Jubilee Hitchhiker (14 page)

Dick Porterfield's anonymity arose from his diffidence as much as from his difference. He never attended any school sporting events and was not an easy social mixer. “We used to hold up the wall at the dances,” Chuck Wical recalled. “Have our leather jackets on . . .”

“He was very shy around women,” remembered Barbara. “He was so good-looking. He had the most gorgeous blue eyes and perfect teeth. I thought he was very handsome. Pure blond hair. He wore his hair longer than the other boys, combing it in a platinum wave across his forehead.”

However gorgeous, Dick Porterfield had no girlfriends in high school, nor did he go out on a single date during those hormonally turbulent years. He was a neat boy who liked to look nice. The leather jacket he wore to the dances was tan suede with knit cuffs and collar, styled like a letterman's sweater. Not just something cheap off the rack at Penney's but quality goods from a downtown haberdashery. “Cost him quite a bit of money,” B.J. noted.

At home, Dick kept to himself, hanging out in his room when meals and his chores were done. A neighbor had shown him how to tie flies, and he labored over the Thompson vise with his bodkin and beeswax-coated thread, winding fur and feathers and tinsel into tiny exquisite barbed creations as intricate and bright as jewelry. Sandra remembers her brother with the vise in his lap, tying flies on the gold couch in the new addition Bill Folston had built onto the living room.

Work remained the polar opposite of fishing. Dick Porterfield's height allowed him to abandon picking beans, a close-to-the-ground crop, and work the hops harvest instead. Hops orchards, rare in the Willamette Valley today, were quite numerous in the 1950s. The leafy vine grew on wire trellises more than six feet high. Kids with a religious bent, like Peter Webster, wouldn't pick hops because the dried blossoms were used in the manufacture of beer. It was very hard work. The long sacks dragged on the ground, and it took a vast quantity of the feathery flowers to have enough for a paycheck.

Dick Porterfield finally found a dream job after school and on Saturdays, working for Mrs. Manerude, a prosperous old woman who owned a big house in the university district. She hired him for yard work and various odd chores around her place. “Manerude-Huntington” was how Mary Lou remembered her, “very wealthy lumber, fuel people.” Mrs. Manerude figures in the chapter from
Trout Fishing
called “Trout Fishing on the Street of Eternity”: “She was in her nineties [. . .] The house was four stories high and had at least thirty rooms and the old lady was five-feet high and weighed about eighty-two pounds.”

The new employment occasioned a change in the domestic routine at home. Dick and Barbara had long shared the chore of washing dishes. He did the drying. Working for Mrs. Manerude caused him to start slacking off. “He felt it beneath him to do the dishes,” B.J. noted. They hassled over the matter continuously until Mary Lou laid down the law. One week Dick washed. The next was Barbara's turn. The system seemed “pretty fair” to the kids. Dick soon started slacking off again, coming up with excuses every time his turn rolled around. He offered to pay his sister twenty-five cents a week for his share of the dish washing.

“That was a lot of money back then,” Barbara recalled. She started doing the dishes every night. At first, she collected her two bits like clockwork every Friday. Before long, Dick got behind on his payments. Eventually, his debt totaled over $9. Barbara was furious. Her dark curls framed her anger like a thunder cloud when she demanded her money. Dick said he'd pay her tomorrow. He returned from work the next day carrying a heavy paper sack. “Here's your $9 and change that I owe you,” he said without a trace of a smile as he poured nearly two hundred nickels out onto the kitchen table.

Before Sandra was born, Mary Lou bought an old wicker baby carriage for $5. It had wood spoke wheels and a hood. In
So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
, this “baby buggy” was used
to collect beer bottles along the highway. Barbara remembered pushing Sandi as an infant in the wicker carriage. The family wheeled it out once again for baby David. Dick appropriated the buggy for gathering discarded deposit bottles and “pretended that it was a covered wagon for a while and pulled my sisters and other kids around in it.” With his mother's permission, he also used it to haul his gardening tools all the way across town to Mrs. Manerude's house.

Mrs. Manerude liked the pale-haired boy and gave him plants culled from her garden. He carted them home to his mother in the wicker baby buggy. Mary Lou was proud of her extensive flower garden and grateful for all the contributions from Mrs. Manerude. Her son was on to a good thing. “She just adored him. He was perfect. And because I was his mother she'd call me on the phone and talk sometimes for an hour or two if she'd get lonely.”

During his high school years, Dick Porterfield's babysitting responsibilities assumed a level of vigilance more in keeping with his approaching manhood. When Sandi was a little girl, the mean-spirited sons of an itinerant preacher stripped off all her clothing and sent her home naked, “crying so hard that she had blood spots on her face.” The preacher lived nearby on West Twelfth. “Mother, you stay out of this,” Dick said when he heard of the outrageous abuse. “I'll handle it.”

Dick Porterfield marched straight over to the shabby house on West Twelfth. The preacher and his kids were inside with the door locked. When Dick knocked, they wouldn't let him in. He kicked the front door off its hinges, demanding to know what they had done to his little sister. “They said they didn't do nothing to her,” Mary Lou recounted. When her son returned home, “he said, ‘Mom, I could have wrung their grizzly necks.'” Shortly thereafter, the preacher and his family packed up their stuff and vanished in the middle of the night.

On another occasion, Sandi came home from school one wet winter day “all covered in green slime.” She had been accosted by a neighborhood “half-wit” on a shortcut across Amazon Creek and pushed into the shallow slough. Her pretty new red wool coat had been ruined. The brutal kid (“a big oaf and mean”) lived just up the street from the Folstons. Sandi easily identified him. When he heard about it, Dick Porterfield headed over to the oaf's house to settle the score. “He was very firm and very direct when something was wrong,” Mary Lou said. “We never saw that kid again.”

In the fall of 1952, at the beginning of Dick's senior year, Mary Lou dropped a bombshell on him and B.J. Their last name wasn't really Porterfield. “Richard was getting ready to graduate from high school,” Barbara recalled, “and I was getting ready to graduate from junior high, and my mother said to Richard, ‘Well, you might as well go by your real name. Better have your real name put on your diploma.' And I looked at him, and he looked at me. ‘Real name? That is our name!' Because that's what we thought it was. So, she told him his name was Brautigan and then he started going by that.” There was no fuss made about his new identity. It was no big deal. Dick Porterfield slipped out of his old name with as little regret as a snake shedding its skin.

Not long after his eighteenth birthday on January 30, 1953, the young man who reported to his draft board for a preinduction physical registered as Richard Brautigan. A group of draft-age boys were bused together to Portland from Eugene and put up at a hotel close by the Selective Service induction center for three days of testing and medical examination. A rough sergeant harangued the young men for hours, telling them it was time to straighten out, they soon would be pulled from their loving homes and never see their families again. Dick Brautigan seemed changed somehow when he came home that Sunday evening. “Richard was shook up,” Mary Lou recounted. “He
says, ‘Mother, I'll never put a gun in my hands to kill another man.'” Dick at first was classified 1A but that designation changed to 4F because of his scoliosis.

On his permanent high school record, Dick had been listed as “Porterfield, Richard Gary.” His new last name, “Brautigan,” was typed in just above the previous one. His father remained recorded as “Robert Porterfield,” profession: “laborer, cook.” Brautigan once boasted to Keith Abbott of getting “straight As” for a semester on a whim and then abandoning the experiment “because he couldn't find any reason to continue.” Like many tall tales he told of his youth, this was pure fiction. Richard Brautigan graduated with a grade point average of 2.093, standing number 230 in a class of 287.

As graduation approached, Dick participated in all the usual rites of passage. He had appeared in the 1951 annual as “R. Porterfield,” as always towering a head above his classmates in the group photograph. In 1952, he skipped the photo session entirely and was not mentioned in the
Eugenean
under any name at all. He sat for his formal portrait in 1953 (perhaps the only picture ever taken of Richard Brautigan wearing a necktie) and appeared alphabetically, a sly smile on his face, with his classmates in the yearbook. His first prescription for eyeglasses had already been filled, but Dick didn't wear his new cheaters in front of the camera. As he had joined no clubs, participated in no activities, and played no sport other than intramural basketball, his picture does not appear anywhere else in the 162-page volume.

When the annuals were passed out on the last day of school, Dick grabbed Pete Webster's copy, although he knew the varsity letterman only slightly. He scrawled a quick inscription and handed it back with his Cheshire cat grin. Pete read, “To my good friend, Peter Webster, drop dead!” It was signed, “Dick Brautigan.”

“What'd you do that for?” Pete asked.

“Well,” Dick shrugged, “what are friends for?”

The final issue of the high school paper came out on June 5. In the 1953 Class Will, “Dick Brautigan wills his science fiction books to Marsha Meyers.” A certain editorial desperation clings to this entry. What do you say about a guy nobody knows? None of his family members nor his closest friends remembered any science fiction books.

At the last minute, Dick Brautigan announced his plans to skip the graduation ceremony, telling his mother, “I'm not going to graduate with those slobs.”

“God, he's sick in the head,” Mary Lou thought. “Those are the boys he grew up with, his friends, the Hiebert twins and all of that.”

Dick told the authorities to mail his diploma to the house on Hayes. “The principal called me up and he was really upset,” Mary Lou remembered. “I said, ‘You take that kid in your office and you measure him for a cap and gown!' And he did. And Richard brought home this big old blue gown, and it took me three hours to press the wrinkles out of the thing. And I had a picture taken of him in it, eight by ten in color.”

Dick dutifully wore his mortarboard and the flapping blue gown. At 8:00 PM, on June 9, 1953, he marched in with his class for the baccalaureate ceremony at McArthur Court, a large auditorium used for basketball, cultural, and civic activities on the University of Oregon campus. Bill and Mary Lou Folston arrived in their Sunday best. B.J. did not attend. She was already working for Guistina's and living away from home. Mary Lou cried when the high school band played Elgar's
Pomp and Circumstance
.

Mark O. Hatfield, dean of students at Willamette University and not yet embarked on his long political career, delivered the commencement address, choosing an optimistic theme, “The Golden Age,” as his subject. The principal of Eugene High School presented the Class of 1953 to the gathered friends, relatives, and dignitaries, and the young men and women filed forward to receive their diplomas. Richard Gary Brautigan marched up in the front ranks, between Nellie Leah Brainard and Ronald Milton Bray. After the new graduates joined in singing their alma mater, a brief benediction followed, and the band played the recessional as they paraded out into the rest of their lives.

Backstage, the mood seemed jubilant. Mary Lou had her arms around Dick and Gary. The kids were off to a party that would last thirty-six hours. All except Dick Brautigan. “He came home,” his mother remembered. “He said nuts with it.” Dick didn't drink and had no desire to hang out with a bunch of puking drunks for the next day and a half. “He just came home, took off his clothes, and he went to bed or read or something.” An apocryphal story circulating after Brautigan's suicide described a high school diploma leaning against the half-empty bottle by his body. Only another myth, cobwebs blown into the moonlight by a ghostly wind.

six: midnight driver's ed

T
HE FOLSTON FAMILY owned a '38 Chevy with no backseat. More than ten years old when they bought it, the shabby vehicle was all the car they could afford. Mary Lou never liked the original tan color. One summer day, she painted it black, using cans of house paint and a flat three-inch brush. Every Fourth of July, they'd drive north for a picnic at Uncle Larry's in Halsey, Oregon. David, the youngest and smallest, got to ride on the narrow shelf below the rear window. The other three kids rode in the trunk. Mary Lou folded a blanket in back to provide some comfort. Bill propped up the lid so they wouldn't smother to death. This was also how they traveled on family trips up the McKenzie to Fall Creek. Most of the time, the old heap rusted in the curving driveway in front of their home on Hayes Street.

In the early 1950s, public schools in Eugene did not offer driver's education and the more auto-motively adventurous youngsters improvised their learning experience. Chuck and Art Wical went joy-riding in their parents' car late at night when the old folks were asleep. The twins enlisted Dick Porterfield into their nocturnal driving scheme, not wanting to risk stealing their family auto one more time. They all waited in the darkness until the lights went out in the Folston household, letting another half hour go by “because people usually don't fall asleep that quickly,” Art explained. When they thought the coast was clear, Dick sneaked back into the house, returning right away.