Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Dick Porterfield proudly brought his nocturnal catch back to Seal’s Motel. “He would supply nearly everybody with his darn catfish.” The little family on welfare ate a lot of fried catfish. Dick and Barbara heard people calling frog legs a gourmet delight and learned how to “jig” for them, dangling a treble hook baited with bits of red flannel in front of squatting bullfrogs.

  When they brought the frogs home, Mary Lou refused to have anything to do with them. “They jump around in the pan,” she said. The Porterfields lived in the end unit at Seal’s, down by the laundry room. On the other side lived “a real nice lady,” who shared the kids’ gastronomic curiosity. “If you get any, I’ll fry them for you,” she offered. Richard cut the legs off, and the neighbor lady cooked them. “It was the best food I ever ate,” Barbara reminisced.

  One morning, Mary Lou answered a knock at the door. A neatly dressed stranger stood outside. “Mrs. Porterfield?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Mrs. Robert Geoffry Porterfield.”

  Another affirmative. The man asked if he could speak with Mr. Porterfield. Mary Lou told him her husband didn’t live there. He inquired if she knew where to find him. “No. I haven’t seen him for a long, long time.”

  The stranger identified himself as an FBI agent. Tex Porterfield was charged with wartime desertion from the navy. Eddie Slovick, a U.S. Army private in France, had recently been executed by firing squad for a similar offense. Mary Lou’s hair stood on end. She remembered Tex telling her, “You don’t know what I did to get you.” The G-man asked a few more questions, but she wasn’t much help, having no interest in finding Tex Porterfield. He was ancient history.

  Dick Porterfield attended classes at Lincoln Elementary School, an old two-story clapboard building at the corner of West Tenth and Monroe, not far from Seal’s Motel. Mary Lou never attended any school functions. When the time came for Barbara to start first grade, Dick brought her with him at the beginning of the fall term and parked her in the proper room. He had already previously enrolled himself so it didn’t seem like such a big deal. Barbara remembered that when the teacher got to the end of the roll call, she asked if she’d missed anyone. Barbara Porterfield raised her hand. She didn’t have the proper papers. The authorities went to talk with her brother, and things got straightened out.

  The two kids did almost everything together. Not having money for real toys, they used their imaginations, improvising six-guns out of wood scraps and cutting tree branches for their fishing poles. They played guns a lot and were always running, pretending to be horses. A long-gone wrecking yard located about ten blocks from where they lived provided an enticing place to play King of the Mountain. They climbed over the wrecks, leaping from one junker to another. Barbara was afraid to jump and recalled her long-legged brother saying, “Come on. You can do it. You can do it.’”

  Barbara gave it her best shot, landing half on and half off the adjoining wreck. Dick pulled her across, and she cut her knee. She started crying. “Hey, guess what?” Dick said. “You’re King of the Mountain.” As if by magic, her knee no longer hurt.

  Early in 1947, the Porterfield family moved from Seal’s Motel to a rental belonging to Frances Shields, a woman with “a bunch of kids.” The Shields house seemed enormous after the confinement of motel life. A two-story home located at 1765 West Thirteenth Avenue between Grant and Hayes out in the country on the edge of town, beyond Chambers Street, where the Amazon Creek flooded the unpaved streets almost every year, turning the area into a vast swamp. People abandoned their cars and rowed around in boats until the spring runoff subsided.

  “It was old, and several of the rooms upstairs weren’t finished, and everything creaked,” Barbara remembered. Her mother worked late at various menial jobs, waitressing or cleaning motel rooms and medical offices downtown. “She’d leave, and we’d be there sometimes until twelve, one, two o’clock in the morning by ourselves. She couldn’t afford a babysitter. Richard’s job was to take care of me. He would fix my meals and tell me it was time to go to bed and get me up in the morning and get me ready for school. He was a surrogate mother.”

  The Shields place stood surrounded by a huge yard shaded by old black walnut trees in front and cherry and apple trees out back. A perfect place for kids to play, but the new yard held much less interest for Dick and Barbara than the outlying fields and forgotten orchards or the eternal promise of angling adventure at the logging ponds. In the summer of 1947, the two youngsters began picking fruit to earn much-needed spending money. Dick already gathered discarded beer bottles (worth a penny each) along Highway 99, filling a gunnysack to the bursting point.

  Blackberries provided a more accessible yield. In Oregon, the thorny vines grew unrestrained, weedlike, taking over vacant lots and coiling along the roadsides in concertina-wire profusion. “Blackberry Motorist,” a Brautigan short story, recalled the past. Near their new house, in “an industrial area that had seen its day,” vines engulfed the sides of several abandoned warehouses. Barbara remembered planks laid across the vast snarling thorn-bush, “like bridges.” The ripest berries grew toward the center, and much “medieval blackberry engineering” was required to reach their bounty. “I’m too heavy to go up there,” Dick told B.J., “so you go up and pick them.”

  The kids peered into the “deep shadowy dungeon-like places” and discovered the carcass of a Model A sedan lurking within the tangled thorn fortress. Dick Porterfield tunneled his way through the needle-sting of the vines until at last he sat behind the wheel of the Model A, “staring from twilight darkness through the windshield up into green sunny shadows.” Barbara remembered the old Ford hidden by vines but had been scared to climb down inside. Dick clambered into the rusting car on every visit.

  During blackberry season, the kids picked along the vast bramble “at least once, if not a couple times a week.” Some of their yield went home for jam making, but mostly they sold blackberries door-to-door by the quart when they “needed more money than the price of a movie.” Once, lacking enough ripe fruit to fill a basket, they packed the center with green ones artfully camouflaged by their best berries and sold it to an unsuspecting neighbor.

  “It seemed like we always bought food with our money,” Barbara remembered. “Corn was like twelve ears for fifty cents. We would walk to the store, and he’d buy twelve ears. They’d always throw in an extra one. And we’d come home and that would be our lunch. I’d probably eat two ears. He’d eat eleven out of thirteen. Sit down and eat eleven ears of corn without stopping.”

  Summertime meant commercial picking season. Dick and Barbara bought their own school clothes with earnings from picking on the farms in the Willamette Valley. “We’d have to buy everything for the whole year,” Barbara recalled. They weren’t the only ones who needed the money. All the neighborhood kids picked beans and strawberries and cherries for two or two and a half cents a pound. Farm trucks collected the youngsters around six in the morning at designated spots downtown and hauled them out to the fields.

  The kids worked in teams of two on either side of the bean rows, filling five-gallon metal buckets. Full buckets were emptied into burlap sacks tagged with the picker’s name. The sacks held thirty to fifty pounds of beans. Once the sacks filled, they were tied off with twine and loaded onto trucks bound for the cannery. The goal was to pick a hundred pounds. The most industrious picked an additional hundred. The rowdy crowd horsed around instead, starting water fights.

  Bean picking was “a miserable job,” according to Gary Stewart, who lived on the same hard edge of town as Dick Porterfield. They met in the summer of 1947, out at the big blackberry patch. The two boys became immediate friends, the “odd paths” of their imaginations linking on the outskirts of the fantastic. They wondered how it would be if the vines had actual muscles and could move like a blackberry octopus, coiling and striking with their briars. “Would they take over the world?” Dick and Gary spent all summer and much of the school year together.

  The
y were dissimilar as Mutt and Jeff: a tall kid with white hair from a home broken many times and a short redhead from a big happy family. Gary’s father, Milo Stewart, worked for the highway department and had converted to Mormonism five years before. Dick Porterfield attended no church although he read in the Bible every night before bed. Bonded by imagination and a shared poverty, they toiled in the bean fields and fished the logging ponds. Once, finding a nest of baby pigeons high in an unused lumber yard teepee burner, they speculated on how wonderful it would be to fly.

  The two boys went camping at Paradise Campground sixty miles up the McKenzie, a swift dangerous river. They fashioned a lean-to from a tarp and length of rope, sleeping wrapped in blankets on the ground. A log had fallen across the main channel. Dick and Gary crossed this bridge many times to a deep pool on the other side where they could look down and see beautiful huge trout holding. They dropped their bait right in front of them, catching “some pretty good fish.”

  Several other kids remembered Dick Porterfield as a tall loner in overalls like Huckleberry Finn, hitchhiking up the McKenzie with his fishing pole. They called him “Whitey.”

  Dick bought himself the best equipment as soon as he saved the money. Big commercial tackle suppliers like Eagle Claw manufactured inexpensive split bamboo cane rods. “He had a fly pole that he really, really liked,” Barbara recalled. “It broke down in three or four pieces and fit in this little bag with a drawstring.” Dick Porterfield enjoyed the freedom of a fatherless household. As if in celebration, his body grew eleven inches during his twelfth year.

  “He towered over everybody.” Melvin Corbin, another kid living “out in the country,” on Eighteenth Street, remembered Dick Porterfield from the fifth grade at Lincoln. “All of a sudden, he was just there. I didn’t think he belonged and asked the teacher, ‘How come this big kid is in grammar school?’ She told me that he was just exceptionally big. That he was a genius. I didn’t know what a genius was at the time.” Corbin’s teacher claimed young Porterfield read at an eleventh-grade level.

  “I looked older than I actually was—” Dick described himself at thirteen. “I was tall for my age, so that I could easily be mistaken for fifteen—” Porterfield’s rapid growth caused scoliosis, a permanent lateral curvature of the spine. His chest developed asymmetrically and gave his upper back a slight hump, forcing his right shoulder higher than the left. “He could not hold his neck up straight,” Mary Lou remembered dispassionately. “He had therapy and everything.”

  Melvin Corbin recalled a skinny kid with a sunken chest, an undernourished genius allowed to go through the cafeteria lunch line again and again because he was poor and his family received some kind of assistance. Their fifth-grade teacher was much impressed with Dick Porterfield’s photographic memory. “Whatever he read, he remembered.” Dick’s reading consisted mainly of the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books his mother kept around the house. Mary Lou said her son could “flash read” any book and, when given the page number, repeat what was printed there. “I checked him out on it, and it was incredible.”

  Sixth grade marked a period of ambition and enterprise. Dick and Gary went into the worm business. A lot of kids gathered worms, selling them to filling stations for a penny apiece. The retail price for night crawlers was twenty-five cents per dozen. Dick and Gary figured they could make a profit undercutting the competition by a dime. They searched damp lawns at night with flashlights and stored their catch in a box of dirt down in Gary’s cool dark basement. “We’d put a sign out in front of my house because I was on a busier street closer to town,” Gary said. “When somebody would want some, we’d go down and dig them up and put them in takeout boxes like you get at a Chinese restaurant. We sold them for fifteen cents.”

  Both Barbara and Sandi remembered their big brother taking them hunting worms at night with a flashlight. They pulled on their rubber boots and went out into the pitch dark around eleven o’clock. Dick taught B.J. to feel in the wet grass of a freshly watered lawn. “When you see a worm you have to be fast,” he said. Night crawlers stretched like Plastic Man over six inches through the grass. “They keep one end in the ground,” Dick instructed. “If you miss, they snap back inside.”

  Delivering newspapers became another Horatio Alger enterprise for Dick Porterfield. Melvin Corbin had an Oregonian route that went out Chambers Street, down Eighteenth, and up River Road into the hills. He had been assigned a different route and gave the old one to Dick, who was suddenly in need of a bicycle. Melvin just got a new bike and offered to sell his old one. Dick had never owned a bicycle. During the war, they were almost unobtainable. The price was $25.

  Dick made a deal with Melvin to pay him back monthly with the proceeds from the paper route and took immediate possession of a bicycle that “always looked shitty.” Barbara remembered Dick’s “old broken-down bicycle.” B.J. never had a bicycle either and was “always taking off” on her brother’s. “Seemed like every time he came back to ride it, it had a flat tire. Thanks to me.” Barbara never mentioned the flat. Dick often made the unhappy discovery in the early morning, waking up to patch a tire before delivering newspapers.

  Dick Porterfield “was a kid who didn’t like to do his chores.” He lived in a household where cooking and heating required wood and “always hated to chop wood.” Dick also disliked working in the big vegetable garden the family depended upon and loathed pushing the hand-powered lawn mower across the vast expanse of surrounding yard.

  “He didn’t seem to have any ambition as far as physical work went,” Melvin Corbin remembered. Fixing flat bike tires at four in the morning provided a special challenge for a kid utterly unfamiliar with tools. “Richard didn’t even know what a screwdriver was,” his mother claimed, “or a vise.” He regarded lightbulbs with trepidation. As an adult, he instructed his teenage daughter never to change a bulb on her own, warning “instant death and dismemberment might result.”

  Dick Porterfield abandoned his paper route after nine months but did not give Melvin Corbin back the bicycle. Mary Lou recalled the predawn mornings: “He lost money every month. People would order the paper and then they would move out, you know, deadbeats.” Melvin remembered it differently: “I think he didn’t have the guts to go out and collect afterwards. He probably went once and didn’t go follow up.”

  Eventually, the Oregonian route manager made the collection. He asked Melvin Corbin to take Dick Porterfield’s route back. Melvin still wasn’t getting his monthly bike payment and started going by Dick’s place on West Thirteenth, looking for his money. “The house was always clean around it. It was never junky-looking. It was run-down, but never junky.” Even with his sharp eye for real estate, Melvin never spotted Dick. “Each time I went there for the money, he would always seem to disappear.” B.J. fronted for her brother, telling the strange angry boy that Dick wasn’t at home. Melvin finally spotted Porterfield one day, pedaling his battered bike down Chambers Street. “So I turned around and went back after him, and he just threw the bike in the ditch and took off.”

  Along with Gary Stewart, Dick’s other classmates at Lincoln were the Hiebert twins, Donald and Ronald, both prankster outcasts who formed the instant nucleus of any gang. They lived further up Dick’s street on the edge of town and spent most of their time, “day and night,” hanging out with Porterfield. Melvin Corbin also sometimes “ran with the twins.” The Hieberts were part of a large family. Richard’s mother thought there were ten children. Melvin Corbin remembered seven.

  The Hieberts’ old man worked in a slaughterhouse. His violent profession carried over into his personal life. Mary Lou described a strict disciplinarian who beat his kids with a length of garden hose. Mrs. Hiebert had shown Dick Porterfield a large pair of scissors she kept hidden under the pillow on her bed. She had said she would kill her husband if he attempted to have sex with her again. Dick had been deeply affected by this domestic melodrama. “Worried him an awful lot,” his mother recalled.

  Like Dick Porterfield, t
he Hiebert twins were wild practical jokers, delighting in playing pranks on everyone. Melvin Corbin remembered Halloween mischief. Eugene had no sewer system yet on the outskirts of town. Dick and the Hieberts tipped over outhouses or moved them back in the night, just far enough so the next customer would “accidentally” step in the hole. Another wild Halloween stunt involved collecting human excrement in newspaper. “They’d all take turns crapping in the paper,” Corbin said. Porterfield and the twins placed the night soil bundles on the front porches of the unsuspecting, lit the newspaper on fire, rang the doorbell, and ran, watching from a safe distance as their victims stomped on the flaming shit.

  Richard’s mother recalled a more malicious prank: “We had a bunch of pullets in the backyard—they were sick—[we] got out the bolo knife and went out there and killed them all and buried them up there in the ground. So, they dug them up on Halloween.” After disinterring the rotting chickens, Dick Porterfield and the Hieberts smuggled their stinking corpses into the supermarket at Eleventh and Chambers and put them in the freezer.

  Like the Porterfields, the Hieberts were a poor family. The kids earned their own way doing odd jobs and picking beans in the fields around Eugene. Only Johnnie, one of the younger brothers, didn’t work in the summertime because he had a hernia, ruptured, as they said in those days. Johnnie Hiebert loved to drink Kool-Aid, never imagining his addiction would be immortalized many years later in Trout Fishing in America.

  Mary Lou remembered making Kool-Aid for Johnnie Hiebert by the pitcherful. “Put it out there on the shelf, you know, with a glass. Everybody was giving him food and stuff. We called him the Kool-Aid Kid.” Neon-colored Kool-Aid reigned supreme as the poor man’s soft drink. At a time when a seven-ounce bottle of Coke cost a nickel, a package of Kool-Aid for the same price yielded two quarts. “We drank a lot of Kool-Aid,” Barbara remembered.

  Watermelon provided another memorable summertime treat. Although cheap by the pound, watermelons weighed a lot, and poor kids had to save their pennies. “Sometimes we’d go around to the stores.” Gary Stewart smiled at the memory. “Sometimes they’d drop one. They’d come in big trucks and they’d toss them.” Broken watermelons were set outside the back door of the market, and the kids gathered up sweet juicy hunks of scarlet fruit, delighting in the arching trajectory of spit black seeds.