While Richard concerned himself with the details of book publication, his relationship with Valerie rapidly unraveled. Busy with school, she spent long days in Berkeley, often not returning to the city until late in the evening. Once Valerie stayed over with a friend to finish an assignment. Richard sounded disappointed when she phoned to tell him. Valerie gave him her friend’s number and said to call if he got bored. Around ten thirty, he called, drunk, and rambled on and on, insisting, “I love you more than you love me.” (Valerie believed this to be “true.” In her journal, she tried modifying her judgment with “perhaps,” and then “probably,” crossing out both words.) Brautigan also ranted about the Apple record, a veiled reference to Miles, with whom Valerie had a brief affair. When she argued, Richard hung up. Later, he called back suggesting they not see each other anymore.
Valerie felt she loved Richard in her way but couldn’t live with him and was unable to commit. She’d criticized him to such an extent that she wondered if it might be “ballcutting.” The next night, when she returned home to Kearny Street, Richard called in a good mood and came over soon after. They made love, preparing and eating dinner while still naked. Valerie experienced no awkwardness during their nude meal, her first, wondering only if she should place her napkin in her lap.
One night in late April, Richard arrived for dinner at Valerie’s apartment and announced, “I’ve been making love to another woman.” Valerie kept right on cooking, her chest pounding, thinking of her own recent transgressions. Their meal went half-eaten. A long painful evening followed. Valerie wandered around with her wineglass trying “not to lash out with criticism.” Brautigan claimed his “unhappiness” as the reason for “noticing” a nineteen-year-old “chick” at Enrico’s who kissed him twice and slipped away into the crowd. Although at one point she suggested they “end it all,” Richard spent an uncomfortable nightmare-filled night with her, feral cats howling outside on the street while Valerie’s cat Zenobia and her kittens scrambled for safety under the bed. The next morning, they parted at seven at the bus stop when Valerie left for school. They agreed she’d call if she wanted to see him. On the ride over to Berkeley, “despondent at the loneliness” she knew would come, Valerie thought about how she really did love Richard but wanted some time apart, “to test our feelings.”
Brautigan’s difficulties with Miles had a lot to do with jealousy. He resented the record producer’s relationship with Valerie and her continuing ambivalent feelings. When Miles wrote her about Brautigan’s record, confessing that “Apple is in the process of being destroyed” and that he was “trying to sneak in as many spoken word albums as possible,” he mentioned he’d be back in California in May or June and wished to see her.
Miles received the record sleeve artwork and layout Brautigan had designed with the help of George Osaki. He was upset because Richard wanted a production credit and wrote back to remind him that the “contract is held by Miles Associates.” Not even the Beatles demanded such an accommodation. To mollify the situation, Miles offered a 5 percent royalty instead of the original 3 percent. He casually mentioned finding three breaks in the tapes when they arrived in London—he reedited, resulting in a loss of an inch of tape (one-fifteenth of a second). This infuriated Richard, who demanded that Apple use a copy of the “Sounds of My Life” track held by Golden State Recorders for their master. “I am very interested in the timing of that track and want it just like the way we recorded it in San Francisco.” The loss of one-fifteenth of a second was inaudible to the human ear, but Apple went along with Brautigan’s wishes.
Between classes at the end of April, Valerie phoned Richard and said, “Why don’t you move to Kearny?” They hadn’t made a permanent split the previous week. Without knowing quite why, she felt better about them as a couple. Estes hinted they set a time limit, suggesting the first of June. They were still friends. Valerie wanted to make the best of it even though she continued to think of Miles. “What I don’t need is another married man affair on my list,” she wrote in her journal, but the Englishman provided a convenient “crutch.” She did not intend to sleep with him again, yet she enjoyed his company, and it was comforting to know, “Well, there’s always Miles.”
By the time Brautigan moved back in with Valerie, he had sent all of the design material for his book, including the front cover photograph, off to Helen Brann. He was very specific about what he wanted. This included printing the back cover in blue with the word “mayonaise [sic] in white an inch above the center of the cover.” He asked to see color samples “so that I may choose the blue.”
Brautigan also spelled out his minimalist notion for the front flap copy and specified the two quotes that were all he wanted to appear on the back flap. He instructed that the three titles of his books run in blue across the dresses of the women on the cover, but allowed Roz Barrow to “work out the best design and balance.” Richard insisted “the three books should be reprinted exactly the same as the original editions with all the Four Seasons Foundation imprints on them and everything, back covers, etc.” By exercising his contractual design approval, Brautigan imposed a found-art aesthetic on the uncomprehending world of commercial publishing.
Another domestic crisis flared up early in May. Richard had promised to “be home at six” and cook dinner. At seven, he phoned Valerie to say that “the college artist chick” he had planned to meet at Enrico’s was late, so he would be delayed. When Richard arrived at eight, smiling, drunk, and sheepish, Valerie was stone-cold sober. “Why are you late?” she demanded. He’d never change, she gibed, muttering he was a “pushover” around “chicks.” Furious, Valerie rushed about the apartment, shoving Brautigan’s belongings into a Safeway double bag.
Richard made for the door. “U.S. mail,” he shouted. When Valerie said she wouldn’t mail his things, Richard told her to throw them away and was gone, leaving her “alone and shaking.”
The situation over in Berkeley only added to Valerie’s emotional difficulties. The University of California owned a vacant lot one half block east of Telegraph Avenue between Haste Street and Dwight Way that volunteer students and local street people had landscaped, converting the abandoned urban space into People’s Park. When the University attempted to resume control, claiming they wanted to build a soccer field, and surrounded the lot with a chain-link fence, the students protested. After being initially dispersed by law enforcement, over two thousand demonstrators marched “to take back the park.” Police and sheriff’s department deputies responded with tear gas and shotguns. More than one hundred were injured and an uninvolved onlooker accidentally killed.
Within a week of Brautigan’s walkout, he was once again ensconced in Valerie’s apartment. Soon after, Richard instructed his agent and publisher to use Kearny Street as his new address. At 5:17 am on the morning of May 13, he woke up at Valerie’s side and felt her breasts, but he had a plane to catch and had to forgo any further pleasure. “Alas, I must fly away [. . .] And there is no time to enjoy the weather of her breasts [. . .]” Richard jotted in his notebook as he cruised east on TWA flight 703, eating breakfast at “500 miles an hour.”
Brautigan changed planes in Chicago, heading for Durham, North Carolina, and a reading at Duke University. Along the way during the long trip, he composed several poems in his notebook: “Donner Party,” “Flight Handbook,” “Fake Protien [sic],” “Late Starting Dawn,” and “Tongue Cemetary [sic].”
Brautigan was paid a total of $454.50 at Duke including expenses. After the reading, he got together with a bunch of students and aspiring writers in an off-campus apartment, drinking homemade beer until he passed out on the couch. Three days later, Richard flew back to Chicago. He dined on Chinese food that night, and the next afternoon at three, presented a poetry and fiction reading in the Quantrell Auditorium at the University of Chicago. Brautigan was billed as an “Experimental Prose Writer and Poet,” and received $425 for his efforts, with an extra $175 thrown in for expenses. After less than a week on the road,
he returned home to San Francisco with more than a thousand bucks in his pocket.
In addition to his big reading score, Richard continued to earn other small sums throughout May and June. He sold four more stories to Rolling Stone for $30 apiece. Jann Wenner published something by Brautigan in almost every issue that spring and summer. Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, gave Richard $15 for a one-time “amateur performance” of Trout Fishing in America. (The Sterling Lord agency received a $3 commission.) Strangest of all, a graphic designer named Audrey Sabol paid $300 for “non-exclusive rights” to make a wall hanging incorporating Brautigan’s poem “Xerox Candy Bar.”
Richard understood the critical importance of his new book’s presentation. Brautigan determined not even the tiniest detail would escape his exacting attention. At the end of May, a memo about these special provisions circulated among the upper echelon of the publishing firm, reminding those in power of this extraordinary concession and ensuring that Richard’s ideas would be taken seriously. “You’re the boss,” designer Roz Barrow wrote when she sent him three blue color samples as possibilities for the book’s cover.
One of Brautigan’s many concerns was the correct spelling of “mayonnaise.” In the last line of the concluding chapter of Trout Fishing—a found-art letter—Richard ends his book with the word misspelled as “mayonaise.” The question arose, which spelling to use on the back of the dust jacket, one “n” or two? At first, for his own “specific reason,” Brautigan favored just one but in the end changed his mind and decided to spell it in lowercase with two “n’s.” He also insisted on keeping the “i” in Trout Fishing in America lowercase.
There were also photographic problems. A proof of the cover art arrived with the top of Brautigan’s head cropped off. “I think the photograph would be a little more effective if we had all of my head in it,” Richard wrote back. Brautigan had long insisted he wanted the covers on the Delta editions to look “exactly like” those used by the Four Seasons Foundation, but noticed Roz Barrow was using the fourth printing. That cover was slightly different from the others. The fourth printing had “the top of Benjamin Franklin’s head missing. This is not very good.” Richard wanted the cover to be identical to the one used on the Four Seasons Foundation’s third printing.
Small annoyances arrived from time to time to distract Brautigan from his intense concentration on every tiny detail of his book’s production. A form letter from Apple Records announced that their L.A. office was closing, a death knell for Richard’s album. All correspondence should be forwarded to Joel Silver (the future action film producer) at Abkco Industries, Inc., in New York. In July, Alix Nelson, an editor at Simon & Schuster, wrote “enclosing a set of uncorrected galleys for William Hjortzberg’s [sic] first novel, ALP [. . .]” She thought it “an important literary debut” and “a hilarious one as well.” She hoped that Brautigan might enjoy the book and offer some comment. Richard made no reply of any kind.
Valerie continued her precarious relationship with Richard through the month of July. Some weekends, they rented a car and drove up to Sonoma to visit Ianthe, who lived there with her mother. On other occasions, they rode the bus out to Bolinas, getting together with friends such as the Browns, Joanne Kyger, and Jack Boyce, or to Marin City to visit Lew Welch and Magda Cregg. Richard called Pat Slattery, who handled Apple’s business in Hollywood, around the middle of the month, thanking her for the work she’d done on his behalf. She was bowled over. In her five-and-a-half-month “employment nightmare,” she had not received a single call or letter of thanks until Brautigan picked up the phone.
Richard and Valerie planned to watch the Apollo 11 moon landing at the apartment of their friends Fritzi and Michael Dorroh. They came over for a homemade chicken enchilada dinner. Richard had recently cooked his spaghetti and meatballs for Mike and Fritzi at Valerie’s place. After eating, they sat on the couch staring silently at the television screen, “listening to everything Walter Cronkite told us.” Fritzi remembered how they “were all amazed at this historic event.” When Neil Armstrong took his giant leap for mankind, Brautigan reached for his notebook. Inspired by the TV image of the astronaut’s fat squash-shaped footprint in the moon dust, he jotted down a draft of his poem “Jules Verne Zucchini.” He contrasted the cost of the moon mission with the number of people dying of starvation back at home. Richard added the single word “Earth” above the date at the bottom of the poem.
By late July, Brautigan felt the ever-increasing acceleration of his own liftoff toward stardom. Helen Brann sold two of his short stories (“The Weather in San Francisco,” which Richard had written when he lived with Janice Meissner on California Street, and “The Auction,” a tale of his impoverished boyhood in the Pacific Northwest) to Vogue for a total of $500. These were the first pieces of Brautigan fiction to appear in a national mainstream magazine.
Sam Lawrence contacted Brann, expressing interest in Brautigan’s new volume of poetry, which Donald Allen planned to publish in December. (The rights were to revert to the author after a total printing of twenty-five thousand copies.) Jonathan Cape Ltd. bought the British rights to Brautigan’s three books. Ed Victor, an American who worked for Tom Maschler at Cape, loved Richard’s work and got approval to make an offer. Victor’s sarcastic intelligence and superior attitude made him a natural fit among the Brits. “I don’t think we paid very much money,” he recalled.
Early in August, following another disagreement with Valerie, Brautigan moved back to Geary Street. Aside from having brought his typewriter and a few changes of clothing, he had never actually moved in, so this didn’t involve more than filling a couple shopping bags with his stuff. A week later, Richard and Valerie had dinner at Enrico’s. The next week they went to see the film Midnight Cowboy, so the split was not yet a complete separation.
Mad River’s eponymous first album had not been a hit. The band members’ names mismatched with their pictures on the sleeve, and Capitol had sped up the tracks in postproduction. This made Mad River’s music “sound like the Chipmunks.” Rolling Stone panned the release, which didn’t sell. Greg Dewey called it “one of the biggest heartbreaks of my life.”
When Capitol failed to renew their contract, the band got another chance and recorded a second album in Berkeley with their old pal Jerry Corbitt of the Youngbloods as their producer. Paradise Bar and Grill turned out better and was released at the end of July. The record included Richard Brautigan’s musically accompanied reading of “Love’s Not a Way to Treat a Friend” (recorded the previous year) as its third track on side A. Richard received a check for $136 for his performance.
In August, Brautigan was invited by his friend Lew Welch to join in a reading for a group of prisoners at San Quentin. Welch had been having a hard time that summer, suffering from depression and “big changes [he didn’t] seem able to handle very well.” These included the approach of his forty-third birthday, making him “feel old and feeble,” and his fifth attempt at going dry and “stopping the booze absolutely.” The event marked Richard’s first return to the big house since he researched “The Menu” in 1965. He and Welch agreed the prisoners were among their “warmest and [most] appreciative audiences.” The convicts’ favorable reaction was the only recompense the poets received that afternoon. They donated their time.
Preparing for his trip to San Diego to direct the prose workshop at California Western’s Summer Conference, Richard asked Edmund Shea to make him a series of black-and-white slides of punctuation marks to be projected onto a screen. Long accustomed to working with artists, Shea never questioned Brautigan’s odd request and had the slides ready before he left. Two days prior to his departure, Richard sent a letter to Sam Lawrence listing the writers he wanted to receive complimentary copies of Delacorte’s hardcover three-in-one edition of his books. Along with friends like Don Carpenter, Lew Welch, Ron Loewinsohn, and Michael McClure, and long-standing supporters such as John Ciardi, Tom Parkinson, Josephine Miles, and Kay Boyle, Brautigan added Herbert Go
ld, Anne Waldman, and Ishmael Reed to his list.
Don Carpenter described the San Diego beach campus of United States International University as being “on the sandspit.” He said the suites the school provided for the participants were “little barracks, it was horrifying.” Robert Creeley described them as having a “plastic cement block design.” Richard called the place “Stalag 19.” The poster advertising the event featured an Edmund Shea photograph of Brautigan, clearly the “star” of the weeklong celebration. Along with Brautigan, the literary gathering included Carpenter, Creeley, Edward Dorn, Stephen Schneck, Michael McClure, and Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors, who was there to present his sixteen-millimeter documentary film, Feast of Friends.
After the screening, Morrison sat out on the lawn “in a circle of poets and writers with a few of the students,” passing around a bottle of whiskey. Don Carpenter remembered the rocker “making an ass of himself.” Creeley recalled “this awful sad evening” and Morrison as “extraordinarily drunk.”
Creeley quoted T. S. Eliot, and Jim Morrison began teasing him, “the vulnerable square, the poet.” Morrison grabbed the whiskey bottle (and here the memories of eyewitnesses vary). Don Carpenter thought the rock star broke it over his own head, while Creeley remembered “and he just goes whop on the head of his friend Babe, and the bottle breaks. Wow!” In his book Lighting the Corners Michael McClure recalled the Jim Morrison incident, remembering it both ways.
It was the middle of the night. Everybody was extremely intoxicated. We were sitting out on the greensward. Creeley had his clothes off and was rolling down the hill, drunkenly yelling that he was his body. It was wonderful. Richard Brautigan was sitting under a tree brooding about noble Brautigan thoughts. Jim, Babe, and I were there sort of cross-legged under another tree. I don’t remember what anybody was saying, but Jim reached over with a bottle and broke it over Babe’s head. I said, “Jim, that was a rotten thing to do,” and he said “Oh yeah?” and he picked up another bottle and broke it over his own head.
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