As Richard directed his attentions away from the Haight-Ashbury, he began looking for a North Beach apartment. His search took the form of a prose poem called “The New Apartment Thing.” He was looking for a place “that has a sunny window for his plants.” Brautigan wished to trade his three-room $65-a-month Geary Street apartment for one in North Beach and was willing to pay “up to $100 a month” and asked that any messages be left at City Lights Bookstore.
Nothing came of it. He kept his place on Geary, yet spent most of his time in North Beach, missing out on the Hashbury street action. One morning, early in 1968, a young artist named Robert Crumb wheeled a secondhand baby carriage down Haight Street, hawking copies of a twenty-five-cent “underground” comic book, Zap #1. Crumb had drawn the entire issue himself the previous November. Printed by the beat-affiliated poet/artist Charles Plymell, who kept a small offset press in his apartment, the edition sold out quickly. Like Bruce Conner and Michael McClure, Plymell was a product of the “Wichita Vortex” and had also exhibited his work at the Batman Gallery.
R. Crumb followed quickly with a second printing (raising the price to thirty-five cents). It disappeared even faster. Crumb had a hit on his hands. Other artists admired Zap and wanted to participate. S. Clay Wilson, recently arrived from Kansas, teamed up with Crumb, along with poster artists Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso, to produce Zap #2 a couple months later. Each artist worked in his own distinctive style. The end result was mind-boggling. Not since Depression-era eight-page Tijuana bibles had pornography and the funny papers so happily united. Janis Joplin became a big fan. The Zap audience also bought Trout Fishing in America.
Mad River cut their first album for Capitol sometime in the late spring or early summer, at the recording studio of Golden State Recorders on 665 Harrison Street. The band had grown disenchanted with the degenerate post–Summer of Love scene in the Haight and had relocated back across the Bay to Berkeley. They were assigned a veteran L.A. producer, Nik Venet, who had worked with the Beach Boys and Bobby Darin. He’d recently had a top-twenty hit with “Different Drum” by the Stone Poneys (featuring a very young Linda Ronstadt).
The band invited Richard Brautigan to take part in the session. They wanted to acknowledge Richard’s generosity when they first arrived in the Bay Area broke and hungry. Greg Dewey recalled the invitation “was one of those drunk night ideas.” There were no rehearsals. Brautigan got together with the guys at the studio and read his poem “Love’s Not the Way to Treat a Friend,” accompanied by David Robinson and Lawrence Hammond, playing a tune written by Robinson.
It was not an easy session. The band members had to direct Brautigan how to read his poem in sync with the music. “Richard had absolutely no concept of how to read it,” Greg Dewey remembered. On the first try, Brautigan read the entire poem before Hammond and Robinson finished the music for the first verse. “It was harder than he thought,” Dewey said. “I think he had considered that songs are a lot like poems, but he had never considered how you have to perform the poem within a song.”
In the end, everybody was happy with the results. Lawrence Hammond wrote to Brautigan a couple weeks later, saying “he was pleased,” in spite of a hang-up involved firing producer Venet. “Working with him is like having Otto Preminger make a movie of Woody Guthrie’s memoirs,” Hammond reported when Capitol Records finally released the album, Mad River. The cut featuring Brautigan’s poem was not included on the LP.
For the first time, Richard hired an accountant to prepare his tax returns. His gross income for 1967 totaled $3,081. Esmond H. Coleman, CPA, an English major during the Depression before switching to science, became Don Carpenter’s friend when they both taught part-time at the University of California. Through Carpenter, Coleman got to know Gary Snyder, Phil Whalen, and Brautigan. Over time, he worked for all of them, handling their accounts. “I was sort of simpatico,” Coleman said. “We talked the same language. In between debits and credits, we would talk about literature.”
Coleman met Richard in 1964 when Don took him to an early reading of Confederate General. From time to time after that, he ran across Brautigan at Vesuvio and because the poet never had any money would occasionally buy him a drink. Once, when Coleman was at the North Beach bar with his wife, Richard approached him and said, “One of these days, I’m going to need you. I’ll have a lot of money and I’ll need an accountant.”
“I never thought he was a great novelist,” Coleman admitted, but he found Brautigan very thorough in his record keeping. “Meticulous in a kind of disorganized way,” he said. “He’d come in with a bag of stuff, every little tiny fucking receipt. Everything! If he bought biscuits at the store he would have a receipt for it. Shopping bags full of receipts.”
Coleman considered Brautigan’s life as “something out of Dickens. He was a very lonely boy, and he learned to be a loner, and he was basically a loner. His relationships were not really deep. I don’t think he was able to give much or accept much. He was sufficient unto himself, or at least he liked to think so.”
Throughout the month of June, at twenty-three separate venues throughout San Francisco, an “Underground Art Celebration: 1945–1968,” featured painting, music, films, dance, sculpture, drama, photography, memorabilia, environments, lectures, and poetry. Ken Maytag and his brother, Fritz, who owned Anchor Steam beer, put up some of the money to fund the various events, which were collectively designated the “Rolling Renaissance.” David Meltzer had a hand in organizing the poetry end of the festival. Meltzer invited Brautigan to participate along with more than two dozen readers, including Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Lew Welch, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Patchen, Robert Duncan, Philip Whalen, and John Wieners.
Fritz Maytag threw a huge party at his brewery. Things soon started getting out of hand. Maytag didn’t have a liquor license and worried that the commotion might attract the attention of the police. “It’s my beautiful bubble you’re bursting,” he shouted down from his office at the cavorting crowd. Allen Ginsberg reacted by taking off all his clothes. Irving Rosenthal (former editor of the Chicago Review and Big Table, who had recently moved to Frisco to edit Kaliflower, a free weekly newsletter published by the Digger-inspired Sutter Street Commune) also stripped naked, except for his fingerless gloves.
David Meltzer can’t remember Richard Brautigan actually reading at the “Rolling Renaissance.” He recalled him stealing food and wine at Maytag’s party “to bring back to his tribe.” Richard remained a Digger at heart. “What struck me is we were giving it away, and he was stealing from us and then giving it away,” Meltzer said. “That was a strange cognitive.”
At the end of June, a letter arrived from William P. Wreden, a San Francisco dealer in rare books and manuscripts. He enclosed a copy of “The Story of Joseph Francl,” which he planned to publish in a fine press limited edition of five hundred copies. Originally written in German, Francl’s journal was a transcript of a mid-nineteenth-century diary kept by an emigrant from Bohemia who trekked west to the California goldfields, leaving a young wife back home in Wisconsin. Wreden wanted Brautigan to write a ten-page introduction for the book. He was interested in having “a contemporary literary interpretation of the phenomena of pioneer overland travel.”
Richard accepted the assignment and wrote an off-kilter, oddly moving introduction, bringing his own peculiar sensibilities to the 114-year-old manuscript. The book was published at the end of the year as The Overland Journey of Joseph Francl in an edition of 540 copies. Wreden hosted a reception early in 1969, celebrating the book’s launch at his Post Street showroom. His invitation quoted a line from Richard’s introduction, describing Francl as a man “who cared for his beer and other liquors, too.”
Trout Fishing in America’s San Francisco success did not go unnoticed in the New York offices of Grove Press, and they decided to bring out a trade paperback edition of Confederate General. The avant-garde poet/novelist Gilbert Sorrentino, working as an editor at Grove, thought it might be a goo
d idea to reissue the book with cover art in the manner of the Four Seasons’ singular Trout Fishing photo. He wrote Don Allen, setting the wheels in motion. Allen got in touch with Brautigan. Edmund Shea being unavailable, he contacted Bill Brach, asking him to handle the photography.
Richard showed up in Golden Gate Park with a baby alligator and a hippie girl wearing a full-length belted smock. Years later, Brach couldn’t remember the young woman’s name. She had straight dark hair hanging well past her shoulders, parted in the middle. With a broad nose, thick eyebrows, and full lips, she possessed an exotic ethnic appearance. Brautigan posed her between two columns holding the eighteen-inch-long reptile, her long dress dragging on the ground, looking a bit like a gypsy. Bill Brach took several shots.
Richard brought his favorite prints over to Don Allen. He wanted the title printed in red across the top of the photo and “Turn to page 100 for an interesting story about alligators . . .” at the bottom of the cover. Allen didn’t think the alligator had sufficient light but sent the picture off to Grove.
Gilbert Sorrentino spent the next two weeks working with Grove’s production team on the cover design. He respected Brautigan’s work and had recently written a favorable review of Trout Fishing in America for Poetry magazine. Sorrentino wanted to satisfy the author’s wishes. It was not to be. Grove decided to keep the same Larry Rivers cover art they had used on the hardcover edition.
The gypsy girl was perhaps only a brief fling after Marcia Pacaud’s departure. Richard soon met Valerie Estes, who had majored in home economics in college and went on to earn a PhD in anthropology. Brautigan was attracted by her quick, lively mind. He liked to say that “there was no more powerful aphrodisiac than intelligence in a woman.” Valerie later worked as an assistant to Donald Allen. He expressed surprise at what she “saw in this guy who was sort of unattractive.” Estes thought Brautigan “physically not very attractive,” but felt “his presence was much more than the sum of his parts.” Brautigan “was truly charismatic, and you don’t say that about too many people.”
“Richard was always on the make, you know,” Valerie Estes said. In the era of free love, Estes carved a few notches herself, but Brautigan “had more notches on his gun than almost anyone.” Tall, attractive, and dark-haired, an Aries with large intelligent eyes and the brains to back them up, Valerie Estes grew up in Berkeley and Reno, Nevada. She moved to San Francisco in February of 1967 after almost four years of wandering in Eastern and Western Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East with her husband, Bob Morrill. (In an odd coincidence, Bob’s best buddy in Catholic school, from first grade all the way through graduation, had been Barney Mergen, who befriended Richard when he passed through Reno in 1956.)
Morrill got a job as a corporate attorney, and the marriage lost most of its luster. Valerie split in September ’67, leaving their place on Russian Hill for a tidy three-room Kearny Street apartment on the slope of Telegraph Hill. That fall, Valerie volunteered to register people for the Peace and Freedom Party, a radical new political organization. Eldridge Cleaver was their candidate for president. She set up a card table in front of City Lights and handed out leaflets. One day, pamphlet in hand, she approached a bearded man with “great blue eyes,” asking “if he might be interested in signing up for Peace and Freedom.”
“Sure,” came the laconic reply, “but I think my name is on that pamphlet.” The man turned out to be Lawrence Ferlinghetti. They began “some sort of friendship,” which led to a brief affair and a general introduction “to the City Lights crowd, although not to Richard.”
KQED recruited Estes to help out with an arts festival planned in Washington Square Park in May 1968. She was given the task of finding poets willing to read at the festival. While living in Greece, she had met a poet named Robert Dawson. Having seen Dawson’s name on a poster advertising a reading in the Haight, Valerie wondered if it was the same man. She went to hear him read, and they renewed their friendship. Dawson gave her Richard Brautigan’s name and phone number.
When she called Richard about the arts festival, he said he’d like to talk to her in person about the matter. “What I now realize was he probably liked my voice on the phone,” Valerie recalled, “you know, the potential, and he had no intention of reading.”
“Why don’t I come by tonight?” Brautigan asked in his most winning manner.
“I’m having dinner with some friends,” Valerie replied. “I can’t do it tonight.”
Richard thought this over. “Well, I’ll come by and pick you up after dinner.”
Valerie’s friend Betty Kirkendall, a reporter at the Chronicle, lived in the neighborhood. After their meal, Richard arrived right on time. “I think we probably went back to my house, and I really don’t remember clearly,” Valerie said. “I’m willing to put money on it that we drank a lot of wine and ended up in bed.”
Brautigan did not read at the art festival in Washington Square Park. He accompanied Valerie to the event, which was a great success. Bob Dawson read, along with several others lost to time. “Richard and I rather quickly became some kind of an item,” Valerie recalled, “enough so that I didn’t see Lawrence any longer. In fact, I didn’t see anybody else. All right, that wasn’t true, but all things considered my percentage of time with him was fairly high.”
For Richard, being with Valerie became a self-fulfilling prophesy. Around this time, he wrote an (unpublished) short story in his notebook he called “An Apartment on Telegraph Hill.” Largely autobiographical, the story contained several revealing personal revelations. The narrator was a sculptor, whose work “had long ceased to yield any satisfaction.” He “had no interest in women except to get occasionally laid when I got bored with getting drunk and it took a really good woman to get me away from the bottle,” and dreamed of having “a girlfriend on Telegraph Hill.” He fantasized about her apartment full of “lots of fine stuff.” Brautigan wrote, “Coming from a poor family, I’ve always been attracted to women above my station.”
Richard soon took up residence in Valerie’s North Beach apartment at 1429 Kearny Street (the address was changed to 1427 when the building was remodeled), while maintaining his squalid museum out on Geary Boulevard. Richard had always been self-sufficient and preached a form of sexual equality, but Valerie remembered that she “always did the cooking, except when Richard made his spaghetti sauce. Breast of lamb was another thing.” When Brautigan bought a cheap cut of meat, what he called “a protein wallop,” at their local North Beach market, he’d bring it home and roast it. Valerie recalled him “throwing this hunk” in the oven. “I don’t know what else we ate with it. Red wine, probably.”
The three-room Kearny Street flat was reconfigured to suit Brautigan’s work needs. The middle room, which had been Valerie’s bedroom, was converted into an office for Richard. They moved the bed into the front room, and Brautigan brought over his electric typewriter, setting it on a table painted purple. In October, he wrote a poem he called “The First Lady of Purple,” which he dedicated to Valerie. Richard worked “from mid- to late morning, and then he would wander the rest of the day,” she recalled. He composed directly on the typewriter and “was pretty disciplined about it. When he was writing he drank almost nothing.” His work “was something that was very private,” Valerie said. “He didn’t share this with anybody, including me.”
“Alcohol was always the escape.” Valerie Estes knew the part booze played in Brautigan’s work habits. Whenever Richard “finished whatever that piece of work was then the constraints were removed and he drank again.” In the downtime, he wrote poems. Poetry never had the constraints of discipline that prose did. “He didn’t work on the poems. He didn’t set aside time to work on the poetry,” Valerie said. “The poems were on napkins. So, he drank during that time. Poetry came during the interims of the prose work.”
Several of these poems were written for Valerie. “As the Bruises Fade, the Lightning Aches” celebrated their robust sex life. Brautigan was proud of his a
bility to withhold his climax for an extended period of time. Valerie felt he was mainly concerned with his own pleasure, never asking what she might enjoy. They were noisy lovemakers. Their neighbors in the building on Kearny Street complained often. Of the pair, Richard shouted the loudest.
Valerie first met Don Allen through Brautigan. He took her to a cocktail party at Allen’s apartment in honor of the expatriate writer Kay Boyle, recently returned to the Bay Area. There were eight or ten people present, and Estes remembered drinking “a lot of wine.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti was among the guests. They all piled into the back of his little pickup and drove to a restaurant. Allen was taken with Estes and asked her to be his assistant. In need of a part-time job, she said yes.
Once, after Donald Allen fired her, Valerie and Richard went on a trip to Kirkwood Meadows, an isolated spot in the Sierras near Carson Pass, where Barden (“Bart”) Stevenot, her new boss, owned a mountain retreat he planned to turn into a ski area. Crews of loggers and dozer operators were already at work in a high valley with the greatest variety of wildflowers in all California. At the time, the only structure on the place was the Kirkwood Inn, a venerable log building along what once was the Kit Carson Emigrant Trail. Built in 1864, the old inn had seen some wild times. The saloon and a kitchen were downstairs, with places to bunk above. Stevenot asked Valerie and Richard to move to another bed at the far end of the building because their raucous sex kept him awake at night.
Jubilee Hitchhiker Page 64
