Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  The Webers hosted a dinner party for family and friends at their apartment as a way of saying goodbye to Geary Street. Erik’s mother was among the guests. Richard brought Marcia Pacaud. They spent the evening making out passionately on the couch, oblivious to the party going on around them. “He was in love with her,” Erik remembered. “He seemed like a little kid.”

  Soon after the Webers left for India, Ernest Lowe, a producer at KQED, the local public access television station, wrote Brautigan, asking if he might be interested in working on a film. No real money was involved. A lifelong love for the movies impelled Richard to say yes. The end result, Ellen, Age 3, versus American Television, a six-minute short, starred Ianthe Brautigan’s little half sister, Ellen Aste, who now goes by the name Ellen Valentine Spring. Brautigan’s shooting script may well be the shortest in film history, consisting of five numbered questions, all variations on the same theme.

  The film was made in the kitchen of a Lombard Street apartment belonging to a friend of Brautigan’s former wife, Ginny. Ianthe watched the shoot from the sidelines. Richard asked the cameraman, “Are you ready?” and reappeared with three-year-old Ellen. While Ellen ate an orange at the table, Brautigan asked her his questions. “What kind of animal would you like to see on television?”

  “Purple,” she answered. It was her favorite color.

  The other questions remained the same, only the subject changed: “What kind of dinner?” Richard inquired, “ toy? . . . bird? . . . person?” Every time, the little girl said, “Purple.” At the end, Brautigan asked Ellen if she’d like to see herself on television. When she answered in the affirmative, Richard replied, “Well, I think you will.” Cut. The film ended almost as soon as it started. In postproduction, close-ups of the various items were inserted. Because the film was shot in black and white, none of these (ham TV dinner, wind-up pecking bird toy, picture of a Native American, etc.) appeared in purple. There is no record that Ellen, Age 3, versus American Television was ever shown on KQED.

  Ernest Lowe wasn’t ready to give up on the idea of a Brautigan project, and he urged Richard to give it another try. What Brautigan had in mind was an experimental project as vapid as the work of Andy Warhol. Unlike the pop artist’s interminably long films, Richard sought the soul of brevity. Not long after, a film team from KQED arrived at Geary Street. Producer Lowe brought cameraman Loren Sears, who worked in sixteen millimeter. Richard had a simple four-page typed script. They filmed in Brautigan’s trash-filled backyard, taking numerous close-ups of discarded junk and long tracking shots past broken bottles, headless rubber dolls, and abandoned automobile tires. For the script, Richard compiled a handwritten list of three dozen place names from Yosemite National Park. He called the project Ghetto Yosemite.

  Most of the work was done in the editing room at the beginning of September. Brautigan wrote Bill Jersey that he was working on his movie, “learning how to edit.” He called the process “beautiful magic!” They reduced their footage to a total length of three minutes. Even with this short running time, the film was divided into four “chapters.” Each showed the title and credits superimposed over black-and-white photographs of scenic locations in Yosemite. With traffic sounds (sirens and honking horns) in the background, the camera examined various pieces of trash as Richard read a voice-over narration: “This is Ghetto Yosemite located in the Western Addition of San Francisco. A lot of poor people live here. This is their Vernal Fall, their Castle Cliffs, their Inspiration Point [. . .]”

  Inspired by the adventure serials he enjoyed as a kid, Brautigan ended each forty-five-second episode with a fey cliff-hanger. The first “chapter” stopped on the word “Half,” while the second began with the word “Dome.” The second concluded “Merced.” The third started “River.” Each chapter finished with the phrase “Don’t Miss Chapter 2 (3 [. . .] 4) of Ghetto Yosemite” spiraling into focus over a scenic photo of the national park. The next chapter repeated the opening credits. Ghetto Yosemite aired on KQED “Channel 9” the next year, and the station sent Brautigan a check for $30.

  With Erik Weber off in India, Brautigan looked for another court photographer to take his place. Richard had known Edmund Shea since the days when he worked at the chem lab. They bumped into each other one night at Vesuvio in North Beach and discovered they had friends like Michael McClure and Bruce Conner in common. “We must have talked about art and stuff like that, writing, poetry,” Shea speculated. “I drank a lot of wine with Richard over the years.” Edmund had produced definitive images of Lenny Bruce, Bill Graham, and various rock-and-roll notables. Brautigan knew he did professional work. It was important to have a photographer he could call at a moment’s notice. Richard wanted more pictures of Marcia Pacaud, but she returned for a visit home to Canada in the middle of September. After she left, Brautigan felt at loose ends, making his way down to Big Sur to hang out with Price Dunn.

  Partying with the General didn’t take his mind off longing for his woman. Richard wrote her a poem (“Marcia in Montreal”) and mailed it off in a letter. In all, he wrote her four times between September 17 and October 3, his only correspondence during that period. Perhaps trouble had been brewing before her departure and Richard was trying to smooth things over. A few months after her return they were no longer a couple, although they remained friends and correspondents for years afterward.

  Brautigan distracted himself during Marcia’s absence with a teenage artist he met in Monterey. Dottie Hochberg was a flower child nearly half his age. She wrote him ornate, elaborately illustrated letters for years following their first meeting, even after she married Gene Godare and had a baby. Richard saved every one.

  On Labor Day weekend, Kendrick Rand, whom everyone called “Kend” at that time, opened a coffeehouse called The Minimum Daily Requirement at 348 Columbus Avenue, the triangular corner at the intersection with Grant. The plant-filled MDR provided a cool leafy-green retreat in the heart of North Beach. Rand had been part of the scene in the late fifties but had run a restaurant out on Union Street for the past few years.

  At first, business was slow. Richard Brautigan became one of Kendrick’s first customers that fall. The Hashbury circus began losing its appeal, and Richard gravitated back toward North Beach. Three years earlier, Rand had seen Brautigan’s picture on the back of Confederate General and recognized the author as a guy he remembered from Miss Smith’s Tea Room or the Bagel Shop a decade before. “Richard came in [to the MDR] a couple of times,” Rand recalled. “He would always sit back there all by himself, come in about one o’clock in the afternoon and have his coffee and just take in the scene.”

  Rand had gotten the notion that Brautigan was “a difficult person.” One of the waitresses working at the MDR knew Richard slightly and introduced him to Kendrick. “I used to nod and say ‘Hi, Richard,’ and ‘How are you doing?’ and then he started calling me Kendrick, which very few people called me, and I have been Kendrick ever since.” The two men started talking more and more on each of Brautigan’s subsequent visits. They ended up going out to dinner one night at Woey Loy Goey’s, one of Richard’s favorite places in Chinatown, where he had dined with Joanne Kyger during his first spring in Frisco. “Sort of like the men’s room at Grand Central Station,” Kendrick remembered. “All tiled floor, walls, and ceiling and the noise factor is incredible. Very bright lights, mediocre Chinese food, but Richard loved it.” Brautigan was intrigued by Rand’s patrician East Coast background. “Middle-class suburban yacht club, country club, kind of fascinated him, because [it] was like a foreign world.”

  Kendrick was separated from his first wife. Richard, between girlfriends after Marcia’s departure for Montreal, “started hanging out in my joint.” This involved finding inexpensive places to eat. “He knew the cheap restaurants in Chinatown like the back of his hand,” Rand recalled. “There was one place he referred to as ‘the Pork Chop Palace’ where he got three pork chops and a huge mound of either rice or mashed potatoes with pork gravy on it for $1.98. He
thought that was fabulous.”

  Having left his car with his estranged wife, Kendrick was without wheels. His friend Alvin Duskin, the wealthy garment manufacturer and political activist, came to Rand’s rescue and gave him a “cherry” black Cadillac Coup de Ville and “a whole new life.” Brautigan, antennae finely tuned for anyone who might provide transportation, soon was riding in style with Kendrick. Once, they tooled out to Muir Woods on a fishing foray, winding the big car down through the tight curves on Route 1. They fished Muir Creek where Richard had taken Rip Torn, a ribbon of silver purling between the redwoods toward the beach. Richard spent days planning this trip. “All the preparation that went into this little late afternoon fishing expedition,” Rand reminisced. “I mean, many trips to Figoni Hardware to get the right size hooks and some kind of roe. I didn’t catch one fish. He caught about half a dozen.”

  Shortly after its com/co publication, Richard mailed copies of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace to a number of important literary editors and critics. Malcolm Cowley wrote a card thanking him for the “pensees, like grasshoppers in flight, not my sort of poems, but lively & personal.” The title poem was Cowley’s favorite. A letter from TriQuarterly editor Charles Newman went one better. Newman “particularly” liked the title poem and asked if he could use it in a future issue of the magazine. Brautigan wrote back the next day to give his approval.

  When Mad River’s six-month lease was up on their Berkeley apartment in September, the band moved across the Bay to a new pad on Oak Street overlooking the Panhandle. “Once we got to the city, Richard became a regular visitor,” Greg Dewey recalled, “almost daily.” Usually, Brautigan arrived toting a gallon jug of cheap white wine, “Gallo chablis or the like.” Richard also brought Emmett Grogan, Bill Fritsch, and Lenore Kandel over to Mad River’s flat. Sweet William often came accompanied by outlaw bikers. Lawrence Hammond remembered once “walking into the living room and there were two Hells Angels there. I was kind of intimidated. Richard and Bill were just sitting there grinning. And these Angels were riffing about guns and shooting themselves in the feet. I was watching Richard, and I had the feeling that he was taking it all in and getting ready to write it down. I think he liked to do that, put people together and then sit back and watch.”

  “Richard was a great guy,” Tom Manning said, commenting on the writer’s powers of observation. “He was a spacey guy, in the sense that you think he is looking at you and he’s seeing you, but he’s seeing right through you and behind you and above you at the same time. He was always like that. He was one of the sweetest guys I’ve ever met in my life.” When not sitting back and watching, Brautigan often became quite animated. Hammond recalled how the poet regaled them at times. “When he was really wound up, he would pace back and forth with that funny floppy hat, and his hands behind his back, and just deliver all these lines.”

  One of the attractions for Brautigan at Mad River’s pad was the number of lovely hippie chicks hanging out there. “I always think that he wound up at our place ’cause we generally had these beautiful women around,” Dave Robinson recalled. “God bless him, Richard would go after anything that wasn’t nailed down. We didn’t see much of the women he was with; he was kind of guarded. He was guarding his and eager to meet ours!” Tom Manning doesn’t remember ever seeing Brautigan with a woman. “I don’t know if he kept them away from us on purpose,” Rick Bockner said. “I suspect that he wasn’t an entirely happy man.”

  Through Brautigan, the Mad River musicians got to know the Diggers, who took a liking to them. “We were very young, and we didn’t know what the hell we were doing,” Greg Dewey reflected, “and they were guys who were out there and had been around. They were very kind to us and took care of us. It was a major gift that we had them in our corner. Without a doubt, it was Brautigan who put us in that corner.”

  In addition to providing gigs where the hat might be passed, the Diggers also supplied free food, and often as not, Richard served as the delivery boy. “When we’d come back and open the refrigerator,” Lawrence Hammond remembered, “there’d be all this food in it, and we were starving. That was the Digger thing, free food.” Knowing firsthand what it was like to go hungry, Richard Brautigan delighted in his Robin Hood role.

  Brautigan liked all the guys in Mad River but grew especially fond of Lawrence Hammond, the group’s twenty-year-old chief lyricist. For a young man, Hammond “took his craft seriously,” which naturally appealed to Richard. Greg Dewey recalled that Brautigan “was fascinated with Lawrence’s writing,” and they dug rapping with each other. Hammond noted, “We didn’t talk about art too much. I don’t think he liked to talk about it. If you talked about what you were working on before it was finished, it became very difficult to finish it, for some reason. I seem to remember him commenting on that.” Brautigan had a way of talking indirectly about art in his most casual offhand remarks. Greg Dewey remembered one hot summer afternoon in San Francisco when they both felt a moment’s relief from a gentle passing wind. “You know that little breeze, Dewey?” Richard said. “That little breeze was just like a poem.”

  In September 1967, Richard Brautigan focused on the imminent publication of Trout Fishing in America. When Don Allen sent the cover material to Zoe Brown early in August, he suggested that the author’s name and book title appear “across the top above the photo on the front.” Richard quickly squelched that idea. The book’s front cover would consist of Erik Weber’s photograph and nothing else, no title, no author name, no words of any sort, nothing but this bold iconographic statement. Later, it was rumored that Richard Brautigan first gained a national reputation when all the summer dropouts returned to college with copies of Trout Fishing in their knapsacks. A nice story, but the book wasn’t published until a month later. The returning wayfarers carried com/co broadsides or All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.

  Luther Nichols, an early and enthusiastic supporter of Richard’s work, maintained a connection throughout the years. When Ishmael Reed, a young African American writer whose first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, had just been published by Doubleday, came up from Los Angeles that fall, Nichols asked him if there was anyone in Frisco he’d like to meet. Reed had read Brautigan and said, “This guy’s an exciting writer.”

  Nichols arranged for lunch at Enrico’s. Ishmael had been urging Nichols to get Brautigan published by Doubleday, unaware of the editor’s initial efforts on behalf of Trout Fishing and that his publishing house had recently rejected The Abortion. At their luncheon, Reed found Brautigan to be “a private person. He didn’t say very much.” Ishmael thought Richard looked “very much like the hippie stereotype or the beatnik stereotype,” but remembered him saying “he didn’t even know those people. He didn’t seem to be part of any kind of scene.” The lunch at Enrico’s launched a friendship lasting through the years until Brautigan’s death.

  The autumnal solstice marked the temporal end of the Summer of Love. Spiritually, the psychedelic frolic faded out a few weeks earlier when the last of the seasonal runaways packed up their gear and hitched out of town, heading back to school. With the tourists, spare-change artists, and most of the barefoot waifs departed, Haight Street took on a deserted tawdry appearance, like a carnival midway after the bright colored lights switch off and all the rubes have gone home for the night. Unlike the festive zeal greeting the equinox, the fall solstice arrived with little worth celebrating. A planned powwow at Speedway Meadow attracted only about six hundred participants. That night, the Straight Theater hosted an “Invocation of My Demon Brother,” a Satanist ritual honoring the birthday of Aleister Crowley. The moon was in the sign of Scorpio. Filmmaker Kenneth Anger and a group calling itself the Brotherhood of Lucifer hosted the event with a Ben Van Meter light show and music by the Orkustra (renamed the Wizard for the occasion). Despite that old black magic, not many people showed. The Hashbury party was over.

  In the fall of 1967, Mad River released a three-song EP recording with Wee Records,
a local independent label. The record came in a handmade cardboard sleeve the band assembled themselves. Rick Bockner recalled Brautigan joining in on the impromptu assembly line: “That was a fun project. Five guys, a chunk of hash, and some mucilage, gluing the covers together.” Wee released a thousand copies. The disc sold well in the Bay Area and got a lot of airplay on KMPX, thanks to “Big Daddy” Tom Donahue, who dug Mad River’s sound. This led to the band’s signing a contract with Capitol soon after. Because of Richard’s prior kindness, Mad River gave him part of their advance and claimed on the liner notes of a 1995 CD compilation that this money “paid for the printing of Brautigan’s new novel [sic] Please Plant This Book.”

  Mad River may well have given Richard a sum of money (Rick Bockner thinks it came to around $500), but not all might have gone toward Please Plant This Book. Jack Shoemaker stated that he and Vicki provided the funds that paid for the seeds and the seed packets, while Graham Mackintosh donated his time and press to design and print the folded cardboard cover. Brautigan had first approached Claude Hayward at com/co about printing the book. For technical reasons, Claude could not do it for him. “There was a problem with getting the little envelopes through the machine.”

  “Richard was a great networker, and he played everything very close to the vest,” Shoemaker recalled. “It’s perfectly conceivable that he would have gotten several hundred dollars from Mad River and several hundred dollars from me and God knows where all. Richard was doing this grand dance, and he would collect from here and give off there. It was the Digger style.”