Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Richard spun out of control, screeching, arms flailing. He collided off-balance with the railing and seemed in danger of toppling over. Sherry rushed out into the heavy ocean fog, tripping on a deck chair, grabbing the back of Brautigan’s broad leather belt before he lost complete control. “Die now!” she thought, her inner rage ablaze, knowing a simple push would send him to his doom. Instead, Sherry pulled Richard toward her, and he collapsed in her arms.

  “My leg,” he cried. “I broke my leg!”

  “Come inside.” Sherry helped Richard to the bed and calmed him with coffee. Pulling jeans and a windbreaker over her pajamas, she set off through the night to the home of Dr. John Doss, who had given up his lucrative city practice to become “a hippie doctor” in Bolinas. The Dosses were not at home, but their three sons slept with their girlfriends in a converted garage behind the big Victorian summer house. Sherry woke them, pleading, “Please. I can’t get him down the steps by myself.”

  Jock Doss returned with her and helped Brautigan into Sherry’s VW. The long day of driving had come full circle. “For the fourth time in one day,” Vetter recalled later, “over the hill and back into the city with the man she says she loves folded up like an accordion in the front seat of the bug, moaning out at every sharp curve.”

  Sherry drove Richard to Kaiser Permanante near his apartment on Geary and waited while Dr. Daniel Boone from Kentucky set his leg. Something had changed in the past few hours. Sherry felt “the first break” in their friendship. She took Richard the final few blocks home, and had her last sight of him, leg encased in a fresh white cast, pulling himself backward up the front steps of his dilapidated building.

  Over the next few days, Richard phoned, pleading, “What am I gonna do?”

  “You’ll have to get somebody else to take care of you because I’m not going to do it,” Sherry said. She didn’t see Brautigan again for four months.

  Richard told his daughter he broke his leg in broad daylight, tripping over an exposed root while walking on his property. No mention was made of Smiley’s. Ianthe remembered the difficult time her father had getting about on his crutches, hating every invalid moment. “He did a lot of hopping around the Geary apartment, the sight of which made me giggle.” Brautigan felt imprisoned by his immobility. “Hopping got old very fast,” he told Ianthe.

  A copy of the first book-length critical study of his work arrived in the mail. Richard Brautigan, a slim 206-page paperback original by Terence Malley, a young professor at Long Island University, was the second volume in a series of “critical appreciations” called “Writers for the Seventies.” Richard didn’t particularly care for Malley’s interpretations of his writing but wrote a short letter thanking the author for sending the book. Around the same time, Houghton Mifflin published The Best American Short Stories—1972, edited by Martha Foley. Along with work by Robert Penn Warren, Ward Just, and Cynthia Ozick, the book included Brautigan’s story “The World War I Los Angeles Airplane.” The “East Coast literary establishment” Richard griped about had recognized his work along with the cream of contemporary American literature.

  When Sam Lawrence came “out to frolic” for five days in San Francisco at the end of October, Richard, feeling miserable and incapacitated, spent only a brief amount of time with him. Sam thought of Richard as “the prodigal son” and longed to have him back under his imprint. Brautigan liked and admired the publisher but had been very unhappy with Dell’s poorly designed first paperback edition of Trout Fishing. He resented the extra work imposed on him when the production department ignored his design specifications.

  Housebound with a broken leg, having Loie Weber handle all the correspondence from her home on Potrero Hill, Brautigan worked on his novel. Richard had wanted to do a Western for years. His recent trips to Texas, New Mexico, and Montana charged his imagination. Standing out in the desolate Rosario cemetery taking notes on the crumbling Maderfield tomb suggested the notion of a cowboy gothic. After traveling to Texas, Richard jotted down a possible title for just such a book: “Which then from Death Will Come, A Gothic Western.” In his next four-by-six notebook, Brautigan listed fifty-seven possible titles, ranging from the prosaic (“Nurse on Nightmare Island, “The Witch of Blackbird Pond,” “Mansion of Evil”) to the poetic (“Winterwood,” “Echo in a Dark Wind,” “Nor Spell, Nor Charm”). “House at Hawk’s End” hinted at his eventual choice. Random notes followed: “Possibility of combining gothic novel with western ending,” he wrote. “A large gothic house in eastern Oregon.” The ideas took shape. “Have the plot that you’ve already written arrive the house and the book ends with them walking into the house and the door closing after them [. . .] Chapter with Mary Shelly [sic] as she is making love and all she wants to do is write [. . .] There are always beautiful young women on the covers of gothic novels. The dark mysterious power of gothic novels.”

  On another notebook page, Richard sketched an enigmatic outline: Structure of novel.

  Part I: Gothic Covers

  Part II: Tuna and Saddle

  Part III: Thanatopsis

  Ending: They are changed into a gothic cover. Or, they go into the house, the door closes, then the girl runs out. She looks behind her. She looks terrified but really she is smiling.

  Again, as had been his practice ever since starting on Trout Fishing, Richard Brautigan began working on a new novel by setting down random notes. When the time felt right he knew the work would come in a rush of energy. The only new work since returning from Montana was either poetry or short pieces like “The Last of My Armstrong Spring Creek Mosquito Bites,” an off-kilter fishing reminiscence Brautigan wrote in Bolinas several days after his visit with the McGuanes.

  In November, Mary Ann Gilderbloom returned to San Francisco after “four or five” months in Europe. She had left abruptly after Mark Dowie broke off their engagement with an unexpected “Dear Jane” letter. Back in the city, Mary Ann found a place to live on Ninth Avenue, a “hippie enclave” in the Sunset District, and got a part-time job as a bookkeeper at Philobiblon, a bookstore at 50 Maiden Lane, just off Union Square. Before long Gilderbloom was one of three comanagers.

  Richard Brautigan was the first person to call Mary Ann upon her return from Europe. “I hear you’re free,” he said and asked her out. They soon started dating regularly.

  Richard’s courtship proved both courtly and romantic, with many “long talky dinners.” Lots of time was spent in the Geary Street kitchen, where he would read poetry while they drank “copious amounts of Courvoisier with a Cointreau top.” Brautigan brought Mary Ann out to Bolinas, telling her he had recently purchased his house and adroitly avoiding any mention of Sherry Vetter. “The place in Bolinas actually kind of freaked me out,” Mary Ann recalled. “It was kind of creepy. I wouldn’t have spent a weekend alone in that house.”

  Gilderbloom made herself useful at the Bolinas house. Skilled with a needle, she sewed all the cushions for Richard’s dining room. She prepared pancakes from scratch for breakfast while Ianthe squeezed fresh orange juice. One day, randomly browsing through an old wooden chest, Mary Ann came across a 1901 edition of Wedded and Parted, a novel by Charlotte Braeme, originally published in 1883. The heroine was named Lady Ianthe. “Look at this,” Mary Ann said, showing the book to Richard, who passed it along to his daughter. Ianthe, long convinced her name was unique, found this literary coincidence “a bit startling.”

  Bolinas provided Brautigan and Gilderbloom a vibrant social life. There were lively parties at the Creeleys’. “He was such a decent man,” Mary Ann said. “More drydock than Richard.” She recalled their heavy drinking. “I remember going to the Creeleys’ one night, and there were a whole bunch of people, and the house was just warm and ripe. Bobby Louise was such a woman. She had this voice and this sexiness about her.”

  Gilderbloom recalled spending time at Don Allen’s house in Bolinas. “Really incredible evenings at the Allen household, which was nice and small and totally intimate and wonderful warm
and filled with a soft yellow light.” Don also entertained in the daytime. “We’d all be at his house on a Sunday afternoon,” Mary Ann remembered. “A whole bunch of us were sitting on the front porch and somebody pulled out a joint. They were passing it around, and it came to me, and [Richard] came and he put both hands on my shoulders, and I passed it right by. He didn’t expect it of me.” Once, in a glow of good spirits after an agreeable bohemian soiree, Brautigan told Gilderbloom that “when he died he wanted to be burned in a big fire-pyre on the Bolinas beach. Then you can just ship me out on a big wooden raft.”

  When his walking cast came off for good in November, Richard flew down to Monterey for a long weekend of frolicking with Price Dunn. As always, he stayed at Borg’s Motel. Brautigan returned to San Francisco just before the end of the month and departed the next day for New York, flying on American with his daughter, Ianthe’s first trip to the East Coast. They checked in to a suite at One Fifth Avenue for a two-week stay, and Richard stocked the place with an ample supply of Courvoisier.

  Ianthe had a fine time in New York. Her father gave her cab fare and expense money. She went ice skating at the sunken Lower Plaza in the heart of Rockefeller Center and attended the ballet at Lincoln Center on her own. Treating her like a grown-up, Brautigan brought Ianthe to dinner at Helen Brann’s Sutton Place apartment. Bored with the literary shoptalk, she spent the evening playing with Denver and George.

  When Ianthe wanted to see more of the city, Richard asked Gatz Hjortsberg, a native New Yorker, to guide them on an improvised tour. In town to attend a Playboy awards banquet at the Four Seasons (an abbreviated version of his novel Gray Matters garnered Best First Contributor), Gatz had been trampled by a rodeo bull the month before on assignment for Sports Illustrated. “All covered in hoof-prints,” Tom McGuane observed.

  Late in the morning of the day the Apollo 17 lunar module set down on the surface of the moon, Richard and Gatz, both limping, explored Manhattan, an adventure planned for their daughters. Ianthe enjoyed looking after six-year-old Lorca, holding her hand as they hurried across crowded streets and down into numerous subway stations. Their first stop took them far uptown, to Fort Tryon Park.

  They came to see The Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art located on a four-acre hill at the upper end of the park. Built around enclosed quadrangles with architectural elements salvaged from several abandoned French Romanesque and Gothic monasteries, The Cloisters housed a portion of the Met’s astonishing collection of medieval art. Unfortunately, the place was closed on Mondays, a fact lost on Brautigan’s native-born guide. It was a clear windy morning, and the intrepid quartet wandered around the exterior terraces and sere winter gardens.

  By lunchtime they were famished. Gatz led his charges from the very top of Manhattan to the Fulton Fish Market on the East River just below the Brooklyn Bridge. In the midnineteenth century, the area bustled with activity, alive with ship chandlers’ shops, sailmakers’ lofts, counting-houses, and warehouses, the very heart of the port of New York. China clippers moored in every slip, upthrust bowsprits angling out over South Street. This was the city familiar to Herman Melville. By 1972, the place teetered on the precipice of oblivion. All Melville would recognize from the great age of sail were old Federal-style red brick buildings, constructed between 1811 and 1813, now mostly boarded up, slate tiles slipping off their mansard roofs. The Fulton Fish Market, built in 1822, was one such survivor.

  Richard found the old neighborhood fascinating. Gatz brought them to Sloppy Louie’s, a venerable seafood restaurant across South Street from the Fish Market. The place remained at heart a workingman’s joint, with sawdust-covered floors, mirrored walls, a pressed-tin ceiling, and twelve bare wooden tables scarred from decades of use. Sloppy Louie’s served an extensive variety of fresh seafood at reasonable prices. Richard, Gatz, and their daughters ordered from the daily menu hand-lettered with wet chalk onto a large mirror at the back of the room.

  After lunch, they walked for a couple blocks along South Street, turning west on Maiden Lane and continuing south to Wall Street through the coffee-roasting district. Gatz directed his party into the heart of the Financial District. Much to Richard’s delight, he pointed out the large bomb scars pockmarking the marble facade of J. P. Morgan & Company, remnants of an anarchist attack in 1920 that killed thirty-eight innocent pedestrians.

  Continuing westward on Wall to Broadway, they spent a short time exploring the Trinity Church cemetery, where Richard lingered for several intense minutes staring silently at Alexander Hamilton’s tomb. Soon, they all headed south down Broadway, urged along by the daughters, who anxiously anticipated their final adventure of the day, a trip to the Statue of Liberty.

  The ferry trip across the upper bay over to Liberty Island took fifteen minutes. After disembarking, the four gawking tourists traversed the back end of the small island, sharing an unspoken excitement. Even Gatz felt an unfamiliar thrill. Like his companions, he had not been here before. Native-born New Yorkers never do anything so corny as visiting the Statue of Liberty.

  The interior of the giant statue was even more amazing than its dramatic exterior. An elevator carried them up through the ten floors of the pedestal, after which they climbed a circular iron staircase for the next twelve stories. They ascended slowly. Richard’s recently mended broken leg caused him considerable discomfort. Up in the crown, the incredible gull’s-eye view of the harbor and the Verrazano Bridge provided an ample reward for the rigors of the climb. A pale winter sun hung low over New Jersey. The day was ending.

  It was cocktail hour back in Brautigan’s suite at One Fifth Avenue. Richard got two water tumblers from the bathroom, filling them both to the brim with Courvoisier: his idea of a proper drink. Brautigan downed the first as if it were tap water and poured himself another. Gatz had a harder time, taking small cautious sips. He’d hardly drunk a finger or two before it was time to leave for dinner. Richard gave his twelve-year-old daughter some money to take Lorca to a Greenwich Village restaurant before heading out into the night.

  Brautigan reserved a large table at Max’s Kansas City. When he and Gatz arrived, most of his guests were already there. Bob Dattila, Marian Hjortsberg, and the actress Jada Rowland were among the group. Marian and Gatz had been having marital problems. She and Lorca came earlier to the city without him, staying in Jada’s Midtown apartment. Jada and Gatz had been friends since high school. She debuted on Broadway at age four with Katharine Cornell and created the part of Amy Ames on the soap opera The Secret Storm when she was eleven, staying with the show for its entire twenty-year run. Jada came with another actress friend. Penelope Milford had appeared recently on Broadway in Lenny, a play about the late comedian Lenny Bruce.

  Richard called for bottle after bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé. When the raucous conversation turned literary, Penny Milford said that her favorite writer was Richard Brautigan. The long table fell silent as she went on, enthusiastically describing her great affection for his work. By degrees, it became apparent that Penny was unaware the man with the long blond hair and drooping mustache seated at the head of the table was Richard Brautigan. Someone finally nudged Penny and told her the truth. “No, it can’t be,” she insisted. Everyone chimed in, insisting the tall stranger was Brautigan. Penny took a longer look, overcome by acute embarrassment. Richard beamed with undisguised pleasure.

  For the rest of the meal, Brautigan focused his attentions and charms on Penny. When the party drew to a close, Richard picked up the $93.60 wine tab. Penny invited everyone to her loft downtown for a nightcap. Jada, Marian, and Gatz piled into the cab along with Penny and Richard, not ready to call it a night.

  Penny Milford’s loft occupied an entire floor of an old industrial building, one vast room providing most of the living space. Against a bare brick wall at the far end, brass cymbals gleaming in the dim light, a drum kit seemed somehow out of place. Penny fixed everyone drinks. The conversation subsided into a gentle murmur. It was well past midnight. Like a de
flating balloon, essential energy transpired from the occasion. Penny’s boyfriend burst into the room. He was Richard Gere, an unemployed and as-yet-unknown actor. Richard Brautigan leaned toward Gatz. “We better go,” he whispered. “No percentage in sticking around.”

  Jada dropped them off at Richard’s hotel suite. Ianthe and Lorca were fast asleep. Brautigan offered more Courvoisier, but Gatz felt too queasy for another drink. He burned with fever. Marian also felt sick, so Richard kindly gave them his bed for the night, sleeping on the couch in front of the television. Gatz and Marian had the flu. In the morning, the fruity smell of spilled cognac nauseated them and they retreated to Marian’s aunt’s place in Connecticut to recuperate. Two days later, Richard and Ianthe returned to San Francisco.

  Back on Geary Street, Brautigan got word of an unexpected surprise. The same day Richard flew back from New York, Apollo 17 astronauts Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan had lifted off from the moon. They had discovered a small crater about the size of a football field and less than thirty yards deep that they named “Shorty,” in honor of Trout Fishing in America Shorty. On the rim of this crater, the astronauts had made an even more important discovery, a yard-wide patch of bright orange dirt vented up as a fumarole from deep beneath the moon’s surface, “the greatest single find made during America’s six explorations of the moon.”

  Back on earth, the new year of 1973 began badly for Timothy Leary, who had slipped away from the Black Panthers in Algeria, taking refuge in Switzerland. His wife, Rosemary, left him, and the acid guru took up with Joanna Harcourt-Smith, a jet-setting playgirl. The pair traveled on to Afghanistan, where they were immediately busted in Kabul, set up by Leary’s son-in-law. In January, accompanied by Federal Narcotics Bureau agents, Leary was flown to Los Angeles. He wound up at Folsom Prison facing twenty-five years of hard time, by ironic coincidence in a cell across the corridor from Charlie Manson.