Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston recalled a conversation she had with Richard about a letter she wrote to him in 1971 when Jim’s book A Native Son of the Golden West was first published. She had asked in all innocence for any help Brautigan might offer to support her husband. Although Richard didn’t reply at the time, he remembered Jeanne’s letter and was touched by it. “I was very moved by your loyalty,” he told her that night at dinner.

  In his memoir, Keith Abbott documents another instance of Brautigan’s spontaneous generosity. One evening, when Richard was running errands with Keith, they encountered a large group of artist amigos, Joanne Kyger, Robert Creeley, and his wife, Bobbie Louise, among them, on their way from a gallery opening in search of new adventure. Richard invited the whole crowd to dinner, saying he wanted to start repaying the many favors they had all done for him over the years.

  Abbott doesn’t mention the name of the restaurant. Vanessi’s for classic Italian fare and the Great Eastern with its live tanks for Chinese seafood remained longtime Brautigan favorites. Richard proved a “genial host, directing the conversation from one writer to another.” He graciously picked up the tab for the entire party and invited everybody back to Geary Street for a nightcap.

  In 1970, Richard and Don Carpenter were among the first customers to belt one down at Perry’s, on Union Street in Cow Hollow, another upmarket joint with the look of an Upper East Side New York City saloon, an imitation “right down to the ceiling tiles.” Notorious as a singles bar pickup palace, Perry’s also owned a reputation as a writer’s hangout, frequented by newspapermen like Charles McCabe, a close drinking buddy of Richard’s going back to the Jack Spicer days at Gino & Carlo’s.

  McCabe, “a literary Falstaff” whose prose style had been compared to Samuel Johnson and Montaigne, often composed his Chronicle column, “The Fearless Spectator,” at the Green Street watering hole, drinking Rainier ale in his favored spot at the end of the bar by the window. “McCabe was a falling-down drunk,” Price Dunn recalled, observing that his friendship with Brautigan eventually “soured.” Don Carpenter remembered that Brautigan and McCabe used to meet for lunch once every week.

  One day, someone told Brautigan that McCabe was laughing at him, making fun of him behind his back. “And Richard never saw McCabe again,” Carpenter said. “Just on the basis of what that guy said, never went to lunch, never talked to him. If he saw him he turned the other way. He would have nothing to do with him. McCabe had no idea why and then just became virulently hateful about Richard. And printed terrible items about him in his column. But it was all Richard’s fault for believing some fucking gossip.”

  Curt Gentry, another Brautigan crony who got his start in journalism, began palling around with Richard in the early seventies. The first time Gentry remembered going out to the Geary Street apartment was the first occasion he recalled spending any “real time” with Brautigan, “right after he had discovered Bob Dylan.” Richard played the same record over and over about a dozen times “until everybody left.” This was probably around 1970. Beverly Allen noted Brautigan’s fondness for Dylan when she met him.

  Curt and Richard hung out a lot together at Perry’s, “picking up girls, getting drunk.” Gentry spent four years in the Air Force during the Korean War (mainly editing a military newspaper in Japan) and had worked at the Denver Post and the Chronicle. The noted book critic Joseph Henry Jackson talked him out of a career in journalism: “If you write second things all day you’re not going to write stuff at night.” By the time Gentry became friends with Brautigan, he had several published books to his credit, covering prostitution (The Madams of San Francisco, 1964), the Tom Mooney case (Frame Up, 1967), the search for the Lost Dutchman Mine (The Killer Mountains, 1968), and the Gary Francis Powers U-2 misadventure (Operation Overflight, 1970).

  “Richard had this terrible habit,” Curt Gentry recalled. “He’d invite a couple of girls over to the table at Perry’s. We’d sit down, and one of them said something that would offend him, or didn’t come on to him the right way, or didn’t seem to know who he was, then Richard would just go off and leave us after we’d ordered the food and I’d be stuck with the bill and the two ladies.” Curt cured his friend of his bad behavior one night when two women who were roommates joined them at their table at Perry’s “and Richard stomped out.” Gentry took both the girls home with him that night. “When I told Richard about that the next day, he never did that again.”

  Most Frisco establishments tended in those days to be either bars where you went to drink or restaurants where you went to eat. What distinguished the Washington Square Bar and Grill and Perry’s and Enrico’s was that all three provided both amenities. They were places where you could linger through the afternoon drinking and then stay on for dinner in the evening. Gentry enjoyed Enrico’s, which had “a real street sense to it.” Women working in the neighborhood strip clubs came in for something to eat “when they got off their shift at two o’clock. They served food from two till four after the bar had closed, so you got to know the hustlers, got to know the hookers, the musicians that worked around.” Curt remembered one time when he and Richard “decided to see how long we could last at Enrico’s. Started at eleven o’clock in the morning when they opened, and we left at four o’clock the next morning.”

  Enrico Banducci had ample occasion to observe Brautigan. The bluntness of Richard’s approach astonished him. “There was a Tahitian girl,” Enrico remembered, “and he would just fall over himself.”

  “I’ve got to fuck her,” Richard told Enrico.

  “You just met her,” came Banducci’s incredulous reply.

  “Enrico, there is a feeling you don’t understand,” Brautigan said.

  “Well, no . . .”

  “There’s a feeling that comes over me, and I know it’s in her, too. I know she wants to fuck me. And I’ve got to fuck her. I’m going to ask her.”

  “Well, let me get out of here.” Enrico anticipated an embarrassing disaster. “I don’t want to see.”

  From a safe vantage point at the bar, Banducci watched Richard make his approach. “He walked like his feet never touched the ground,” Enrico observed, describing Brautigan’s prancing footwork. “And you know what? They got up and left together! I said, ‘Holy Christ! Is that what you have to do to make a sale? Just say, ‘I want to fuck you.’” And that’s all he said to her, and she just said, ‘Okay. Let’s go.’ He looked at me and out he went.”

  Not every assignation produced such a satisfactory outcome. Don Carpenter recalled the many lunches he had with Richard at Enrico’s during “the golden period when he was rich.” They sat outside as various onlookers were drawn to their table. “There are people in North Beach who flat fucking loved Richard because he’s the most famous person they knew and he likes them and treats them well.” Brautigan used all this attention to hunt for women. He’d go over to a pretty girl’s table and say “I’d like to buy you lunch. Could you join us at our table? We’d like it very much if you could.”

  Carpenter noted this practice often led to disaster. “He’s been burned a number of times. The girl is sitting with him and he’s buying her drinks and it’s all worship. ‘I love your work.’ And then the girl’s husband would show up. She called her husband: ‘I’m with Richard Brautigan. Come.’ And he’d get burned.”

  The worst burning had a promising start. One rainy evening Richard picked up a woman at Enrico’s. He paid for her drinks, looking over his shoulder all the while for a husband who magically didn’t show up. The love god smiled, and the woman offered to take him home with her. She lived far off in South San Francisco. Brautigan hailed a cab on Broadway, and they drove through the pouring rain to the far outer reaches of the city. When they pulled up in front of her building, Richard played it smart. “Where do you live?” he asked the woman.

  “I live there on the fourth floor,” she replied.

  “Which apartment?”

  The woman pointed it out. “That’s the apartment.
Right there.”

  Brautigan told the cab driver, “You wait here, and if everything’s okay, I’ll wave to you from the window. Otherwise, you wait for me, okay?”

  The driver agreed, and Richard went inside with the woman. He checked out her apartment, and everything seemed fine, so he went to the window and waved down at the cab, which promptly drove off into the night. At that moment, awakened from his sleep, the woman’s husband strolled into the room. Brautigan walked back through the downpour, reaching his place soaked around six in the morning.

  Later, relating the unfortunate episode to Don Carpenter, Richard said, “All the way home, walking through the rain in South San Francisco, I kept saying to myself, ‘You’ve earned this, Richard. Enjoy yourself. You’ve earned this. You’ve worked for it.’”

  On other occasions, Brautigan’s appetite for casual sex got trumped by an overabundance of enthusiasm. Don Carpenter told of a couple different barroom pickups. “Two times, not once, but two times we picked up girls,” Don recalled. “Once we went up into the hills of Sausalito with the girls, and once we went over to my house. But what happened then was exactly the same, both times.

  “At one party, I was in a room with one girl, and she was on the phone, lying on top of me, and we were sharing a joint. Much younger than us. We shouldn’t have been with them in the first place, but they hustled us out of a ride home from the Trident. The next thing I know, I look up and Richard is standing naked in the doorway saying, ‘Let’s go. Come on, let’s go,’ and the [other] girl comes in and says, ‘What’s the fucking matter with this guy?’”

  The other time Don remembered: “We were over at my house. My living room was very small, and I was kneeling at the television set attempting to tune in Johnny Carson. I heard a girl behind me say, ‘Umm, I think it’s time to go.’ I turned around and Richard was stretched out full length on the couch, naked. And the girls were sort of standing there looking a little tense. So I had to drive them back to Sausalito to the No Name Bar.”

  Don Carpenter also attested to Richard’s kindness and generosity with his old friends. “There was no change in personality,” Carpenter stated, addressing a charge that Brautigan became crazed by fame. “There was no change in character. The important things to a guy like Brautigan were loyalty and respect and honor, and those things never altered with him. He was an absolutely loyal man.”

  Several times, Don and Richard planned to dine together at the Washington Square Bar and Grill, the upscale watering hole that first opened its doors in 1973. It was known familiarly as “The Square” to its habitués until Herb Caen started calling it the “Washbag” and the new nickname stuck. On their way into the restaurant, they would be accosted by Jack Micheline, “this drunk old poet.”

  Micheline, author of North of Manhattan and River of Red Wine, had been affiliated with the San Francisco Renaissance. He was part of the local literary scene since the heyday of the Beats, and his wild unpredictable misbehavior earned Micheline a reputation as “a precursor of Charles Bukowski.” Don Carpenter got “pissed off” because when he wanted to have dinner with Brautigan, Micheline “would start monopolizing Richard’s time drunkenly.”

  “Instead of getting rid of Micheline,” Don said, “Richard would have him to dinner and feed him and just be the sweetest guy in the world. Pay for it, be kind to him. Richard was recognizing something that I wasn’t. Jack Micheline needed him. Needed to be seen with him, sit with him, have dinner with him. Didn’t have any money for dinner. You don’t ask poets to order their priorities.”

  Curt Gentry recalled Brautigan’s kindness and generosity to Bob Kaufman. Drink and drugs had taken a toll on the black bard of North Beach. It was difficult to ascertain if Kaufman’s ten-year vow of silence, embarked upon after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, was the result of moral indignation or psychosis from years of substance abuse. Rumored to have first used the term “beatnik” before Herb Caen popularized it in his newspaper column, Kaufman had fallen on hard times since his glory days as one of the founders of Beatitude.

  Gentry remembered how Kaufman “was always hitting on [Richard] for money, you know, a dollar here and a dollar there,” at a time when the culture-shocked poet had been eighty-sixed from every bar on the Beach. Brautigan never turned him down. Even if Kaufman had already put the bite on him earlier in the evening, “Richard would give him a dollar.”

  Cow Hollow remained far from Bob Kaufman’s regular haunts, and the old beatnik poet never put the bite on Brautigan outside Perry’s. Michael McClure occasionally accompanied Richard on his forays to the pickup palace after he introduced Michael’s work to Helen Brann. She agreed to represent him and placed McClure’s first novel, The Adept, a phantasmagorical murder mystery involving a hippie coke dealer, with Sam Lawrence at Delacorte. Brautigan joined Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley in providing enthusiastic blurbs for the book, calling it “a beautifully written psychological thriller.” Michael repaid these small favors by finally completing the “sketch” he had agreed to exchange with Richard five years earlier.

  “The Richard Brautigan Story” by “Miking Malecho” was a bizarre sixty-one-page quasi–science fiction fable, divided into two sections. McClure wrote the first part in the late sixties, mentioning Richard’s “new blond girlfriend.” The fictional narrator is “Captain Paranoia,” a Halvmart, half-Martian, half-human, whose “face is a mask of rage!” He and his androids engage in relentless struggle against the Martians who have taken over the world and “secretly kidnapped” Richard Brautigan, replacing him with an android replicant. The meandering eighteen-page narrative is accompanied by thirteen cartoonish portraits of Brautigan. McClure deftly captured his friend’s ironic bemusement.

  The second part, called “The Brautigan Mystery: Volume Two,” runs for forty-three typewritten pages, a series of “Letters to a Young Poet, by Guru Maximus (Compiled by the Editors of the College of Philandery)” purportedly published by the “Institute of Erethric Priapism, second edition, 153rd printing.” The letters were “addressed to Mr. Richard Brautigan who is still struggling in the Philandery Program,” trying “to achieve the degree of Doctor of Philandery.” No illustrations this time. The allusions to Perry’s date the manuscript to sometime after 1970.

  McClure wrote of

  THE THREE Ps

  1. Pussy.

  2. Perry’s.

  3. Peach brandy.

  Guru Maximus instructed Brautigan in the subtle arts of Philandery, urging him to use “The Pocket Watch Technique.” Set a large pocket watch in front of the twenty-three-year-old secretary he is attempting to seduce and say, “You’ve got nineteen minutes until screwing time, Toots.”

  Richard saved the manuscript until his death. Michael McClure didn’t keep a copy and thought the piece had vanished.

  Most of Richard’s encounters at Perry’s were one-night stands, while Sherry Vetter remained his “main old lady.” A lone wolf like Brautigan spent much time by himself or in the company of male friends. In late September, when Richard was sitting on the terrace of Enrico’s drinking wine with Erik Weber, a waiter told him he was wanted on the phone. A minute or so later, Richard informed Erik the call was for him. It was bad news. Weber’s sister, Avril, had committed suicide, hanging herself from a tree behind Margot Patterson Doss’s house in Bolinas. She was three months shy of her thirtieth birthday.

  Stunned, Erik wandered out of the restaurant onto Broadway. Richard followed. He knew Avril and was familiar with her mental problems but still disapproved of her final decision. They walked together up a side street to Weber’s truck, and Brautigan told him that suicide “was a chickenshit thing to do.” Taking your own life was cowardly. Loie Weber had a different view of the situation. She regarded her sister-in-law’s death as an example of Brautigan’s gift for “foreknowledge.”

  Richard began writing In Watermelon Sugar in Bolinas in 1964. The novel in part was an allegory of the Bolinas lifestyle. Margaret, one of the main characters, commit
s suicide by hanging herself with her scarf from an apple tree. The narrator sees this tragic event reflected in the Statue of Mirrors. “Everything is reflected in the Statue of Mirrors, if you stand there long enough and empty your mind of everything but the mirrors, and you must be careful not to want anything from the mirrors. They just have to happen.”

  For Loie, the mirrors and their prophetic reflections were a symbol of foreknowledge. “Richard was a very intentional person,” she said, “So, Margaret hangs herself, and the narrator is with Margaret’s brother at the time, and Richard was with Erik at the time when Erik’s sister killed herself.”

  By the fall of 1971, Brautigan had $105,835. 57 deposited in his Wells Fargo savings account. He needed to invest some of this money but was instinctively suspicious of large financial institutions. “He didn’t like banks,” his accountant, Esmond Coleman, observed. “He didn’t like the stock market. He didn’t trust that. He was a sort of Henry George sort of tax man. He thought the only thing worthwhile was real estate. That’s all he felt was of lasting value.”

  Richard and Sherry spent frequent weekends in Bolinas, staying at the Dosses’ house downtown on Brighton Avenue or at the home the Creeleys bought halfway up Terrace Avenue. “Oh, a normal one!” Margot Doss said when she met Sherry for the first time. “One who talks. A normal one who dresses normal.” The Creeleys moved to Bolinas with their family, and Bob commuted to the City to teach at San Francisco State. Crouching under stands of dripping eucalyptus, the Creeleys’ place stood on an acre of land granted as payment to the town’s original surveyor. Bob thought it “looked like an old New England farmhouse.”

  Richard loved staying with Bob and Bobbie, where he was apt to encounter lively conversation and interesting strangers. This was the time Bob came to know Richard best. “For me [he] was an excellent friend,” Creeley said. Sherry remembered many evenings when the poets gathered. She thought the writers’ talk was “not dialogue, all monologue.”