Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  On the day Elizabeth McKee received Brautigan’s letter, she wrote him back, expressing interest. McKee requested a copy of In Watermelon Sugar with the understanding that Richard wanted her firm to negotiate the contract with Grove. She also asked to see the Trout Fishing contract to check the option clause. Brautigan responded immediately. He enclosed copies of his book and contract, saying he had “plus and minus feelings about Grove,” again stressing his unhappiness with being classified as a “Beat” writer.

  Richard wanted to write another novel “dealing with the legend of America and its influence upon myself and these times [. . .] my trouble so far has not been with writing, but with publishing. That’s why I need an agent.” Brautigan’s outline description of In Watermelon Sugar bled away all the magic of his book. Reducing the simple story to its bare bones made it sound banal. (“Previous inhabitants include tigers that can talk, but which have been killed off because the people got tired of being eaten by the tigers.”)

  1965 became a dress rehearsal for the big Frisco party still to come. Many seminal moments occurred that spring and summer. In April, the first Owsley acid hit the street. This extremely potent LSD was the product of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, a former radar technician and amateur chemist whose ubiquitous aspirin-sized tablets changed colors from batch to batch, keeping one jump ahead of the rip-off artists. High in Comstock Lode country in the Sierras, the Red Dog Saloon opened its swinging doors in Virginia City, Nevada, at the end of July. The house band was an oddball San Francisco outfit called the Charlatans, sporting thrift shop Edwardian clothing and hair so long they made the Beatles look like bankers. The Charlatans became the first psychedelic band, offering a pulsating light show (designed by painter Bill Ham) throbbing across the bar walls in time to the music.

  Two other important music venues started up in Frisco soon after. On the Fourth of July, four-hundred-pound Falstaffian local DJ “Big Daddy” Tom Donahue (who ruled the local rock scene) opened a club called Mothers. It took off after he booked a New York band, the Lovin’ Spoonful, in August. A little more than a month later, a former pizzeria was transformed by Marty Balin (née Martin Buchwald) into a nightclub he named the Matrix. Balin, an actor/singer living in the Haight, performed with a rock group that became the house band. Their peculiar name, Jefferson Airplane, was an abbreviation of Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane, a Berkeley gag skewering the pretensions of folk music buffs with mock invented names for “legendary” bluesmen.

  Over on 1836 Pine Street, a boardinghouse for wandering musicians managed by Bill Ham, “the light show man,” a poet named Chet Helms got involved in a “dope marketing enterprise” called the Family Dog. Helms had talked Janis Joplin into dropping out of summer school at the University of Texas in 1963 and hitchhiking with him to San Francisco. Joplin lasted for a year in the city on her first trip before returning to Austin. Chet’s group soon transmuted into a production company. The Family Dog rented Longshoreman’s Hall for two weekends in October and put on dances. They called the first one “A Tribute to Dr. Strange,” in honor of the Marvel Comics superhero. The second was dubbed “A Tribute to Sparkle Plenty,” after a character from Dick Tracy.

  Bill Ham set up his light equipment at one end of the cavernous hall. The Dog hired the Charlatans, Jefferson Airplane, and the Great Society to supply the music. Several hundred people showed up on both occasions, clad in all manner of mod finery and thrift shop Edwardian castoffs. They danced under the pulsing amorphous light show to the electric blast of rock and roll, forming impromptu weaving conga lines with happy strangers. Something bold and new had come to town. It was time to party.

  By the end of October, Richard Brautigan was in no mood for a party. Bob Sherrill had turned down the Christmas tree story (“Too much, too little, for us. Very funny idea, though. Keep trying.”), effectively closing the door at Esquire. Richard had no other viable notions for magazine articles at the moment. He wrote to Donald Hutter at Scribner’s, asking if he’d be interested in reading Trout Fishing. Brautigan said he’d been “doing a lot of writing [. . .] I’m trying to give the short story a little workout before I start another novel.” Hutter answered a week later, saying he’d be happy to read the book. Richard shipped him a copy the very next day.

  That same afternoon brought a curt note from Sallie Ellsworth at the Partisan Review. After sitting on the Trout Fishing chapters for nearly six months, the magazine informed him that the material had finally been given to Richard Poirier, one of the three editors. “Your story will have to be passed through all three, which will take several months.” Ellsworth requested that Richard submit something else should he be rejected. “I found the stories exhilarating,” she concluded.

  The last week of October, Richard Brautigan went shopping. He bought a used six-string guitar for $16 from the Diamond Loan Company, a hock shop on Third Street. The dawning age of the poet/troubadour saw a new breed of pop star emerge. Donovan and Leonard Cohen received big Bay Area airplay. Bob Dylan, reigning supreme as king of the genre with his AM hit “Like a Rolling Stone,” was in town for a series of concerts. Michael McClure experimented with song lyrics. Richard saw an avenue worth pursuing.

  Janice and Richard planned a big Halloween party, stocking their place on California Street with wine and beer. Brautigan wrote out the invitations by hand on orange computer cards. Costumes were encouraged. The whole world was invited on Saturday night, October 30. Most of them showed up. Allen Ginsberg came clad in white Indian pajamas. Andrew Hoyem sported a white beret, white tunic with gold buttons, white Australian shorts, and “white shoes and anklets.” An unidentified shirtless woman wore a bra with cutouts revealing her nipples. Peter Orlovsky “took the prize” in blue-and-white striped pajamas. Robert Zimmerman came dressed as Bob Dylan.

  The place was packed. People crowded in and out all night. Michael and Joanna McClure, Joanne Kyger and Jack Boyce, John and Margot Doss, Erik and Loie Weber along with Erik’s sister, Avril, were all in attendance. The noted jazz drummer Elvin Jones, at the time a member of the John Coltrane Quartet, beat on McClure’s tambourine so hard that it broke. Nemi Frost lost her purse. Don Allen arrived fresh from a trip to New Mexico, bringing a book from Robert Creeley for Joanne Kyger, who remembered everyone “grumbling about the horrible puke-colored paint Richard had bought [to paint the apartment] because it was so cheap.”

  Sometime during the raucous evening, a band known as the Fugs made an appearance. The Fugs had come to Frisco to play at Appeal I, a Mime Troupe benefit organized by Bill Graham, who had been the renegade theater group’s business manager since 1964. He wanted a grand parting gesture before branching out on his own. Centered on two New York poets, Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, the Fugs were the prototypical East Village punk band. Kupferberg, an old Beat hero at forty-two, had teamed up the year before with Kansas City–raised Sanders, a young poet who had published with City Lights and edited Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. About the same time the band got started, Sanders opened a bookstore named Peace Eye. With the addition of two musicians from the Holy Modal Rounders and original songs like “River of Shit,” “Kill for Peace,” and “I Feel Like Homemade Shit,” the Fugs quickly became underground legends.

  Their host stood out in the noisy exotic crowd. Richard’s high-crowned felt hat added to his towering height. His underpants provided the remainder of his costume. Brautigan’s pale pink flesh declared his presence in the dim light like a billboard advertising a nudist camp. The only thing wrong with this description was the expression on Richard Brautigan’s face. He was not a happy camper. Reasonable to assume anyone cavorting nearly naked at his own party packed with outrageous counterculture celebrities would be wearing a shit-eating grin, but such was not the case. Erik Weber remembered that Brautigan “had a terrible look on his face. Richard was very unhappy.”

  Weber felt “uncomfortable” at the party and “probably didn’t stay a long time.” Looking back, he can’t recall seeing Janice that night but k
new Richard’s misery somehow concerned her. “A big flirt. That’s the only thing that seemed to make Richard unhappy, the relationship.” Joanne Kyger remembered that Janice went out into the backyard with one of the Fugs “and almost never came back.” The gossip making the rounds that night and circulating among the Frisco poetry scene after the party implied that Janice had gone off for a fling with one or more (possibly all) of the Fugs.

  Gossip remains painful even if it isn’t true. Richard’s glum demeanor and hangdog expression indicated he brooded about the Fugs. Brautigan’s arcane literary knowledge certainly included the derivation of the group’s name: Norman Mailer’s bowdlerized euphemism for the English language’s most common expletive in The Naked and the Dead. (When actress Tallulah Bankhead was introduced to Mailer at the time of his first book’s publication, she quipped, “So, you’re the young man who doesn’t know how to spell fuck.”) For Richard Brautigan, it was no laughing matter.

  Goblins far worse than those troubling the Halloween party haunted Richard in the weeks to come. Elizabeth McKee wrote to say that she and Peter Matson had read In Watermelon Sugar and agreed “your writing is very talented and interesting.” Even so, they declined to represent him. A couple weeks later, Grove Press rejected the novel as well. Brautigan now needed an agent more than ever. Further complicating the situation, Grove’s contract for Trout Fishing (McKee doubted she could improve upon the terms) remained in effect even as the publisher expressed no enthusiasm for the book.

  Appeal I made history one night early in November. The benefit was held at the Calliope Warehouse (also known as “The Loft”), a former stable and flophouse at 924 Howard Street in the inner Mission south of the Chronicle building. The space, once housing a pie factory, was the Mime Troupe’s office and rehearsal area as well as the local headquarters for SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). Bill Graham assembled a splendid array of talent. The Fugs were there, along with banjo player Sandy Bull, poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Jefferson Airplane, who used the Mime Troupe’s loft for their rehearsals.

  At midnight, the police tried to break things up, but people kept sneaking back in using the freight elevator, and the dance went on until dawn, when Allen Ginsberg chanted a mantra. The benefit was a huge success. Everyone wanted more events just like it. Ralph Gleason, the Chronicle’s jazz critic (who also espoused rock and roll) suggested to Bill Graham that he have a look at the Fillmore Auditorium, an old second-floor ballroom at Fillmore and Geary. Gleason thought it might provide an excellent setting for future ventures of this sort.

  A renewed correspondence with Donald Hutter at Scribner’s resulted in his reading of Trout Fishing (with the understanding that the rights were unavailable). Hutter thought Richard Brautigan “a singular writer, with a strong free talent,” and enjoyed the book’s “wryness, its sympathy and humaneness, its sense of American place and American foibles” but in the end found it didn’t work for him, in spite of “such exploding imagery.” Brautigan urged him to read In Watermelon Sugar, saying, “I think it is the best thing I have done.”

  Hutter agreed to have a look right about the time the art gods smiled on Brautigan. The last week in November, Grove Press offered Richard $1,500 as an advance against future work. Payments of $250 a month would start in January 1966, with the option period to last for six months. Any work completed during that time would be submitted to Grove and the payments “considered part of an advance” should they decide to publish.

  Richard badly needed the money. His income for the year remained under $1,000. He had an idea for a new novel, and six months bought a lot of writing time. The arrangement with Grove ruled out any possibility of a deal with Scribner’s. Unable to consider the novel for publication, Donald Hutter nevertheless enjoyed reading In Watermelon Sugar and wrote on the last day of the year to say that he found it “a distinctive work, with some very lovely writing.” Hutter considered the book “a more effective novel than TROUT FISHING, a more discreet and consistent fiction.” He thought such a “contained, idyllic fantasy” would be difficult to sell but regretted all the same not being able to get involved.

  At midnight on December 18, Brautigan attended the premier performance of Michael McClure’s play The Beard at the Encore Stage of The Actors’ Workshop. McClure’s two-character one-act, starring Billie Dixon as Jean Harlow and Richard Bright as Billy the Kid, played for only a single performance. The scenery was designed by Robert LaVigne. “A beautiful small set of blue velvet with pinpricks of light.” It had originally been scheduled for two performances, but the artistic director of the Workshop got cold feet. It was fund-raising time, and “The Beard threatened the acceptable image of The Actors’ Workshop.”

  Loie and Erik Weber went with Brautigan to the opening night of McClure’s play. Loie remembered it as “a big event.” Looking back over almost three decades, Loie observed Richard’s fascination with celebrity. He “was very thrilled at being there and thought it was wonderful and great. I feel like he got really heady around events, important cultural events, because he would talk about it, build it up, talk about it afterwards a lot, and then he would create a story about it. He created stories about the mythological events of his life that he participated in.”

  Watching the play, Richard took notes for a possible review. He observed that the audience was middle-aged, “average age about forty,” and that the actors “both wear clothes from another time. 1890s, 1930s.” In the end, Brautigan wrote very briefly about McClure’s initial dramatic effort. “A review of The Beard. Thursday. I’m sitting here next to a pretty blond girl who has feet so narrow that they could walk around the petals of a flower without disturbing the pollen.” That was it. Richard turned his intended criticism into a final backhanded love poem for Janice.

  McClure designed his own poster for The Beard. He went to a print shop specializing in boxing posters and had 150 printed for the play in the same manner. Bold red and blue block letters bellowing in the beast language: “LOVE LION, LIONESS / GAHR THY ROOH GRAHEER.” Photos of William H. Bonney and Jean Harlow stared out on either side like contenders in the main event. McClure made his poster into a poem and papered the town with it. A year or so later, when McClure angled a reading gig for Brautigan at California College of Arts and Crafts, he drew a poster by hand for the event. “It was like a boxing poster of the time [. . .] Richard face forward with his glasses, mustache, and hat. Across from that, I drew his profile, then wrote “DIGGER” under one and “POET” under the other.” Brautigan kept this poster in his Geary Street apartment as long as he lived there, along with the original one-sheet for The Beard.

  On the fifth of December, Richard joined a gathering of published poets, scholars, entertainers, and artists for a group portrait in front of City Lights. Lawrence Ferlinghetti staged the event, inviting all Frisco photographers to “come on down and take pictures of poets.” John Doss was among the many shutterbugs snapping away. Larry Keenan, the occasion’s official photographer, posed his subjects in rows outside the bookshop’s front door. Ferlinghetti, clad in a dark djellaba, towered over the group, opening a striped umbrella above the heads of Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure. Ranked around them, Lew Welch, Peter Orlovsky, David Meltzer, Stan Persky, Robert LaVigne, Shig Mauro, Andrew Hoyem, Larry Fagin, Daniel Langton, and Committee Theater actor Garry Goodrow, wearing a fez, stood or sat on the sidewalk.

  Richard Brautigan, a head taller than most of the others, looked shyly to one side in his trademark high-crowned fawn-colored Stetson. Nemi Frost, a blond ghost in Ray-Bans, appeared and disappeared just over Goodrow’s left shoulder in the several exposures Keenan made of the occasion. At one point, the crowd outside City Lights grew so large someone turned on a fire alarm and several engines, sirens blaring, roared up to the store during the photo session.

  Variously titled The Last Gathering and Poets at the City Lights Bookstore, Larry Keenan’s photograph quickly became an icon of a fading era. One version graced the co
ver of City Lights Journal (no. 3, 1966). No work by Brautigan appeared in this issue, yet his picture among such a crowd on the front of the magazine ensured that he would forever be associated with the Frisco Beat movement he so vociferously disowned.

  Afterward, in the alley between City Lights and Vesuvio, Keenan photographed McClure and Ginsberg chatting with Bob Dylan, who had performed at the Oakland Civic Auditorium the previous evening. Later, they were all ejected from Tosca, across Columbus Avenue from the bookstore, when Lafcadio Orlovsky (Peter’s younger brother) accidentally wandered into the ladies’ restroom.

  December became an intense month. On the fourth, Kesey hosted his second “Acid Test” in a private home down in San Jose (“Can you pass the acid test?”) and attracted four hundred participants. The Warlocks, a local blues band, found their groove in the pulsing light show. They had once been known as the Emergency Crew and before that Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Stompers. Soon the group would change its name one last time, to the Grateful Dead.

  The evening of December 10, Bill Graham rented the Fillmore Auditorium for Appeal II, hoping to raise more money for the Mime Troupe. He signed some of the area’s best bands for the occasion, including Jefferson Airplane, Great Society (featuring a singer named Grace Slick, who would join the Airplane when Great Society disbanded a couple months later), the John Handy Quintet, and Mystery Trend. Graham sold no booze in his upstairs establishment. Admission was $1.50, and the kids lined up two-deep around the block waiting to get in.