Street was the reason cited. Close to the end of the month, a unanimous jury declared The Love Book “obscene and without redeeming social value.” Two days later, Lenore Kandel donated 1 percent of the book’s profit to the Police Retirement Association. She said this was her way of “thanking the police” for bringing her work out of obscurity. Before the cops raided the Psychedelic Shop, the Thelin brothers had sold perhaps fifty copies of The Love Book. After the bust, sales climbed to over twenty thousand. The donation amount was tongue in cheek. Kandel’s husband, Bill “Tumbleweed” Fritsch, was a Hells Angel.

  At a time when nearly everyone seemed to be living a dream, Brautigan’s ascending star in the hip community added further elements of the surreal to his bohemian life. After staying up most of one night writing and drinking red wine, Richard was awakened just before dawn by an insistent pounding on his front door. He lay thinking about it for a while before padding down the long cold parachute-hung hallway in his nightshirt.

  A striking statuesque blond named Cassandra Finley stood on his doorstep. She looked like an exotic reincarnation of someone from an earlier earthier time. Her singular dress reinforced this image, ropes of glass beads, black fur-trimmed shoes and gloves, her hood lined with white fleece. She didn’t know Brautigan, seeking him out for unknown reasons of her own. Shivering, Richard contemplated her beauty, at a complete loss for words. “I came to be with you,” she said.

  Brautigan turned without a reply and headed back to bed. The mysterious blond stranger followed him through the chilly apartment. She undressed while he watched, shivering under the covers. Like many gypsy voyagers on the road to Nirvana, Cassandra traveled light, wearing most of her clothes to minimize luggage. She took off several loose cotton blouses and layer after layer of full embroidered skirts. When she was naked (except for her long lapis earrings), she slipped into bed and wrapped a trembling Richard Brautigan in her pliant arms. Cassandra’s blond pubic hair excited Richard. He remarked upon it later. In his notebook, Brautigan wrote a prose-poem he called “Magic,” saying he had “never laid a blond woman, and being so carefully naive,” he wondered if they were “blond all the way down as I am.”

  Cass Finley didn’t stay with Brautigan for long, a few weeks at most. During their brief time together, he took her out to Bolinas one Sunday to visit Bill and Zoe Brown. They liked her, intrigued by her commanding presence. As they returned to the city, their driver worried about finding a parking space. When they neared their destination, Cassandra gave him directions, saying he’d find a spot at the end of the block. Just then, a car pulled away from the curb. Impressed with her powers as a seer, Richard asked Cass to tell him what his own future held in store. She refused. He demanded to know why she kept silent. “Know only I won’t be with you,” Cassandra Finley replied. She was right on that score.

  In mid-May, Brautigan took part in a San Francisco State Writer’s Conference, a three-day event at Camp Loma Mar in Pescadero, a small seaside town twenty miles north of Santa Cruz. Over fifty local writers had been invited to participate. Stephen Schneck and Herbert Gold were on the list. So were Don Carpenter, James Broughton, Thomas Sanchez, George Hitchcock, Lester Cole, Lawrence Fixel, Lenore Kandel, Janine Pommy Vega, Bill Fritsch, and Mr. and Mrs. Stan Rice. (In 1967, Anne Rice was an unknown poet while her husband commanded a reputation sufficient to gain him a spot as a workshop leader and featured reader.) “Don’t forget your bedrolls,” the participants were instructed.

  Richard caught a ride south with Andrew Hoyem. He was scheduled to read at eight that night in company with fellow Diggers
Lenore Kandel and Bill Fritsch. “Also bring a bathing suit and, of course, some of your work to read,” S.F. State advised. Brautigan did not own a bathing suit. His daughter can’t recall ever seeing him wear one. What Richard enjoyed was witty conversation and hanging out with writers. The weekend at Camp Loma Mar offered ample amounts of both.

  After three days of sunshine, readings, workshops, and literary chit-chat, the conference ended with a “Festival of Feeling” for which the Grateful Dead provided music. Standing among a gathering of talented poets, watching the sun set over the Pacific as Jerry Garcia’s blues guitar solos soared into the crisp sea air, Richard Brautigan must have felt like one of the anointed few. His time was surely soon to come.

  twenty-nine: willard

  RICHARD BRAUTIGAN PROVIDED an accurate description in Willard and His Bowling Trophies: “Willard was a papier-mâché bird about three feet tall with long black legs and a partially black body covered with a strange red, white and blue design like nothing you’ve ever seen before, and Willard had an exotic beak like a stork.” He was not making this up. As with all Brautigan’s work, flights of imaginative fancy were grounded in the reality of his everyday life. Even the bowling trophies.

  Willard was the creation of Stanley Fullerton, one of a flock he made with wire frames stuffed with the Sunday New York Times, covered with canvas strips dipped in gesso and painted with whatever was on hand. “I tend to make art objects in great floods or piles,” Fullerton later declared, “until I run out of gas or have finished that conversation.”

  By the middle sixties, the artist lived in Pacific Grove, California, and had acquired a bit of girth. Always a large man, Stan now favored suspenders and a Greek sea captain’s cap. This was no mere nautical affectation: Fullerton put out to sea in his gill netter at 3:00 am, “every morning the bar could be crossed,” looking for “a fog bank to fish in and hide under.” He didn’t care much for other people and made no secret of it. “Stan never had a nice word to say about anyone or anything,” one old acquaintance recalled. He detested all other artists, with painters topping the list of the despised. That’s why he got along with Price Dunn, another irascible iconoclast. Fullerton lived with a large menagerie of cats and exotic birds (mynahs and toucans). “I never met an animal of any sort that I didn’t prefer to human kind,” he later wrote. “Animals and birds of all sorts come to me. We speak each other’s hopes, and we live in harmony till their end comes.”

  After returning to Pacific Grove from Mexico (“the obligatory hermitage”), Stan got involved “with a sweet young airhead” and planned to leave again soon in a “barely able” pea green 1937 municipal water department tool truck. Price stopped by one day for a visit, hoping to take over Fullerton’s Pacific Grove house after the artist moved north to the little town of Marshall on Tomales Bay. About to abandon everything he owned, Stan gave him some of his big colorful cartoonish paintings along with a batch of drawings and etchings. Price spotted the gaudy three-foot papier-mâché bird perched in a corner. “Hey, I like that,” he said. “That’s nice.” Fullerton told him he might as well take the damn thing along with him.

  Price Dunn had no idea that Stan made the bird as a “satire” of Richard Brautigan. “A portrait in caricature,” was how the artist put it years later, “for in his walk and carriage in early days [Richard] resembled nothing closer than a white stork.” Many of these bird portraits had bull’s-eye targets painted, in Fullerton’s words, “on some portion of their anatomy, something to denote the behavior of the person thus parodied and not dissimilar to the basic behavior of birds.” Stan found it “skookum tee hee (a joke of the spirits)” that Brautigan ended up with the bird he had intended as a burlesque on the writer’s essential nature.

  Price hauled the unlikely looking creature home and parked it on a bookshelf, christening him “Willard,” for no particular reason. “I just started a spontaneous fantasy,” Dunn remembered. “Poor old Willard, he’s an orphan, you know. He’s got a speech defect.” It began in a bar, Price regaling his drinking companion with tall tales. “I used to have this bird,” he told the stranger, “and I loved this bird. So, I made this sculpture of Willard just to remember him by, because I loved him so much.” Bit by bit, the fantasy grew, and the legend of Willard was born.

  The bowling trophies came soon afterward. Price and his brother, Bruce, had an old truck they used for their moving business, and after a job they found a bunch of discarded bowling trophies left behind by a client. For no obvious reason other than a love for the absurd, Price stacked them around Willard. Bruce Dunn immediately joined in on the joke. “God,” he told Price, “I’ve got some bowling trophies that belong to Willard, too.” He brought them over, and soon a shrine was born, the absurd papier-mâché bird surrounded by dozens of gleaming statuettes.

  In spite of his strained finances in 1967, when Richard Brautigan came to visit Price in Pacific Grove, they’d go down to Nepenthe, the restaurant located on property once owned by Orson Welles, or up to Monterey and “put on the feed bag. Live high, drink high.” One night after dinner at the Sardine Factory, they returned to Price’s place and Richard encountered Willard for the first time. “What the hell is this?” he laughed.

  “Shhhh!” Price fell into his joking mode. “Please don’t offend Willard, Richard. You realize this is probably, next to you, my best friend. Willard thinks you’re weird.” Price went on in this vein, telling Brautigan the history of Willard and making a formal introduction to the artificial bird. “And he says, ‘Oh, hi, Willard.’ He just buys it hook, line, and sinker. He loves it. It’s just the sort of weird fantasy he would like.”

  The subject of Willard became the theme of the weekend. The painted bird was the only thing Richard could talk about. The next day, he met a girl and went off with her, telling her all about his new friend “Willard,” certainly one of the more bizarre pickup lines in the history of romance. When Richard returned and it was time for him to go back to the city he told Price, “I don’t know if I can part with Willard.”

  “You’ve formed that kind of a bond with Willard,” Price replied, enjoying the joke more and more. “Maybe he’ll go home with you. Just ask him and see.”

  Richard went along with the gag, going through the motions of asking Willard to come away with him. “Yeah,” he said at last, “he wants to. He wants to go to San Francisco.”

  “Well, goodbye, Willard,” Price replied, a touch of feigned sadness in his voice.

  And so the multicolored bird came to live in Richard’s Geary Street apartment. On a later trip, Brautigan returned to Pacific Grove and collected all the bowling trophies, bringing them back to re-create the Willard shrine in San Francisco. He treated this sort of nonsense with utmost seriousness. Richard believed Stanley Fullerton had painted Willard’s face in such a way that his expression changed from time to time, shifting from serious to apprehensive like “a kind of bird Mona Lisa.”

  Whenever Price came to visit the city, he inquired about Willard, wanting to know all about the bird’s recent adventures. When they were drinking, the Willard stories grew ever more convoluted and absurd. “Just a goofy game,” to keep the fantasy alive. Over time, the game evolved into an elaborate ritual, the objective being to leave the other guy stuck with Willard. Richard might sneak the peculiar bird under the tarp in the bed of Price Dunn’s pickup when he wasn’t looking. Price retaliated by smuggling Willard back into town and hiding him in Brautigan’s closet. Keith Abbott wrote of Price adopting “his best Southern idiot voice” for the game. “Willard’s been getting lonesome for you. It’s time for you to take care of Willard again, Richard.”

  The game went on even after Richard Brautigan was forced by circumstance to move out of the Geary Street apartment. When the rest of his odd collection was “packed up,” the painted bird went along with him to live in a two-bedroom apartment on Telegraph Hill opposite Coit Tower. Willard provided a link to the days of impoverished Bohemia. Several years later, Richard started
work on a new book. One day, he brought Price Dunn the just-completed manuscript. “I’ve got something for you to read,” Richard said, suppressing a sly smile. Price glanced at the title page: Willard and His Bowling Trophies. Now, it was his turn to grin. Once again, his best friend had turned a private fantasy into literature. The book’s subtitle, A Perverse Mystery, seemed right on the mark.

  As Richard saw Price less frequently, he continued the Willard game with other friends. When Brautigan began traveling to Japan in the 1970s, he left the bird with Curt Gentry. “He would say that I would have to soak his beak once a week in bourbon,” Curt reported. “And a couple of times he came back and said I hadn’t done it, and he would take Willard away.” For a while, Gentry kept a framed photograph of Willard on his bureau.

  “Even a bird needs to get out once in a while,” Richard told Ianthe, explaining why they had to haul the absurd creature along with them on evening excursions. In her memoir, Ianthe Brautigan described a dinner party at Curt Gentry’s house when she was seventeen. Richard brought Willard and insisted that he sit at the table with his own place setting and a drink of whiskey. Ianthe didn’t mention her father had spent the day drinking with his buddy Tony Dingman, who was leaving the next morning for the Philippines to work as a production assistant on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. When Richard called the Gentrys to ask if he might bring Tony along for a final aloha, Gail Stevens (not yet Mrs. Gentry) said no. Her sit-down dinner was planned for twelve, and she didn’t want to set a thirteenth place at the table. Brautigan showed up with Willard instead. Gail was not amused. This was the last time Ianthe ever remembered seeing Willard. She thought somehow the painted bird had slipped through her father’s fingers, vanishing forever into the vast limbo of detritus littering the soul of our republic.