Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Richard Brautigan modeled for Conner’s first or second class. He did not disrobe. Instead, the session became a reading, a Brautigan performance piece. Bruce Conner can’t remember any of the students actually drawing. “This was a weird theater they had all come into.”

  The event had been previously announced, and one young student asked if her mother might attend. “Obviously, she disapproved of Richard,” Conner drily observed. “Her daughter was taken out of the class shortly afterwards.” The students didn’t know what to make of Brautigan. His reading was greeted with “dead silence.” Richard commented later to Bruce “that usually when he reads his good poems he gets laughter and stuff.” Not this time. “It was a dead response.”

  Friendship with Conner and Michael McClure brought Richard Brautigan into contact with the Batman Gallery at 2222 Fillmore Street. Founded in 1960 by black-haired Billy Jahrmarkt, a wealthy young man “obsessed with the macabre and gothic,” the gallery was named by Michael McClure for the Dark Knight of the funny papers. Jahrmarkt had a taste for black clothing and hard drugs and was so taken with the comic book hero that he started calling himself Billy Batman. The walls of the gallery were painted black, a happy contrast to the sterile hospital white endemic to most art-selling establishments. Batman Gallery’s inaugural show featured the sculpture and collages of Bruce Conner. Conner’s show was a great success, launching the Batman Gallery “into first place in the avant-garde.” Conner observed, “It opened very spectacularly, but then it didn’t function very well because Billy was a junkie.” Over the first half of the sixties, the gallery showed the work of Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, George Herms, and Joan Brown, all local artists of distinction.

  The Beard was published that March by Coyote Books. Shortly afterward, the fledgling publisher ran out of funds and Richard got word that they would not bring out In Watermelon Sugar or his book of collected poetry. In spite of this disappointment, Brautigan’s primary concern throughout the endless impromptu party of 1967 remained the publication of Trout Fishing in America. Robin Blaser contacted him early in the year about submitting a portion of the novel for the first issue of the Pacific Nation, a new magazine he was editing. As customary with small literary periodicals, no payment was involved. Richard agreed to let him use the first five chapters from the book.

  Having design control meant not informing Donald Allen of every decision. When Brautigan arranged a date with Erik Weber for a cover shoot not long after Susan Morgan’s visit, he already knew what he wanted. After auditioning alternative muses, Richard Brautigan chose Michaela to appear with him in the photograph. It was hard to resist a woman who ended her letters with “Cookies” and valued Richard’s storytelling prowess above his skills as a lovemaker. They gathered in the Webers’ kitchen next door. Erik set up his camera. Richard had a pose in mind with him standing against the refrigerator and Michaela seated to one side on a little wooden stool.

  Erik remembered their earlier shoot in Washington Square and suggested packing everything up and moving the whole operation across town. Richard thought this an excellent idea. They all headed over to North Beach. Once again, the statue of Benjamin Franklin became the focal point for the session. Erik Weber arranged his subjects to form a balanced composition. Brautigan stood slightly to the right in his high-crowned hat and navy peacoat. Michaela Blake-Grand, wearing a white skirt, calf-high black boots and a brass-buttoned military-style tunic, a wide lace ribbon tied around her red hair, sat on the low stool to his left. Dr. Cogswell’s monument rose impassively between them in the background. Unbeknownst to Richard, the stool upon which his muse perched that day had been built in the furniture workshop of Clayton Lewis, the very man his former lover, Anna Savoca, had run off with to Virginia City five years before. Watching without saying a word, Loie Weber found the business with the stool a “little odd thing.”

  Erik shot a roll of film. He experimented with different distances, yet the basic pose never changed after the first exposure when Richard stood to the wrong side, tugging on his hat brim with both hands. Once they got started, Michaela reached out to straighten Richard’s jacket hem. He and his muse looked very relaxed, engaging in an easy banter. At one point, they cracked each other up. Brautigan endeavored to assume a natural stance, crossing his arms, folding his hands in front of him, placing them on his hips, before finally clasping them behind his back. It wasn’t until the twenty-ninth frame that Weber captured the classic image that embodied an era.

  When Richard gave Don Allen the photo, he also included prints of the solo portrait Erik took in front of the Benjamin Franklin statue two years before. Allen preferred the earlier picture and wanted to use it on the cover. When Erik heard the news he was adamant with Brautigan. “No, Richard,” he protested, “you have to insist that it be this other one. It’s much better.” Brautigan listened to Erik’s advice. Since Richard retained complete control of the cover art, “the rest is history,” as Weber later observed.

  In mid-March, Richard walked to the Fillmore Auditorium on a Thursday evening in the pouring rain to hear Gary Snyder read from his poetry cycle, Mountains and Rivers without End. Snyder sat on the stage floor with a candle burning at his side and read for almost two hours while pictures and colorful light explosions flashed on the wall behind him. Snyder was about to embark on another long trip to Japan, and many of his friends came to wish him bon voyage. Richard listened in the company of Albert Saijo and Lew Welch.

  After the reading, a few people hung around, cleaning up the paper cups and candy wrappers littering the auditorium floor. Welch went out and bought a bottle of vodka, smuggling it back into the Fillmore, which did not permit alcohol. Lew and Richard shared a couple of shots, pouring booze into their coffee cups like kids at the prom. Later, Brautigan walked home alone up Geary Street through the rain. He was pleased to see a stream of rainwater pour down from a pedestrian overpass “like a small waterfall.” Richard wrote a poem about the evening, lying in bed that night while incense burned on the table beside him.

  During the first week of April, the Gray Line bus company began a daily two-hour excursion (Monday through Friday) through the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Billed as “the ‘Hippie Hop’ Tour [. . .] the only foreign tour within the continental limits of the United States,” the Gray Line expedition borrowed a page from the past, when tourist busses prowled the streets of North Beach during the beatnik heyday. As then, the interlopers were greeted with a mixture of derision, disbelief, and a certain amount of acid head amiability. Richard Brautigan met the bus with his shard of mirror, reflecting the gawkers’ curiosity back into their incredulous faces.

  On the same day tour buses started navigating the Haight, an organization calling itself the Council for a Summer of Love held a press conference in a converted firehouse. Composed of representatives from the Diggers, the Family Dog, the Oracle, the Straight Theater, and other factions of the hip community, the Council planned to organize art exhibits and “celebratory events” as well as providing “a liaison to the straight world.” There was only a halfhearted acknowledgment of the youthful hordes expected to descend on the neighborhood once school let out. In reality, the migration had already begun.

  Bolder students heeded Tim Leary’s advice and dropped out early. Among them were five young white men from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. They had formed a band together the year before, drifting out to Berkeley in the spring of 1967. Antioch required its students to leave the campus every other quarter and work at a real job as part of their education, so the quintet didn’t technically “drop out.”

  David Robinson (lead guitar), Rick Bockner and Thomas Manning (vocals, twelve-string guitars), Lawrence Hammond (lead vocals, bass), and Greg Dewey (drums) all got college credits for being in a rock group called the Mad River Blues Band. Greg Dewey’s sister had an apartment in Berkeley on Telegraph across the street from the Caffe Mediterraneum. Her pad served as a convenient rendezvous as the various band members drifted out to the West
Coast.

  The band abbreviated their name to Mad River and found their own Berkeley crash pad nearby on Blake Street. The group had a good tight sound but like start-up bands the world over had a hard time finding gigs. Not long after they arrived in Berkeley, Richard Brautigan became their benefactor. Each band member tells a different story about how the group first met Richard. Tom Manning and Greg Dewey recalled Brautigan shyly approaching one afternoon after Mad River played at an event in Provo Park, the new hippie designation for Constitution Park. “He wanted to meet us,” Dewey said, “pretty bizarre, actually.”

  Early in April, Glide Memorial Church, having recovered from the aftershock of The Invisible Circus, opened its doors at 8:00 PM for a “Free Digger Poetry Reading.” A “Gestetnered” com/co flyer advertised the event as part of the Spring Mobilization against the War. Twelve poets stepped to the podium to read, including Brautigan, Ferlinghetti, Lenore Kandel, Lew Welch, Jim Koller, Ron Loewinsohn, Andy Hoyem, Bill Fritsch, and young Jeff Sheppard. This time, there were no naked bodies on the altar.

  Brautigan read at Glide three more times the next year; first, at an event to raise money for the American Federation of Teachers strike fund at the end of February. Richard shared the stage with Muriel Rukeyser, Michael McClure, Kay Boyle, Thom Gunn, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among others. Foremost among the others was Elizabeth Bishop, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States, who said she was participating out of curiosity rather than political commitment. She had never seen any of the famous San Francisco poets and “wanted to know what they were like.” Bishop smoked pot before the reading and took a liking to Brautigan, who read for about ten minutes. Considering herself “a member of the eastern establishment [. . .] and definitely passé,” Bishop thought Thom Gunn’s poems and her own “were the best.”

  The second event, “San Francisco Poetry,” came in mid-June, when Brautigan read with McClure, Philip Whalen, David Meltzer, Lenore Kandell, Andrew Hoyem, Joanne Kyger and Bill Fritsch. Keith Abbott was listed on the poster but did not appear, being off in Monterey for the summer. Brautigan’s last appearance was as part of a program put on by the Intersection for the Arts, a small coffeehouse ministry (like the Bread and Wine Mission) that had opened its doors three years earlier in a seedy former Tenderloin bar a couple blocks further down Ellis from Glide. Richard shared the bill with Michael McClure. Freewheelin’ Frank was in attendance, along with several other Hells Angels. Robert Johnson, Intersection’s director, remembered that the occasion coincided with one of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s frequent arrests for protesting the Vietnam War.

  “[Brautigan] went out and got a newspaper,” Johnson recalled. “[He] brought the paper into the church and started shouting and raving. People started throwing things from the balcony, set fire to the drapes.” The Hells Angels pitched in to help quiet everybody down. Freewheelin’ Frank, who’d had a beef with Johnson earlier on the steps, now helped him get the riot under control. “He got some of his motorcycle guys to take charge.”

  Angry Arts Week, organized by the Spring Mobe, got off to a jump start with a fund-raiser at Longshoreman’s Hall featuring the Dead, Quicksilver, and Country Joe. Plans for a “construct-fully disorderful demonstration” at the IRS office downtown to protest the special Vietnam surtax were put on hold. The following Tuesday the Gray Line tour bus was plastered with tomatoes as it cruised through the Haight.

  Richard Brautigan did his part for the Spring Mobilization, creating a Friday night event for the Diggers. Peter Berg remembered it as “a memorial to someone who had died.” Loving sly wordplay, Richard called his happening “Candle Opera.” The com/co broadside, picturing a crude cartoon candlestick, advertised seven bands along with “candles, incense, love, etc.” Country Joe and the Fish were the headliners.

  Brautigan secured a spot on the lineup for Mad River, telling them about the gig only the day before, when he dropped by their apartment in Berkeley for the first time. (According to music historian John Platt, the first of Mad River’s free concerts for the Diggers “was a Be-In held at night in a canyon near San Francisco.” Given the timing, the Panhandle event likely preceded it.) The other groups scheduled for “Candle Opera” (New Age, All Night Apothecary, Group Morning Glory, Moebius) were all equally unknown.

  The night of April 14 was cold and misty. The crowd gathered in the Panhandle at six, and the Diggers handed out hundreds of free candles. Lawrence Hammond of Mad River recalled Brautigan standing up onstage with the band “and candles all over this flatbed truck.” As Peter Berg described it: “Richard had everyone light the candles at the same moment. Women were holding up white sheets; everyone was holding candles; Richard was beaming.” Brautigan had achieved his creative vision. Here before his eyes stood a human candelabra, a lyrical take on Digger-style life theater.

  Angry Arts Week concluded the next day with a big Spring Mobe peace march beginning downtown on Market Street and proceeding up Fell Street through the Haight, where it doubled in size before overflowing into Kezar Stadium in Golden Gate Park. Richard Brautigan did not participate in the march. He voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 because he believed the New Dealing Texan would end the war in Vietnam. When Johnson escalated the conflict, Brautigan felt betrayed and never voted again, maintaining an apolitical stance for the rest of his life.

  Com/co published Karma Repair Kit: Items 1–4, Richard’s numbered four-part poem (the fourth part deliberately left blank) early in April and Brautigan distributed the poem in the streets of the Haight-Ashbury. Kenn Davis, who drove a cab during this period, remembered cruising through the Haight and seeing Richard relaxing on a plastic lawn chair, handing out free poetry to the passing crowd. Brautigan made an effort to ensure special friends saw his newly published work, mailing copies of Karma Repair Kit to Michaela Blake-Grand, Susan Morgan, and Wes Wilson, the poster artist whose work advertised the Trips Festival and many of the dances sponsored by Bill Graham and Chet Helms.

  Trout Fishing in America had been planned for release early in the summer, but a monkey wrench was thrown into the production schedule when a San Francisco typesetter turned down the job because he objected to a chapter (“Worsewick”) that ended with sperm floating on the surface of a hot spring after the narrator and his woman made love in the water. Donald Allen had to rethink his publishing strategy. The Four Seasons Foundation operated on a shoestring, and the loss of the typesetter provided a blessing in disguise. Allen decided to print the book using an offset process and hired Zoe Brown, wife of Brautigan’s friend Bill Brown, to type the manuscript and create a photo-ready dummy. The publication date was pushed back until fall.

  Brautigan took the news in stride. The Communication Company afforded a more accessible publishing venue, and Richard decided to use the Duboce Avenue facilities for more than simple broadsides. Since his stint at Cal Tech, Brautigan had written a number of new poems, and it made sense to bring out a collection of his latest efforts. As always with his com/co productions (indeed all his earlier self-published chapbooks), Richard acted as his own designer, overseeing every aspect of production.

  Erik Weber lived right next door, but Richard wanted a photographer with closer connections to the Haight-Ashbury for his cover shot. At the time, the three best-known camera artists in the Haight were Tom Weir, Bob Greene, and Bill Brach. Both Brach and Greene hung their work in the Psych Shop. Bill Brach owed his singular reputation in part to a number of fine studies made of Janis Joplin. He simply asked prospective subjects if he might take their picture. He did this with Brautigan, and Richard said yes.

  Brach didn’t find Richard Brautigan especially social. “I used to see him all the time,” he remembered, yet they never hung out together. When Bill Brach showed up one afternoon at the apartment on Geary Street, he was visiting the home of a stranger. Brach took a number of photographs of Richard that day. Scouting for an interesting new location, they went down into the basement, where Brach posed Ric
hard in a doorway, sitting in a laundry sink and staring out a small street-level window.

  Brautigan favored this last shot and took it with him over to com/co later in April, when it was time to assemble the new book. Hayward had an IBM Selectric in his apartment, and Richard typed up thirty-two of his most recent poems, including all his previous com/co broadsides. Knowing it to be one of his best, he chose “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” as the book’s title poem. Brautigan wrote out the title of each poem by hand and signed his name on the printed title page. Claude can’t remember where the paper and ink came from, although he’s certain Richard must have supplied it. “There would have had to have been a vehicle involved,” he wrote years later, “because 1,500 copies was four cases of paper.”

  The entire production took only a couple days after Brautigan completed the typescript, which “passed rapidly through the Gestefax.” Hayward needed a few hours of “tinkering” to get “the right degree of graininess” for Bill Brach’s basement window photo on the yellow cover stock. H’lane helped with the cover layout as Claude manned the Gestetner. Hayward finished the printing “in an overnight burst of energy.”

  Brautigan assisted in collating the pages, a “tedious” nontechnology of walking round and round the table stacking the sheets. The Communication Company now owned a folder and a stapler and the edition was assembled in a remarkably short time. The haste sometimes showed, as certain copies were bound with pages out of order, others with duplicate pages, pages upside down and missing. Several purpose statements appeared on the reverse title page and front free endpaper. The first of these began, “Permission is granted to reprint any of these poems in magazines, books and newspapers if they are given away free,” and the last ended, “None of the copies are for sale. They are all free.”

  Brautigan misspelled the photographer’s name in the second of the statements. “Bill Brock lived with us for a while on Pine Street. He took the photograph in the basement. It was a beautiful day in San Francisco.” Brautigan lived alone on Geary Street. Bill Brach shared an apartment on Pine with Mime Troupe actor Peter Coyote and a “crazy artist” named Carl Rosenberg. Brach recalled that a Digger couple lived out on the back porch in a pile of rags, “in squalor like rats.” Fifteen hundred copies of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace were handed out for free. Richard Brautigan made sure a copy was sent to Malcolm Cowley. Not one was given to the photographer. To this day, Brach has never seen the ephemeral little book.