Jubilee Hitchhiker (23 page)

The third fair-copy manuscript Richard Brautigan typed at Edna Webster's house, “The Smallest Book of Poetry in the Whole God-Damn World,” contained only thirteen poems and carried a dedication revealing worlds about the author, who also considered himself a genius and expected to die young: “For James Dean. / An American genius. / Dead at twenty-four.” These thirteen brief poems displayed a greater degree of sophistication than Brautigan's earlier work. Three of them utilized traditional meter and rhyme, perhaps the only known examples of his poetry to do so. “A Vision of the World” concerned a two-headed sparrow who read
The New York Times
and had his subscription canceled by a little boy “with a / BB gun.” In “The Happy Poem,” Brautigan wrote of writing a beautiful poem and then burning it. “All things / become nothing, / anyway,” he observed. The final poem, “A Western Ballad,” sang of Brautigan's desire to find a new life someplace else. “Wander away [. . .]” he wrote. “Never go back.”

Richard Brautigan mailed the manuscript of “The Smallest Book of Poetry in the Whole God-Damn World” to the editors of New Directions in New York. He was careful to include a SASE (again, using 41 Madison Street) with his submission. The slender selection had been winnowed from dozens of poems Dick left behind with Edna Webster. One of these, “The Flower Picker,” described the agony he still suffered over Linda, whom he called “Libby.” She had recently started dating a ninth-grade classmate, a boy she would eventually marry five years later. “JESUS CHRIST! My soul screams when I / think about somebody else making love to her. / Some little boy,” Brautigan wrote. “I believe his name is Ed.” Other lines lamented, “What I want to know is: why is she 15 and I 21?” and, “I never got to stroke her. / Or kiss her. / Or hold her hand. / Even.” And, “I want to walk into a / dark house, her body, and turn on all the lights.”

“Little Children Should Not Wear Beards,” a forty-seven-page poetry collection, was the final fair copy manuscript that Dick typed at Edna's house, intending it as a submission to Scribner's, the venerable New York publisher on Fifth Avenue. A self-addressed manila envelope survives, with 41 Madison Street as the return destination, but the writing is not in Brautigan's hand. It was written by Edna Webster, who never mailed the poems to Scribner's. The postage stamps on the envelope (twenty-seven cents' worth) were not canceled. The manuscript remained in Edna's possession until she eventually sold it. Along with her other Brautigan papers, it ended up at the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, several years after Richard Brautigan died.

Early in May (1956), two disappointing bits of news arrived in the mail. The first came on the eighth to the Bartons' rural route address from Horace W. Robinson of the Speech and Dramatic Arts Departments at the U of O. He enclosed a program of five short plays performed three days earlier in the University Theatre under the billing “Theatre Excitement No. 7.” One was a scene from Shakespeare; another, Edna St. Vincent Millay's
Aria da Capo
(not all that exciting in an age of Genet, Ionesco, and Beckett). Professor Robinson thanked Mr. Brautigan “for the opportunity of examining your experimental dramas,” saying that he had circulated the three short plays among the other directors on the staff and “they have indicated that they are interesting.” The department used “such material” to instruct young actors or for student performances. Having raised Dick's hopes, Professor Robinson concluded: “Your plays are so brief and devoid of character development that they probably would not be useful in either of these categories.”

The second letter arrived at 41 Madison Street from The Macmillan Company. It contained Brautigan's manuscript
Linda
. In his brief accompanying letter, Assistant Editor-in-Chief R. L. DeWilton politely rejected the poetry and thanked the author for sending it. Richard took it all in stride. He was already long accustomed to receiving what his idol Ernest Hemingway once called “the sternest of all reprimands.”

Around this time, Dick paid his last visit to the Folston home on Hayes Street. Mary Lou was out working in her vegetable garden, wearing her husband's old size 52 mackinaw. “Put the shovel in one hand,” she laughed, “and the hoe in the other.” Years later, she recalled that her son was furious at what he perceived as a gross indignity. Mary Lou said Brautigan confronted Bill Folston, raging, “You took my mother, a lovely lady, and you made a darn old Indian squaw out of her.” Richard detested prejudice in any form, and it's unlikely he ever used these exact words. In any event, Folston, an amiable, good-natured man, never took the bait or replied in kind. Soon after, Dick stormed off, pursued by his angry demons. He had just departed from their lives forever.

It was Hal Barton's understanding when he signed Richard Brautigan out of the mental hospital in Salem that the young man was not to leave the state of Oregon without official permission. Even so, Hal made no effort to block Dick's planned departure. “He just wanted to go,” he said. “Be out from under here and get into a new environment where he thought he'd be more accepted.” One day in June of 1956, the young poet packed his few belongings in a couple cardboard boxes, each no larger than a case of beer. He didn't have many clothes, although Lois Barton remembered “a half a dozen or more sets of underwear.” Much of his writing had been left with Edna Webster, but certain manuscripts and works in progress went along with him. He never returned home to collect any of his things, not even a suitcase. “His nice stuff he left here,” Mary Lou said. “He just disappeared, you know.”

At dawn, five thirty the next morning, with the sun rising over Three-Fingered Jack Mountain, Lois Barton drove Dick Brautigan and his makeshift luggage downtown. He wore his favorite brown suede jacket. Lois dropped him at the bus station. She didn't buy his ticket or wait to see him off. The Bartons never heard from their resident poet again. He never wrote them a letter or a postcard. “He was just gone and out of the picture,” Lois said.

Richard Brautigan did not buy a ticket or board the bus that day. He might have killed time with a couple cups of coffee and a cheap breakfast. When it no longer seemed too early, he picked up his boxes and walked over to the Stewarts' house on Tyler Street. Gary's mom later wrote that Dick “just showed up at the door. He was down and out and wanted to go to San Francisco.” Milo Stewart's sister lived in South San Francisco, and he agreed to drive Dick to the city the very next day. Mary Lou later heard a story that her son worked for the Stewarts, helping them paint their house.

Either later that afternoon or sometime the next morning, Barbara was walking north along Willamette in downtown Eugene, when she spotted her brother across the street, heading in the opposite direction. She was taking care of the Guistinas' kids and had seen Dick only once since his release from the hospital. B.J. remembered that he had seemed “just kind of laid-back and sedate and very quiet,” in marked contrast to his previous behavior, “always full of energy and things going on in his mind.” Brautigan had phoned a few times from up at the Bartons' place to read B.J. his new poetry, but it wasn't the same as before. Dick struck her as “aloof—more wary, standoffish.” They were no longer close.

On that last day, Dick waved and called out, “Barbara!” to get her attention. He waited for the traffic to clear before crossing over. “Hi. How're you doing?” he said, and they started talking. Barbara remembered that “he had on that brown suede jacket he really liked.” After a few moments of casual conversation, Dick said, “Well, I'm leaving.” He didn't mention San Francisco or tell her about his long-range plans. “We didn't hug or kiss or anything,” Barbara remembered sadly. “He said, ‘I just wanted to say goodbye.' And we stood there looking at each other for a couple of seconds, and then he rambled back over to the other side of the street, and that's the last time I ever saw him.”

ten: family album

W
HEN EDNA WEBSTER expressed a curiosity about Dick Brautigan's family, he brought over a box of old photographs his mother kept hidden in her bedroom. Dick found them one day when his folks were away and took them without asking. They portrayed Kehoes and Dixons. Mary Lou had not saved a single snapshot of Ben Brautigan. After going through the pictures, he gave several of himself as a kid to Mrs. Webster. When Mary Lou discovered the photographs missing, she immediately suspected her son and asked what he had done with them. Dick told her he burned the photos. Unaware of her mother's inquiry, Barbara wanted to look at the pictures on another occasion. She had never seen several and was curious about them. Dick repeated the same story, telling his sister he had burned them all. And that was the last anyone ever said about the matter. This uniquely unsentimental family forgot all about the lost photographs.

Richard had not burned the family pictures. They were packed in one of his cardboard boxes when he left Eugene, among the very few personal possessions he took away with him. Many years later, his daughter grew increasingly curious about her family's history. Every time Ianthe asked Richard to tell her about the relatives she had never seen, he stalled with one excuse or another. She remained insistent, pestering him for information about her unknown uncles and aunts, wanting to know what her grandparents and great-grandparents looked like. Richard promised when she became an adult he would tell her everything she wanted to know.

Richard assumed, given enough time, that his daughter would forget her curiosity. Ianthe never forgot. On her nineteenth Christmas, alone with her father in the huge echoing living room of his Pacific Heights apartment, she finally got her wish. Richard and his second wife, Akiko, had split up earlier in December (1979), and the painful legal thrust-and-parry of divorce had just begun. The near-empty apartment, so recently a proud symbol of Brautigan's enormous literary success, now seemed a sad manifestation of the couple's final unhappiness. Aki had taken the rug and the stereo and much of the furniture. The imitation leather couches and an odd octagonal table were all she had left behind. Even the lamps walked out the door with her. The only light in the room, aside from the flickering fireplace, spilled in from a hallway ceiling fixture.

Richard had just given Ianthe a check for $150. They sat down by the fire for a quiet Christmas evening. Abruptly, Richard set his whiskey glass on the table and jumped to his feet. He left the room, saying he'd be right back. Ianthe fingered the check, contemplating her father's distinctive spidery signature. When Richard returned, he carried a manila file folder. With the deliberate care of someone handling extremely volatile material, he pulled an old Polaroid snapshot from the file and handed it to Ianthe, telling her it was a picture of her grandmother.

Studying the old photo of a sharp-eyed, middle-aged woman smoking a cigarette in the shade of a willow tree, Ianthe puzzled over how her father happened to have such a memento of someone he hadn't seen in almost a quarter century. Richard never corresponded with his mother. It's possible Mary Lou sent him the picture when his sisters attempted to reestablish contact in 1970. More likely he brought it with him when he left home for good. There were several other photographs, all family pictures. Ianthe stared at them, trying to absorb their essence, searching for a connection to link her to an unknown personal history.

After a while, Richard asked his daughter if she was “done looking.” She said, “Yes.” And he wanted to know if she was sure. Ianthe nodded her head. Without another word, her father, this mysterious man who had so completely turned his back on his own past, took the family pictures from her, stepped over to the fireplace, and scattered the photographs into the flames like a handful of dry dead leaves.

eleven: reno

T
HE LONG JOURNEY taking Richard Brautigan from Eugene to San Francisco began when Milo Stewart set off for the Bay Area to visit his sister. He drove Highway 99 (mainly replaced by Interstate 5), south out of Eugene, all the way to Sacramento, then west on U.S. 40 to Oakland. Richard took this route with Gary's father. He had always wanted to see Reno, so Milo dropped him off in Sacramento. Richard hitchhiked to Reno by way of the Donner Pass.

On a warm summer day in June, he passed under the steel arch spanning Main Street welcoming him to “The Biggest Little City in the World.” Richard looked first for a place to bunk for a couple nights. In 1956, Reno had not yet become a sprawling metropolis studded with high-rise casinos. Bisected by U.S. 40, the Truckee River, and its primary dividing line, the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks, Reno back then was just another of the neon-bright honky-tonk oases brightening Nevada's highways at distant intervals in the vast empty desert.

At the time, very few buildings in Reno stood over four stories. Gambling establishments and most of the bars congregated along several blocks of Virginia Street and a rowdy strip on Commercial bordering the tracks from Sierra to Center Streets. The city fathers acted as if no one ever shook a pair of dice or bet on blackjack or cranked a one-armed bandit within the city limits. Reno retained the quiet ambience of its tree-lined neighborhoods. In the words of writer Walter Van Tilburg Clark, it was a “city of trembling leaves.”

Brautigan found a cheap room not far from Route 40 in a rundown part of town near the railroad tracks. It was a tiny chamber furnished with a narrow cot in a ramshackle flophouse so depressingly decrepit that he feared leaving his few humble possessions and carried the two cardboard boxes along with him when he set out to explore the sights. The first place on his itinerary was a bookstore. Finding his way proved not too difficult. Reno boasted dozens of casinos but possessed only one bookstore.

Checking the poetry section, Brautigan came across a copy of
Brushfire
, the University of Nevada's literary magazine. Leafing through its pages, he found the work of a young poet named Barney Mergen. The “Notes on the Contributors” mentioned that the author lived in Reno. Surmising he had found a kindred spirit, Richard looked up Mergen's address in the phone book: 112 Ridge Street, way over on the south side, a part of town far removed from the high-toned north-end university neighborhood. Brautigan gathered up his cardboard boxes and started walking.