Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Twenty thousand people showed up by one o’clock. Gary Snyder officially started things off by blowing a beaded Japanese conch shell, the ceremonial instrument of the Yamabushi Buddhist sect. A group of poets faced the vast crowd, sitting in a lotus-position line along a raised stage covered with Eastern bedspreads. Ginsberg, Snyder, Lenore Kandel, Michael McClure (with autoharp), and Lawrence Ferlinghetti all read their poetry, although at times the public address system failed. They were joined onstage by mantra-chanting Maretta Greer and Freewheelin’ Frank, shaking his tambourine. Through it all, Shunryu Suzuki-roshi, founder of the San Francisco Soto Zen Center, silently sat zazen behind them.

  Richard Brautigan and Andrew Hoyem were not invited to participate with the better-known poets. They wandered among the disinterested crowd, two more foam-flecks amid a sea of faces adrift beneath rippling tie-dye banners and upthrust god’s eye totems. The inadequate PA system frequently broke down. The Dead, the Airplane, Big Brother, the Loading Zone, Quicksilver, and Country Joe all played that afternoon, and thousands danced, even if they couldn’t hear the music very well. The Diggers gave away a truckload of sandwiches made from several dozen turkeys donated by Owsley Stanley, who also kicked in innumerable hits of White Lightning, the strongest acid he had yet manufactured. At sunset, Gary Snyder produced another blast on his conch shell. Allen Ginsberg chanted “Om Shri Maitreya.” As the crowd drifted off, he exhorted them to pick up their trash. The people left the Polo Fields cleaner than they had found it.

  Emmett Grogan thought the whole thing a shuck put on by the Thelin brothers’ business organization, the Haight Independent Proprietors (HIP), for their own benefit. Not a gathering of the tribes, but “actually more a gathering of the suburbs with only a sprinkling of nonwhites in the crowd [. . .] a showcase for beaded hipsterism [. . .] a single stage with a series of schmucks schlepping all over it, making speeches and reciting poetry nobody could hear [. . .]” They were all just “ham chewers” gathered at “one great big fashion show.”

  Grogan blamed the HIP merchants for the vast influx of newcomers he anticipated in the near future. In Emmett’s opinion, “the truth was that the disastrous arrival of thousands too many only meant more money for the operators of fly-by-night underground-culture outfits, the dope dealers, and the worst of the lot, the shopkeepers who hired desperate runaways to do piecework for them at sweatshop wages. It was a catastrophe [. . .]”

  The next day was Sunday, and Richard Brautigan slept in, lingering abed, making love twice with Michaela. By early afternoon, he loaded his travel kit into Andrew Hoyem’s car, and the two poets-in-residence set off on the road to L.A. They arrived in Pasadena that night and were accommodated in the guest suite at Ricketts House on the campus of the California Institute of Technology. Impromptu greetings kept them up late. At three in the morning, Richard wrote “The Beautiful Poem” just before going to sleep. Holding his penis while taking a bedtime leak made him think of his passionate morning with Michaela. Richard was so tired, he dated the poem incorrectly, thinking it was still the fifteenth.

  Monday afternoon, Richard and Andrew gave a reading at Hoyem’s alma mater, Pomona College in Claremont, also the home of Scripps and Pitzer, two other small distinguished schools. Looking more like a sylvan transplant from New England than a Southern California suburb, tree-lined Claremont retained an easy casual charm. Buffered by the three college campuses, fast-food joints and other abominations of the automobile culture had been held to a minimum in Claremont. After the reading (for which Brautigan was paid $50), the faculties of the various colleges hosted a cocktail reception at the home of Irish poet W. R. “Bertie” Rodgers, poet-in-residence at Pitzer. “There was a lot of broken glassware,” Andrew Hoyem recalled.

  The new ten-day poets-in-residence at Caltech made a contrasting pair. Hoyem appeared “nattily dressed” in a bold-checked sports jackets or a three-piece suit and tie. Brautigan maintained his unique style. John F. Crawford described him as “wearing a floppy Stetson hat, an old vest, adorned from head to toe with two necklaces, a San Francisco dog tag, and Italian studded shoes.” He also sported, perhaps only for this SoCal visit, an enormous Mad Hatter bow tie. When a student campus-tour guide spotted Richard walking along the quad, he blurted, “Oh, he can’t be a Techer! We’re more normal than that!”

  Brautigan and Hoyem soon established a routine on campus. They dined each evening at a different student residential house, taking their campaign as resident “pied pipers” directly to the undergraduates, a studious scientific lot somewhat shy and suspicious at first. A morning coffee hour with readings and literary discussions provided another way to break the ice. They soon had a small group of fans following their every move. Inspired by steaming mugs of hot black java, Richard and Andrew compiled a list of fifteen amusing coffee quotes, which they called “Student Stimulation Stations.” Adding to Dutch and Turkish proverbs and quotes from famous poets (Lord Byron, Alexander Pope, and Wallace Stevens), Hoyem and Brautigan wrote many of the aphorisms themselves. Among others, Richard contributed “The nice thing about coffee is that it’s legal” and “It’s always midnight on Coffee Standard Time.” The poets mimeographed the list of coffee quotations and distributed copies around the campus.

  During their free time, Brautigan wrote “Fisherman’s Lake,” while Hoyem worked on a prose poem he called “Bric-A-Brac.” Both poets read before the student assembly. Andrew led off with “The Litter,” a long poem his friend John Crawford found “macabre and powerful [. . .] a recounting of his dream visit to the House of Death.” Hoyem’s gravity captured the attention of the audience. It was a tough act to follow, but Richard worked with a stand-up comic’s timing. When he read his lament about his nose growing old and how it might affect his future sex appeal, he won the students over.

  Richard wrote to Michaela Blake-Grand three times during his stay at Caltech. He drafted a poem beginning “I feel my blood / joined to the stars [. . .]” and included a copy in his letter to Michaela the next day. “Mammal Fortress” consisted of two short stanzas, the first a plaintive cry, “Where the doe is queen / and the buck is king, / I need you. I love you.” Brautigan sent it along with his third letter to Blake-Grand.

  The poets-in-residence had a pleasant stay at Caltech. Their 11:00 AM coffee gatherings attracted growing numbers of students. Frequently photographed, Andrew and Richard larked about the campus, paying regular visits to the humanities division to flirt with the secretaries. They sat in on classes, at times “awed and discomfited by teaching, science, and the power of technology.” At other times, they simply pursued coeds. Some evenings, they got away from the mysteries of science and drove into Hollywood. Hoyem remembered the sidewalk kids cracking up over Brautigan. “I may not be funny looking,” Richard quipped, “but I’ll do until something better comes along.”

  Brautigan found time to speak with his film agent, H. N. Swanson, about The Abortion. Swanee liked what he heard and said he’d read the book, “to see if there is a movie in it.” It rained all day on Tuesday the twenty-fourth. Richard was bored and wrote a poem about the rain and his ennui, which he called “At the California Institute of Technology.” The first lines, “I don’t care how God-damn smart / these guys are” got a big laugh when he read them the next morning at the final farewell coffee hour in the lounge at Winnett house.

  Brautigan was in fine spirits. Earlier that morning, armed with an introduction from John Crawford, he and Hoyem stopped by the faculty office of world-famous physicist Richard Feynman, who’d won the Nobel Prize two years earlier for his work on quantum electrodynamics. Feynman was a noted prankster, and his varied interests included juggling, Mayan hieroglyphics, lock picking, painting, and playing the bongos. While Andrew and Richard cooled their heels, the secretary discreetly informed her eccentric boss about the visitors. When Feynman heard poets waited, he shouted, “Poets? Poets are always welcome here!” and rushed out to greet them.

  The physicist invited them into his office. R
ichard Brautigan mentioned that there was no rhyme in the English language for the word “orange,” suggesting Richard Feynman name some newly discovered atomic particle “torange” to make up for the deficiency. After a discussion of Feynman’s “passion for beautiful formulae,” the poets hurried off to their reading. Andrew’s mood was enhanced by a good-looking blond he met along the way. Brautigan told his friend, “Don’t wash that hand, Andrew; it has been shaken by a Nobel Prize winner and a Girl!”

  Fifty coffee-sipping students showed up for the poets’ final performance. Richard and Andrew read only work they had written while at Caltech. “Le grand farewell appearance” had been advertised to be “by popular demand,” but things ended on a sour note at Caltech. Brautigan and Hoyem had been promised $300 each. When they went to collect the honoraria, they found $185 apiece deducted from their payrolls for room and board. Richard and Andrew made a final romantic poetic gesture, refusing the checks and storming out in high dudgeon.

  The poets-out-of-residence had dinner that night at the home of film actor Harry Carey Jr. The next afternoon at a quarter past three, Richard and Andrew sat in a parked car “on a rundown residential / back street,” staring up at the Hollywood sign high on the green hillside above the stucco bungalows and flowering jacaranda trees. The Lovin’ Spoonful played on the car radio: “Do You Believe in Magic?” Richard pulled his notebook from his shirt pocket and wrote down a poem called “Hollywood.” In the fantasy town where celluloid dreams were born, Brautigan, a lifelong movie fan, observed lonely men in shirtsleeves taking out the trash.

  Leaving Tinseltown after another day, the two poets drove north to Santa Barbara, a wealthy seaside resort and residential community with uniform Spanish-colonial architecture and a venerable mission. Hoyem and Brautigan’s destination was the home of Jack and Vicki Shoemaker in Isla Vista, ten miles north of Santa Barbara. Shoemaker managed the Unicorn Book Shop (owned by Ken Maytag, whose grandfather made a bundle in washing machines) near the University of California Santa Barbara campus.

  Jack went on to a distinguished career in publishing, cofounding North Point Press, Counterpoint, and Shoemaker & Hoard. He first got in touch with Brautigan after reading Confederate General, writing him a letter saying, “We were going to be putting on a reading series and would pay fifty bucks a reading, plus expenses for travel, would he ever consider coming.” Shoemaker soon had a reply from Richard. “I got back a letter from him saying, ‘Absolutely. I would love to come. When?’”

  Richard and Andrew arrived at Jack and Vicki’s place the afternoon of January 27. They enjoyed drinks and conversation before their scheduled reading at the Unicorn, waiting to leave until the Shoemakers’ babysitter arrived. Althea Susan Morgan, a tall slender nineteen-year-old redhead who wore her boyish close-cropped hair in a Peter Pan bob, was a sophomore at UCSB. Susan worked for Jack and Vicki four nights a week. Brautigan, always keen for pretty women, was immediately drawn to the vivacious babysitter. At that point, Susan Morgan had never heard of either poet but admitted she and Richard “were instantly attracted to each other.”

  Brautigan and Hoyem gave a dual reading at the Unicorn, continuing what Jack Shoemaker called “their Mutt and Jeff act—playing off each other. Richard looked quite wild and deranged, and Andrew looked like a librarian.” The bookstore, located in the residential neighborhood of UC Santa Barbara, attracted mainly undergraduates to its events, “an audience that was fairly flummoxed and quite familiar with Brautigan and not at all familiar with Hoyem.”

  The British poet Basil Bunting, a visiting lecturer at UCSB, and his raven-haired daughter, Sima Maria (Persian for “Face of a Virgin,” Bunting claimed), were also in attendance. Bunting had worked in Paris in the twenties as a subeditor of Ford Madox Ford’s Transatlantic Review and had been associated with Pound and Yeats in Italy in the 1930s. At the time, his modernist work was better known in America than in his own country.

  After the reading, Richard and the others came back to the Shoemakers’ and he invited Susan to join them in the ongoing festivities. She didn’t take much persuading and hopped into a VW van with Brautigan, Hoyem, and five or six others. With Jack driving, they headed north about fifteen miles to Gaviota State Park. Along the way, the group smoked “lots of weed,” loudly chanting and singing. Richard abstained from the marijuana but accompanied the singers by playing a pair of finger cymbals.

  The trail to the Gaviota Hot Springs ascended from the parking area for half a mile through the trees. A waning half-moon made it easy going. The spring was only three or four feet deep and smelled of sulfur, but they had the place to themselves, and everyone quickly disrobed and slipped naked into the steaming water. The rain earlier had stopped, and a phosphorescent ring surrounded the moon. Bats swooped down out of the night, skimming over the tops of the bathers’ heads. Mud covered the bottom of the pond, and every movement caused streams of tiny tingling bubbles to rise up between their bare limbs.

  They soaked for a couple hours. It was a very romantic evening, so much so that Andrew Hoyem later wrote a prose-poem about the experience for Susan Morgan. He called it “Xenovale.” (“In the midst of rising mist a woman’s form is discernible. She disrobes and slowly descends to the pool. The outline of her body is blurred, but one may be sure she is statuesque. Her steps are as deliberately delicate as her physique is perfectly proportioned [. . .]” His words made her feel “beautiful,” and Susan appreciated Andrew’s sensitivity, but it was Richard Brautigan she took home to her Madrid Street apartment that night.

  The next day, Richard gave her an inscribed copy of the 1966 Cranium Press reprint of The Galilee Hitch-hiker. That evening, the Shoemakers arranged a poets’ get-together at their home. Brautigan came with Susan. Bunting brought his daughter. “Both Hoyem and Brautigan noticed her,” Jack recalled. “Bunting liked company, and he liked company when he drank. Richard and Andrew both liked to drink.” It was the first time Susan saw Brautigan “badly drunk.” She remembered Bunting and Brautigan “really hit it off and emptied many bottles.” Shoemaker understood their connection. “Bunting liked eccentrics and would have found [Brautigan’s] wry, fey self amusing.”

  Brautigan and Hoyem returned to San Francisco that Sunday. Much had transpired in the hipster community during their fortnight’s absence. A dapper dude in a white linen suit had been following Kesey around, hanging out with the Pranksters, and taking notes. Tom Wolfe’s series of articles on the Trips Festivals for the New York Herald Tribune (combined in 1968 to produce his best-selling book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) did more to publicize the hip life than all the combined headlines about the Great Human Be-In.

  From Brautigan’s perspective, the most interesting media development was a tiny innovative Haight-Ashbury publishing venture launched while he’d been out of town. The Communication Company had its genesis when Chester Anderson, “a fountain of quips and bon mots who liked to play Baroque music on his harpsichord and recorder,” came out to Frisco at Christmastime and met Claude Hayward and his pregnant partner, H’lane Resnikoff. Anderson, a thirtysomething bohemian, had published The Butterfly Kid, a sci-fi novel set in Greenwich Village, and during a previous stay in North Beach had edited both Beatitude and a satirical magazine called The Underhound.

  Claude and H’lane had only recently moved up to San Francisco from Los Angeles, where Claude wrote for the L.A. Free Press. Somehow, he ran into Anderson and they dropped acid together on New Year’s Eve. The next day, while coming down, they wandered over to the Wail in the Panhandle. When a burly Hells Angel gave Anderson two beers, one for each hand, Chester knew it was time to move back to San Francisco.

  At the end of the first week in 1967, Chester Anderson came to stay at the Haywards’ third-floor apartment at 406 Duboce Avenue (corner of Fillmore Street) on the slope of Buena Vista Hill, “a brisk walk” away from the action in the Haight. Hayward worked as the advertising manager for the Sunday Ramparts, a weekly newspaper published by Ramparts magazine. Peter Coyote de
scribed him as “a ferret-faced guy with an easy laugh and furtive manner [. . .] an anarchist by temperament as well as a skilled thief.” Emmett Grogan was kinder in his assessment, calling Claude “a Topanga Canyon beat from Los Angeles” with a “graveyard look who though he seldom talked, he made most people laugh just by being around.” Grogan also considered him “a slick hustler,” a high compliment coming from the consummate con artist of the Haight-Ashbury.

  Hayward got Anderson a job as the Marin County ad representative for the Sunday Ramparts, a position requiring a minimum of actual work, allowing Chester ample time to explore his new neighborhood. Anderson grew a beard, stopped cutting his hair, and began wearing “beads and things” around his neck. In a letter to a friend, he described himself as looking “quite picturesque, but fairly drab within my environment.”

  Founded in 1962 as a liberal Catholic news magazine, Ramparts metamorphosed into a hip flashy muckraking monthly in 1964, after Warren Hinckle III took over as its editor. Hinckle at that time had failed as a publicist and as a reporter for the Chronicle, but in his mudslinging hands the left-wing magazine prospered on the newsstands if not with advertisers. Critic Ralph Gleason served on the editorial board. Jann Wenner, a pudgy rock and roll enthusiast, was the entertainment editor of the Sunday supplement and shared his office with Claude Hayward. The office mascot, a spider monkey named Henry Luce, cavorted between the desks. Claude and Chester fit right in. The unlikely duo talked up the freaks in the acid head community, and Hinckle took an interest in doing a major feature on the hippies. He offered Anderson $2 an hour as a researcher to dig up stories in the Haight.