Jubilee Hitchhiker (19 page)

Dick struggled to maintain his composure, keeping cool while bleak darkness closed around him. Years later, in his short story “Forgiven,” Brautigan wrote of fishing downstream from a bridge “into a fast shallow run covered over closely with trees like a shadowy knitted tunnel.” Fishing there, surrounded by “nothing but darkness,” a nameless, uncontrollable fear took hold of him. Panic-stricken, he ran. “Every horror in the world was at my back [. . .] they were all without names and had no shape but perception itself.” He ran on and saw “the dim white outline of the bridge standing out against the night, my soul was born again through a vision of rescue and sanctuary [. . .] the bridge bloomed like a white wooden angel in my eyes [. . .]”

For as long as Richard Brautigan lived, Goodpasture Bridge, the graceful covered structure where angels nested, remained a symbol of hope, salvation, and enduring love. On that sad, beautiful October afternoon in 1955, he wasn't feeling quite so poetic. “He was very upset,” Linda Webster remembered. Riding home to Eugene, instead of sitting in back with Linda, Dick slouched on the front seat, not saying much, as Bill Brown talked about his time on the stream.

When the boys dropped Linda off, Edna asked her daughter how the day went with Dick. “Linda said that he was boring.” She never went “fishing” with Dick Brautigan again. As far as he knew, aside from an accidental meeting at the front door of her home, he never saw her again. It wasn't from want of trying. Soon after, Dick brought a small bowl of goldfish over to the Webster house, accompanied by a poem, as a gift for Linda. The long-lost poem spoke of being happy to know that the fish were swimming around in her room. Although she didn't want to see him, Linda remembered how very sad she felt when the goldfish died.

Discussing the fishing trip later with Edna, Dick said, “I was so embarrassed. I couldn't talk to her. I can't understand why she doesn't want me. I prayed about it. She doesn't respond.”

A complimentary copy of the Autumn issue of
Flame
(vol. II, no. 3) arrived in the mail about the same time, the names of contributors printed on the cover beneath an arching red logo blazing like the fiery lettering painted on the hood of a hot rod. Richard Brautigan's short poem was the final piece in the issue, crouching at the bottom of the page on the inside of the back cover.

Another pleasant surprise arrived that fall from
Epos
, an established poetry quarterly located in Lake Como, Florida. Edited by poet Evelyn Thorne,
Epos
championed the work of young unknown poets, Charles Bukowski among them. Thorne published her own work as Will Inman, adopting a masculine pseudonym because she felt the deck was stacked against women. Acceptance came as welcome news. “The Second Kingdom” was a love poem inspired by Linda Webster (“The sound of / your eyes: snow / coming down / the stairs / of the wind). Not even a modest payment was forthcoming.
Epos
sent poets two copies of the quarterly containing their work.

Around this same time, Brautigan submitted a short story to
Playboy
magazine. The first paragraph of “My Name Is Richard Brautigan,” consisted of two short sentences announcing the author's name and age (“I'm twenty-years-old.”) The second paragraph speculated on “how nice it would be if my name were Ernest Hemingway.” That name in the title would grab the editor's attention. He'd want to read the rest of the story instead of tossing it aside because he'd never heard of a writer named Richard Brautigan.

The story came back with a personal letter from the editor. “If this piece was as fresh and clear as its opening, you might have something,” the letter began. “As it stands, the opening has no connection with the story, is a gimmick-for-the-sake-of-a-gimmick only, and the story itself is over before it starts, has no discernable point. Thanks, though.” Encouraged, Brautigan “hunted up a discernable point lickity-split” and immediately rewrote the story. On a dreary rain-soaked day close to the end of October, suffering from his second bad head cold of the month, Brautigan sat on his bed in the furnished room, handwriting a letter to Gary Stewart while Bill Brown retyped the revised
Playboy
story. Bill volunteered for this task as a mental distraction because he was “having girl trouble” and feeling blue.

Dick had the blues pretty bad himself and for similar reasons. “Linda Webster broke my heart,” he wrote. “I've been feeling like hell for over two months. Memories of her haunt the castles of my brain. I never knew I could be hurt so much. I never knew that much hurt existed in
the world.” Brautigan told about going to visit Gary's folks a couple Sundays before, eating cake, watching TV, and thinking “about killing your little brother.” He also mentioned that he had started writing poetry again and included a recent example. “Hi,” a brief bit of trivia, exuded a surprising amount of good cheer considering his bleak mood.

Lack of money continued to trouble Dick Brautigan. Bill Brown tried to get him work at the post office. Such regimented employment ran contrary to his nature. “He wasn't really too enthused,” Brown remembered. Instead, Dick sold his typewriter for $100. Bill Brown witnessed the transaction. “I was there when the guy paid him for it,” he said. “Packed it out the door, guy and his wife.” Afterward, the two boys went downtown and Brautigan bought some flannel shirts at Eugene Surplus. Having tended to his limited sartorial needs, Dick went shopping for food.

Without a typewriter, Brautigan began using a pencil, writing longhand in a number of inexpensive spiral-bound notebooks. He joked that he favored this method because “you can write in the most comfortable positions.” He had started on a book of short stories he called
These Few Precious Days
. The Folstons had cut off his rent payments, and the typewriter money was soon exhausted. Always desperately short of cash, Dick took a job for a few days picking walnuts, earning over $2 an hour. The work injured his hands, and his fingers grew too sore to hold a pencil. He came home from the job so exhausted he had only enough energy to open a can of cold beans for dinner before collapsing into bed.

On the night of October 28, Dick telephoned Edna Webster. Her mother, Alice Smith, picked up the receiver.

“May I speak to Edna?” Dick asked.

“She isn't here.”

Standing in the kitchen, Linda Webster thought the call was for her. “I'm here,” she yelled at her grandmother. Dick Brautigan hung up without another word and wept.

Two days later, on another bleak rainy afternoon, Dick sat in a rocking chair in his furnished room and wrote another letter to Gary Stewart. A sore finger pained him enough that he joked about gangrene setting in. “I'm so poor that I'll have to amputate it myself.” Hungry but unsure what he'd have for dinner, Dick quipped, “I'll probably eat the big rat who has been staring at me while I've been writing this letter.” The overall tone of the letter was bleak. Dick told Gary about the book of stories he had started, adding that he would never try to publish it.

Grinding poverty and an energy-depleting malnutrition laid the foundation for his acute depression, but the framework remained a broken heart. Brautigan called it the “Linda Webster Blues.” She had become an obsession. In the grip of his feelings, Brautigan began losing sight of
reality. “I love her, but she hates me. It hurts and hurts and hurts me. I feel like a God-damn fool [. . .] Isn't it ridiculous for a person as ugly as I am to love a person as beautiful [as] Linda. And she's only fourteen-years-old, too. My heart is insane.” He hoped “to God” that he would never see her or hear the sound of her voice ever again.

Avoiding the Webster household to spare himself the pain of running into Linda, Dick transferred his need for family over to Gary Stewart's mother and father, “a pair of the nicest people alive.” He visited and phoned them regularly. “You are very, very lucky to have such wonderful parents,” he wrote Gary, signing himself “a nothing called Brautigan.” A pathetic PS observed, “These letters are stupid, horrible things. If you want me to stop writing them, I will.”

The next three weeks dragged on in a similar fashion. No money. Not enough to eat. The dreary cold wet weather enhanced the bleakness Brautigan felt inside. Dick was going down fast, his lonely craft all he had left to sustain him. In spite of low self-esteem, this “little zero” continued wielding a pencil, struggling to perfect his prose and poetry in the twenty-five-cent school notebooks he could barely afford.

On Tuesday, November 22, 1955, he flipped open the cover of one and wrote “i love You” in a diagonal descending across the first page. At the bottom of the second sheet, in tiny lowercase letters, he wrote, “by richard brautigan.” On the third leaf came the dedication, carefully printed in huge block printing dwarfing all the rest: “for LINDA.” The very next day, Dick Brautigan found God.

“The night is over,” Dick wrote to Gary Stewart. “Now I will walk in the sun. / Oh, Gary, I am so happy. / It was the longest night.” Finding God greatly improved his attitude. “I have so much intelligence and sensitivity and love to communicate to the world,” his letter continued. “My writing has improved tremendously during the last month. I believe that God is going to help me to be a literary sensation by summer. God has made me know something about myself. I know that I am [a] genius with creative power beyond description. And I am very humble about it.”

The intensity of Brautigan's words vibrate with the psychotic fervor of an extremely troubled young man. “This letter is very, very hard to write. I want my writing to be perfect. I want to say exactly what I want to say.” The manic drive for perfection didn't arise out of his admiration for Hemingway's lapidary styling or his newfound godliness. It came from his all-consuming love for Linda Webster. “I love Linda with a love deeper than the river, purer than the river,” Dick declared. “I want to build a cage around her. A delicate cage. The cage will be made out of the strangest thing in the world: gentleness. I shall feed her the food of my love, and give her the milk of my love to drink, and I shall grow her up and make her beautiful beyond all things.”

Dick believed he would do his “greatest writing” when he finally had Linda. He planned to complete his book of love poetry in three days. He very carefully printed the title, “i love You,” emphasizing the capitalization of the second-person pronoun. “It is a very lovely book,” Dick declared. “I have created a new form of love poetry.” Two examples follow:

Brautigan felt he had discovered “a very lovely form.” He decided not to publish “because it does not belong to me. It is Linda's book.” On the surface, his recent religious conversion appeared to bring some peace. “Oh, I am so happy now that I have found God,” he told his friend. Brautigan finished his book of love poetry two days behind his strict schedule and carefully wrote on the next-to-last page: “this is Linda Webster's book. / it is a symbol of my love for Her. / i will not give this book to Linda / until i know that She loves me. / if the world is going to get this book, / Linda will have to give it to the world. / will i give this book to Linda? / will the world get this book? / only God knows. richard brautigan / November 27th, 1955 / eugene, oregon.” The final page contained just three words: “love / never / ends.”

Everything about Brautigan's “love” book revealed the author's deep instability. The compulsion to finish the book by a certain date, the use of the lowercase for all names and personal pronouns except those referring to (and thus equating) Linda Webster and God, the belief that these spare, slight verses created a new form of love poetry; all pointed to a disturbed mental state. Certainly his critical facilities were compromised. Compared with the intricate beauty of “The Second Kingdom,” the poems in “i love You” amounted to little more than innocent fluff.

True to his declaration, Dick Brautigan did not give “i love You” to Linda Webster. Instead, as he had done with his letters, he handed the notebook over to Edna, who, again for reasons of her own, never passed it along to her daughter. Decades went by. Eventually the little spiral-bound volume was sold to rare book dealers, along with the rest of the contents of Edna Webster's safe deposit box. It resides now in the Bancroft Library. Linda Webster has only a Xerox copy (given to her by the author of this book), having never laid eyes upon the original.

Bill Brown didn't see all that much of Dick after the fishing season closed but continued to loan him money from time to time. “He wasn't into me for large amounts,” Brown remembered. “Fifty, sixty, seventy bucks. Of course, back in those days that was quite a bit.” Dick also borrowed from Pete Webster. “A dollar here, a dollar there, until it amounted to $20.”