Jubilee Hitchhiker (28 page)

Brautigan certainly heard all this dirt and more at The Place. He very quickly fell in with the local scene, roaming North Beach bars and shyly finding his way into boisterous poetry-reading parties. Ron Loewinsohn, another notebook-toting young hopeful, remembered spotting Richard with a group of people he knew outside The Place one evening in the fall of 1956. “A guy you could not miss—very blond—haircut like a pudding bowl.” He was with a group of much younger kids, all about sixteen or seventeen years old, wearing a black imitation-leather jacket zipped all the way up. “I don't believe I ever saw him in those days with his jacket unzipped,” Loewinsohn recalled. “It was like his protection against the world.”

Just back from a hitchhiking trip to the Southwest, Ron wasn't introduced to Richard and didn't know his name or anything about him at the time. Grant Avenue had long been Loewinsohn's “stomping ground.” A Frisco kid who grew up in the Mission, he had spent his earliest childhood interned in Manila during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. Brautigan, long fascinated by World War II, often told Ron that he should write a story beginning with the words “The first time I saw a Japanese soldier.” Drawn to North Beach as a young teenager, Loewinsohn had met Kerouac and Ginsberg in The Place. He was also introduced to Robert Duncan but “didn't know him real well,” and Philip Whalen, who “became a very good friend.” Barely eighteen, Ron had been part of the poetry scene long before Richard made his first reticent appearance.

Soon after this, Loewinsohn saw the tall blond stranger at a party at poet Robert Stock's house way out on Twenty-fourth Street. Stock was also a jazz clarinet player who worked as a bartender at the Co-Existence Bagel Shop. As a poet, he remained a traditional formalist at a time when adherence to the old forms were breaking down. Influenced by the work of the sixteenth-century Portuguese poet Luis de Camöes, Robert Stock held workshops that were much in demand and difficult to get into. In order to be accepted, the applicant first had to write a perfect villanelle. (“Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas remains the best-known modern version of the form in English.)

Stock's short story “Disappearing Act” chronicled the mysterious disappearance of Weldon Kees. His poetry had been included in the first (and only) issue of
Ark
in the spring of 1947. This local literary magazine, hand-set on a printing press by volunteer labor, took a militantly antiwar posture (what contributor Kenneth Rexroth defined as “philosophical anarchism”) in the face of the rampant McCarthyism gripping America. Reborn in March 1956 as
Ark II
–Moby I, when Michael McClure joined James Harmon as coeditor, it again lasted for just a single issue.

Not yet a staple at North Beach bars and coffeehouses, Frisco poetry readings remained informal affairs in 1956. Casual readings often took place at parties like the one at Robert Stock's place where Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso were all in attendance. At some point during the evening, Brautigan read a few of his poems in the living room. Ginsberg and company were not impressed. “They didn't take him seriously,” a partygoer observed. Behind his back, Allen snidely referred to Richard as “Frood.” Before realizing he had unwittingly used “their pejorative nickname,” Ron Loewinsohn addressed Brautigan as “Frood” that night. Later, he heard Ginsberg call Richard a “neurotic creep.”

Brautigan's eccentric behavior doubtless reinforced this disdain. Shy and taciturn, Richard made no effort to hide his bumpkin background, turning his origins into an asset, the cornerstone of his public persona. “I'm just a country boy, come to town on my apple-picking money,” he told everyone. It became a favorite recurring joke. “A lot of people ridiculed him,” John Allen Ryan recollected, “and that made him even shier. Actually, he had invented a new method of writing. His poetry was unusual; it was mostly prose poetry, which people weren't doing at that time. He invented a new approach that was really his.”

One afternoon about three weeks after first encountering Richard Brautigan, Ron Loewinsohn (who knew his real name by now) ran into the blond poet again on Grant Avenue. Dick walked up to Ron without saying a word, his Naugahyde jacket zippered all the way up. Ron said, “Hello.” Dick just nodded and handed him an open notebook. On the offered page, he'd written a short poem in his cramped hand:

Loewinsohn laughed. “That's pretty funny,” he said, handing back the notebook. Richard folded it up and stuffed it in his pocket, sauntering away down Grant without a word, hip and detached. The moment cemented their friendship, and they started hanging out together. Looking
back across the years, Ron Loewinsohn viewed Brautigan from a different perspective, as “a very painfully shy young man who tried everything in the world to cover up his shyness with a veneer of cool reserve.”

Another chance meeting occurred late that summer on the streets of North Beach. Philip Whalen and Allen Ginsberg came ambling along, deep in conversation, when they encountered the tall blond stranger headed in the opposite direction. The two older poets stopped, and Ginsberg introduced Whalen to Richard Brautigan without a trace of the condescension displayed at Robert Stock's party. It was a brief encounter. “[Richard] was busy going someplace and went on by,” Whalen remembered. He and Ginsberg continued in the opposite direction. Their paths would all cross again in the future.

Having cut his poetry-reading teeth at Stock's party, Dick Brautigan felt ready to climb the stairs to the balcony at The Place. “Blabbermouth Night,” an open forum first set in motion by a bartender named Jack Landon, took place every Monday and always drew a raucous crowd. Customers wishing to sound off on any subject striking their fancy used a wooden “soapbox” nailed to the balcony floor as a podium. The barfly audience below roared in either approval or derision.

Poetry readings were more sedate, often scheduled on Sunday afternoons, when the clientele tended to be mostly sober. Before his first appearance on the balcony soapbox at The Place, Brautigan enlisted the talents of Zekial Marko, who coached him on the fine points of presentation, delivery, and the dramatic use of personal mannerisms. Leo Krikorian remembered Richard reading “The Chinese Checker Players,” the poem he wrote at the Bartons' after his release from the mental hospital.

Allen Ginsberg left San Francisco for wider horizons in October 1956. Jack Spicer returned to Frisco from Boston a month later, making the same discovery as Robert Duncan and Jess had when they came back to the city from Majorca, by way of Black Mountain, earlier in the year. In their absence, Ginsberg and the Beats had become the hep new cats on the Beach. Duncan took a job at the Poetry Center and moved with Jess to Stinson Beach in Marin County.

Spicer picked up pretty much where he left off, holding court at The Place. Surrounded by devoted acolytes, a coterie he called the “magic circle,” Jack pontificated on a wide range of subjects. He regarded the Beats with amused contempt and could not abide either Ginsberg or Kerouac. Dick Brautigan and Ron Loewinsohn were initially put off by Spicer's overt homosexuality. Both outsiders and suspicious of in-groups of any kind, they “affected a kind of contempt” while secretly envying the sense of community shared by Spicer's clique.

Six-foot-tall Jack Spicer appeared much shorter because of his hunched shambling apelike posture, the result of serious calcium deficiency. He had developed a curiously contorted way of sitting to conceal the many cigarette holes burned through the shiny black suit he always wore. Lew Welch described Spicer as “hell-bent on self-destruction.” The poet Jack Anderson remembered Spicer as a “hulking bearlike man,” with a “beautifully cultivated speaking voice.”

Described as “genially ugly,” his light brown hair combed straight back above a high forehead, Spicer worked part-time as a private detective during his university years, investigating embezzling bartenders and other petty larceny. Poet Robin Blaser and his lover, James Felts, shared their house with Spicer soon after he arrived in Berkeley in 1945. Spicer's first poetry teacher was wheelchair-bound Josephine Miles, poet-in-residence at the University of California in Berkeley and the lone
woman on the English Department faculty. She had a great influence on his early poetry and found him odd jobs to supplement his meager income as a gumshoe.

Robin Blaser remembered “an almost spastic characteristic,” a man who “saw himself as unattractive and dramatized that and played it out. He was an astonishing figure.” Jack Spicer was a highly regarded linguist in the academic world. Fluent in German, he had completed all the requirements for a PhD in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse except for his dissertation and earned his keep working in universities and libraries, publishing scholarly articles for professional journals under the name “John Lester Spicer.” As a poet, Jack Spicer published few works but earned a reputation as a powerful and dramatic reader.

Subsisting on white bread mayonnaise sandwiches, Spicer lived a near-monastic life on Leavenworth, close to Polk Street, in a cramped two-room basement apartment without a telephone, surrounded by stacks of books borrowed from the library at UC Berkeley. A slovenly man, he used his typewriter as an ashtray, the carriage “heaped with butts and ashes.” For reasons of thrift, Spicer stuffed his unwashed laundry, stiff from repeated use, into a closet also housing his empty brandy bottles. A visitor described accidentally opening the door. “The stench was incredible, because his closet was totally jam-packed with socks, underwear, and shirts that were beyond the pale.”

Jack Spicer's interests, aside from language and literature, were baseball, the tarot, pinball, playing bridge, and movies. He detested popular music. Every evening, until the bar closed at two, he met with his “magic circle” at The Place. At one time or another, the group included George Stanley, Lewis Ellingham, Richard Duerden, Lew Welch, Joanne Kyger, Bob Kaufman, David Meltzer, John Wieners, and Michael McClure. Jack Goodwin recalled Spicer holding court: “A squinting, sneering, adenoidal, hunch-backed Socrates presiding over the nightly poets' table [. . .] the latest tenderfoot on the left, taking notes.”

Early on, Ron Loewinsohn and Dick Brautigan overcame their inherent homophobia and sat down at Spicer's table at the Place. The experience provided an education neither had ever received. “Jack was not only a brilliant critic, he was a brilliant teacher,” Loewinsohn recalled. “He could give criticism in a way that allowed you to accept it, even when the criticism was painful.”

Spicer felt immediately drawn to Brautigan. Both men affected an air of mystery, neither ever revealing intimate secrets. Brautigan, much like Spicer, didn't talk of his past or the family he had left behind for good. Ten years older, Jack Spicer reinvented himself when he first arrived in Berkeley from Los Angeles, a metamorphosis Dick had only just begun. As Ron Loewinsohn observed, “Jack also had a kind of perverse streak in him. He was never predictable. He would make friends with people who the group thought impossible.”

Jack Spicer and Richard Brautigan shared the same birthday. Discovering this cosmic connection appealed to the older poet's love of magic and the tarot. Spicer introduced Brautigan to astrology, initiating a lifelong interest. Jack Spicer believed in a poetry at once communal and impersonal, like language itself. Whitman, godfather to the Beats, was not his cup of tea. He wanted poetry to be free of politics and personal voice, liberated from language itself. Dick Brautigan, privately shaping one of the century's most distinctive American literary voices with each rewritten poem, listened hard to Spicer's pronouncements, sifting what he needed, panning gold from the onrushing brilliance.

In November, Brautigan moved away from North Beach to a $6-a-week room in the Hotel Jessie, a flophouse on a little alley south of Market off Third Street behind the Hearst Building
and around the corner from Breen's, where William Saroyan used to drink in the late twenties. A parking garage has obliterated the site of the cheap hotel. Jessie is one of a number of tiny streets in the district (Minna, Clara, Annie, Harriet, Mary) named, with a twinkle in the municipal eye, for favorite nineteenth-century prostitutes. The city fathers knew how to celebrate a good time way back when, in marked contrast to the insipid civic spirit now renaming obscure back alleys and dead-end cul-de-sacs for famed local literary gents like Kerouac, London, and Saroyan. Thus far, Frisco lacks a Brautigan Street, although the city recently funded a bronze casting of Richard's poem “30 Cents, Two Transfers, Love,” setting it into the pavement at a light rail stop near the corner of Folsom and the Embarcadero.

At the Hotel Jessie, Brautigan wrote continuously, often completing between ten and twenty poems a day. At the end of November 29 seeking a public reading, he sent a batch to Robert Duncan at the Poetry Center, along with a brief cover letter. Spicer encouraged Dick in this endeavor, having credited “three solid years of Duncan” for his ability “to write poetry seriously.”

Duncan wrote back early in December 6 fearing his criticism might “seem harsh.” He felt Brautigan's poetry “lacks character, signature. They are curiously uninvolved.” Although Duncan praised “Titles for Unwritten Poems about America,” finding “a certain lively wit at play,” he dismissed the others as inadequate. “We must be ignorant of too much in the originals to be amused.” Thanks to a private grant, the Poetry Center had scheduled a free workshop in the spring of 1957. Instead of offering a reading, Duncan suggested Brautigan test himself in “the open Forum of your contemporaries.” According to Michael McClure, Robert Duncan despised Richard's poetry and even after Brautigan became successful considered him only “a talented stand-up entertainer.”