Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  “‘How’s Bill?’

  “I said, ‘I don’t want to talk about Bill.’ I was hungover on Lasker’s couch. I said, ‘I want to talk about Flossie.’ So, we went on and on. He was asking questions like ‘Where is this?’ and ‘Where is that, downtown, like on the beach?’ He didn’t know zip—zip about anything.”

  Zip came fast in the narrow streets of North Beach. A new world as far removed from Oregon as a rocket ship journey to the moon waited outside the cramped confines of apartment number 38. Within sauntering distance of his rented room, a three-block stretch along Grant Avenue offered almost everything an impoverished young poet might require. The Co-Existence Bagel Shop (1398 Grant), with a cartoonish wall mural by Aaron Miller, served up bargain breakfasts. Cheap dinners and dago red attracted hungry hipsters to the Old Spaghetti Factory (just off Grant at 478 Green Street), where numbers of antique wooden chairs dangled from the rafters high overhead. Miss Smith’s Tea Room (1353 Grant) offered booze and poetry readings. For an afternoon java hit, the newly opened Café Trieste (corner of Grant and Vallejo) provided sanctuary and the daily newspapers. Mainly, there was The Place, at 1546 Grant. The public forum this nondescript joint provided prompted Brautigan to send for his manuscripts.

  Kerouac called The Place “the favorite bar of the hepcats around the Beach.” To Mike McClure it was “the Deux Magots of Frisco.” Since opening in 1953, when Leo Krikorian, “a short, husky, ferocious-looking man,” bought the bar for $3,000, The Place had attracted a steady clientele of poets, working men, artists, and such local oddballs as Hube the Cube, Red Fred (“a port wine freak” who sat on the counter and played the piano), Boring Boris, Badtalking Charlie (the “crazy black seaman”), and one-armed Paddy O’Sullivan (a faux-cavalier bedecked in Vandyke beard, plumed hat, and a cape).

  The Place had a comfortable no-nonsense atmosphere. Fresh sawdust covered the floor every day; a battered upright piano obscured the front window; an antique back bar sported mirrors and columns. Licensed to sell beer and wine, Leo Krikorian stashed Coke bottles full of whiskey out of sight under the sink for the old-time neighborhood Italians who occasionally wandered in looking for a real drink. The bar opened every morning at nine.

  In 1954, Knute Stiles, a fellow painter who knew Krikorian from Black Mountain College, became his partner “for about a year,” from one April Fool’s Day to the next. Leo took the day shift and Knute ran The Place at night. “We were a freak joint,” Stiles recollected, “poets of all sizes and ages, some painters, some photographers, some merchant seamen, some radicals, some conservatives.”

  It didn’t take many customers to make a crowd in the bar’s four hundred square feet. According to Knute Styles, “We arranged it in such a way that there wouldn’t be any single-tabled people, that people would be all kind of together. The smallness of The Place ensured the continuity of the dialogue—it was very hard for anybody to get lost.” The barroom had a staircase in the rear leading to a tiny balcony with tables for twelve or fifteen. It overlooked the entire establishment. The first staged event “was Jack Spicer’s cacophony band from his class at the Art Institute. They were a very noisy lot—almost drove the customers out really, making noises on the balcony.”

  Two painters running a bar resulted in a gallery by default. The Place began showing the best contemporary art in Frisco. In 1953, after the close of King Ubu, and prior to its reincarnation as the Six, the city had no galleries adventurous enough to exhibit abstract art. Leo Krikorian’s bar on Grant Avenue filled the gap. Among those featured in one-man shows at The Place were Robert LaVigne, Deborah Remington, Joel Barletta, and photographer Bill Eichele.

  Jay DeFeo had her first show at The Place after returning from a stay in Paris and Florence with stacks of paintings on paper. DeFeo remembered the barroom walls “sort of plastered with these little drawings,” and Knute Stiles recalled that there was so much of her work, “we had to put some of it on the ceiling.” The boisterous iconic paintings of DeFeo’s husband, Wally Hedrick, hung prominently in the first two annual Dada shows held at The Place. As a couple, DeFeo and Hedrick personified the Frisco art scene, at the time in every way a family affair.

  “The bars in the ‘Beach’ were people’s living rooms,” said John Allen Ryan, who started tending bar for Leo Krikorian in 1956, shortly before Dick Brautigan arrived on Grant Avenue. Ryan described the establishment’s evolution into a hotbed of hipness: “The Place was like a cultural center, poetry in fourteen languages in the toilet, pasted, written, painted on the wall. We had art shows, Blabbermouth Night, poetry readings, jazz. There was always something going on.”

  Until 1967 there were no true bars in California in the sense of the taverns and saloons elsewhere, two-fisted hard-drinking watering holes where you belly up and toss back your shot. In order to legally pour hard liquor, a California bar in that era had to have a kitchen and also serve food. It had to be a restaurant. All the other joints, places where writers and artists could afford to hang out, served only beer and wine.

  Dick Brautigan hadn’t started drinking when he first began hanging out at The Place. California law in those days didn’t prohibit minors from entering a bar, provided they consumed no alcohol. Tall, awkward, and blond as a newborn child, Brautigan looked younger and far more innocent than most men of twenty-one. He came in shyly and took a table by himself, his perpetual notebook under his arm. Because he didn’t ask to be served, Leo Krikorian assumed “he was no more than sixteen.”

  Wherever Brautigan took his first drink, at 12 Alder Place or Vesuvio or Miss Smith’s Tea Room or at Mike’s Pool Hall or perhaps slugging it down from a brown-paper-bagged pint on a quiet corner of Telegraph Hill, it wasn’t long before the frugal young poet, meticulously noting every minute expense in his notebooks, began devoting ample bookkeeping space to The Place, where a beer or a glass of port cost a dime.

  A couple years later, when Brautigan was a drinking man and lived a bus ride away from the Beach up on Potrero Hill, he jotted the following list:

  Bus .15

  lunch .46

  Place .10

  Place .10

  Place .10

  Place .10

  Carfare .15

  Snack .10

  ––––––––––

  1.10

  THIS WAS AN exorbitant tally by Richard’s pinch-penny standards when his total expenses for all the rest of April came to only $6.55. If Brautigan sipped coffee every day during his first impoverished summer on the Beach in 1956, he drank it at Leo Krikorian’s bar. John Allen Ryan remembered the young poet: “He’d sit and write in The Place, in all the bars, he wrote everywhere and carried his notebooks with him.”

  Richard joined an informal cadre of notebook-toting unknown poets hanging out and gossiping at The Place. There was considerable talk about Gary Snyder, who had left for Kyoto, Japan, in May, his studies funded by a grant from the First Zen Institute of America. Hipsters also chattered about Allen Ginsberg, back in town in September for the City Lights publication of Howl and Other Poems. The New York Times Book Review had published an article on Ginsberg and the San Francisco scene by poet Richard Eberhart on September 2. Rogue wanderer Robert Creeley with his pirate’s eye patch (he lost the use of his left eye before he was five), really set Frisco poet-tongues wagging.

  Creeley breezed in from Black Mountain back in March and blazed through the next three months, befriending Ginsberg and Kerouac, typing the stencils for an informal first mimeograph printing of “Howl,” brawling and getting arrested, editing the final issue of the Black Mountain Review, and running off with Kenneth Rexroth’s wife, Marthe Larsen. The affair started with a party bidding Gary Snyder bon voyage on his Japanese freighter.

  The next night, Jack Kerouac and Bob Creeley, both drunk, got the bum’s rush from The Cellar, a club featuring poetry and jazz. Creeley’s lip was bleeding from the bouncer’s haymaker. Kerouac invited him to stay at “Marin-an,” Snyder’s rustic cabin over in Mill Valley. Not much
more than a shack, the little place had windows without any glass. Creeley accepted, bringing along Mrs. Rexroth to a eucalyptus-scented Marin County love nest. The cuckolded husband eventually took his revenge in print. A prominent literary critic, Rexroth never missed an opportunity to attack both men with scathing reviews.

  Brautigan certainly heard all this dirt and more at The Place. He very quickly fell in with the local scene, roaming North Beach bars and shyly finding his way into boisterous poetry-reading parties. Ron Loewinsohn, another notebook-toting young hopeful, remembered spotting Richard with a group of people he knew outside The Place one evening in the fall of 1956. “A guy you could not miss—very blond—haircut like a pudding bowl.” He was with a group of much younger kids, all about sixteen or seventeen years old, wearing a black imitation-leather jacket zipped all the way up. “I don’t believe I ever saw him in those days with his jacket unzipped,” Loewinsohn recalled. “It was like his protection against the world.”

  Just back from a hitchhiking trip to the Southwest, Ron wasn’t introduced to Richard and didn’t know his name or anything about him at the time. Grant Avenue had long been Loewinsohn’s “stomping ground.” A Frisco kid who grew up in the Mission, he had spent his earliest childhood interned in Manila during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. Brautigan, long fascinated by World War II, often told Ron that he should write a story beginning with the words “The first time I saw a Japanese soldier.” Drawn to North Beach as a young teenager, Loewinsohn had met Kerouac and Ginsberg in The Place. He was also introduced to Robert Duncan but “didn’t know him real well,” and Philip Whalen, who “became a very good friend.” Barely eighteen, Ron had been part of the poetry scene long before Richard made his first reticent appearance.

  Soon after this, Loewinsohn saw the tall blond stranger at a party at poet Robert Stock’s house way out on Twenty-fourth Street. Stock was also a jazz clarinet player who worked as a bartender at the Co-Existence Bagel Shop. As a poet, he remained a traditional formalist at a time when adherence to the old forms were breaking down. Influenced by the work of the sixteenth-century Portuguese poet Luis de Camöes, Robert Stock held workshops that were much in demand and difficult to get into. In order to be accepted, the applicant first had to write a perfect villanelle. (“Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas remains the best-known modern version of the form in English.)

  Stock’s short story “Disappearing Act” chronicled the mysterious disappearance of Weldon Kees. His poetry had been included in the first (and only) issue of Ark in the spring of 1947. This local literary magazine, hand-set on a printing press by volunteer labor, took a militantly antiwar posture (what contributor Kenneth Rexroth defined as “philosophical anarchism”) in the face of the rampant McCarthyism gripping America. Reborn in March 1956 as Ark II–Moby I, when Michael McClure joined James Harmon as coeditor, it again lasted for just a single issue.

  Not yet a staple at North Beach bars and coffeehouses, Frisco poetry readings remained informal affairs in 1956. Casual readings often took place at parties like the one at Robert Stock’s place where Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso were all in attendance. At some point during the evening, Brautigan read a few of his poems in the living room. Ginsberg and company were not impressed. “They didn’t take him seriously,” a partygoer observed. Behind his back, Allen snidely referred to Richard as “Frood.” Before realizing he had unwittingly used “their pejorative nickname,” Ron Loewinsohn addressed Brautigan as “Frood” that night. Later, he heard Ginsberg call Richard a “neurotic creep.”

  Brautigan’s eccentric behavior doubtless reinforced this disdain. Shy and taciturn, Richard made no effort to hide his bumpkin background, turning his origins into an asset, the cornerstone of his public persona. “I’m just a country boy, come to town on my apple-picking money,” he told everyone. It became a favorite recurring joke. “A lot of people ridiculed him,” John Allen Ryan recollected, “and that made him even shier. Actually, he had invented a new method of writing. His poetry was unusual; it was mostly prose poetry, which people weren’t doing at that time. He invented a new approach that was really his.”

  One afternoon about three weeks after first encountering Richard Brautigan, Ron Loewinsohn (who knew his real name by now) ran into the blond poet again on Grant Avenue. Dick walked up to Ron without saying a word, his Naugahyde jacket zippered all the way up. Ron said, “Hello.” Dick just nodded and handed him an open notebook. On the offered page, he’d written a short poem in his cramped hand:

  A Correction

  Cats walk on little cat feet

  and fogs walk on little fog feet,

  Carl.

  Loewinsohn laughed. “That’s pretty funny,” he said, handing back the notebook. Richard folded it up and stuffed it in his pocket, sauntering away down Grant without a word, hip and detached. The moment cemented their friendship, and they started hanging out together. Looking back across the years, Ron Loewinsohn viewed Brautigan from a different perspective, as “a very painfully shy young man who tried everything in the world to cover up his shyness with a veneer of cool reserve.”

  Another chance meeting occurred late that summer on the streets of North Beach. Philip Whalen and Allen Ginsberg came ambling along, deep in conversation, when they encountered the tall blond stranger headed in the opposite direction. The two older poets stopped, and Ginsberg introduced Whalen to Richard Brautigan without a trace of the condescension displayed at Robert Stock’s party. It was a brief encounter. “[Richard] was busy going someplace and went on by,” Whalen remembered. He and Ginsberg continued in the opposite direction. Their paths would all cross again in the future.

  Having cut his poetry-reading teeth at Stock’s party, Dick Brautigan felt ready to climb the stairs to the balcony at The Place. “Blabbermouth Night,” an open forum first set in motion by a bartender named Jack Landon, took place every Monday and always drew a raucous crowd. Customers wishing to sound off on any subject striking their fancy used a wooden “soapbox” nailed to the balcony floor as a podium. The barfly audience below roared in either approval or derision.

  Poetry readings were more sedate, often scheduled on Sunday afternoons, when the clientele tended to be mostly sober. Before his first appearance on the balcony soapbox at The Place, Brautigan enlisted the talents of Zekial Marko, who coached him on the fine points of presentation, delivery, and the dramatic use of personal mannerisms. Leo Krikorian remembered Richard reading “The Chinese Checker Players,” the poem he wrote at the Bartons’ after his release from the mental hospital.

  Allen Ginsberg left San Francisco for wider horizons in October 1956. Jack Spicer returned to Frisco from Boston a month later, making the same discovery as Robert Duncan and Jess had when they came back to the city from Majorca, by way of Black Mountain, earlier in the year. In their absence, Ginsberg and the Beats had become the hep new cats on the Beach. Duncan took a job at the Poetry Center and moved with Jess to Stinson Beach in Marin County.

  Spicer picked up pretty much where he left off, holding court at The Place. Surrounded by devoted acolytes, a coterie he called the “magic circle,” Jack pontificated on a wide range of subjects. He regarded the Beats with amused contempt and could not abide either Ginsberg or Kerouac. Dick Brautigan and Ron Loewinsohn were initially put off by Spicer’s overt homosexuality. Both outsiders and suspicious of in-groups of any kind, they “affected a kind of contempt” while secretly envying the sense of community shared by Spicer’s clique.

  Six-foot-tall Jack Spicer appeared much shorter because of his hunched shambling apelike posture, the result of serious calcium deficiency. He had developed a curiously contorted way of sitting to conceal the many cigarette holes burned through the shiny black suit he always wore. Lew Welch described Spicer as “hell-bent on self-destruction.” The poet Jack Anderson remembered Spicer as a “hulking bearlike man,” with a “beautifully cultivated speaking voice.”

  Described as “genially ugly,�
�� his light brown hair combed straight back above a high forehead, Spicer worked part-time as a private detective during his university years, investigating embezzling bartenders and other petty larceny. Poet Robin Blaser and his lover, James Felts, shared their house with Spicer soon after he arrived in Berkeley in 1945. Spicer’s first poetry teacher was wheelchair-bound Josephine Miles, poet-in-residence at the University of California in Berkeley and the lone woman on the English Department faculty. She had a great influence on his early poetry and found him odd jobs to supplement his meager income as a gumshoe.

  Robin Blaser remembered “an almost spastic characteristic,” a man who “saw himself as unattractive and dramatized that and played it out. He was an astonishing figure.” Jack Spicer was a highly regarded linguist in the academic world. Fluent in German, he had completed all the requirements for a PhD in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse except for his dissertation and earned his keep working in universities and libraries, publishing scholarly articles for professional journals under the name “John Lester Spicer.” As a poet, Jack Spicer published few works but earned a reputation as a powerful and dramatic reader.

  Subsisting on white bread mayonnaise sandwiches, Spicer lived a near-monastic life on Leavenworth, close to Polk Street, in a cramped two-room basement apartment without a telephone, surrounded by stacks of books borrowed from the library at UC Berkeley. A slovenly man, he used his typewriter as an ashtray, the carriage “heaped with butts and ashes.” For reasons of thrift, Spicer stuffed his unwashed laundry, stiff from repeated use, into a closet also housing his empty brandy bottles. A visitor described accidentally opening the door. “The stench was incredible, because his closet was totally jam-packed with socks, underwear, and shirts that were beyond the pale.”

  Jack Spicer’s interests, aside from language and literature, were baseball, the tarot, pinball, playing bridge, and movies. He detested popular music. Every evening, until the bar closed at two, he met with his “magic circle” at The Place. At one time or another, the group included George Stanley, Lewis Ellingham, Richard Duerden, Lew Welch, Joanne Kyger, Bob Kaufman, David Meltzer, John Wieners, and Michael McClure. Jack Goodwin recalled Spicer holding court: “A squinting, sneering, adenoidal, hunch-backed Socrates presiding over the nightly poets’ table [. . .] the latest tenderfoot on the left, taking notes.”