Jubilee Hitchhiker (34 page)

In fact, Richard's actual birth at 12:30 AM made him Scorpio rising. His nature was 180 degrees opposite from what his advisers deduced. Having a rising sign in Scorpio indicated a secretive, cautious, reserved, privately creative personality, a much more accurate assessment of Brautigan's nature. To whatever degree Richard believed in astrology, he carried this erroneous sense of self to the grave, preserving the misleading star chart among his papers until the day he died.

seventeen: scaling mount parnassus

1
958, YEAR OF the Edsel and the hula hoop, also marked the birth of Barbie and the Xerox copier. America successfully launched
Explorer I
, her first satellite, while, closer to Earth, Charlie Starkweather began his murder-spree love-romp across Nebraska. The enormous success of
Howl
and
On the Road
focused national attention on the tight-knit North Beach bohemian community. America clamored for lurid tales of the bearded, sandal-shod, pad-dwelling, dope-smoking beatniks.

When the poet Lew Welch moved to San Francisco in October of 1957 he still wrote newspaper ad copy for Montgomery Ward. According to local legend, during his brief advertising career Welch penned the immortal line “Raid Kills Bugs Dead.” In a letter to Philip Whalen, Lew recorded his immediate reaction to the excesses of the current scene. “Telegraph Hill with its children-type Bohemes was a real shock. Saw one 20 year old in a black greatcoat, pointed patent leather button shoes, black stockings, spiky umbrella, and shaved skull [. . .] it is sad to see that fine section ruined and expensive.”

The following summer, a wave of tourists flooded the Beach and roamed upper Grant Avenue in search of bohemian highjinks. In their wake sprang up numerous pottery shops, bead stringers, and sandal makers. The moment Miss Smith's Tea Room closed its doors forever in '58, the Coffee Gallery took its place at the same address, offering poetry, jazz, and the singular talents of Lord Buckley. In May 1958, the
Examiner
began a three-part series on the Beats, which aroused the interest of both curious hangers-on and the local police. Kerouac again unwittingly fueled the frenzy, publishing both
The Subterraneans
and
The Dharma Bums
in 1958, further padding the passenger lists of the North Beach tour buses even as his buddy Neal Cassady was busted for possessing three joints and sentenced to five years to life at San Quentin.

Undercover police nailed Lenny Bruce for obscenity after laughing through his performance at the hungry i. The same bluecoat bluenose attitude compelled Leo Krikorian to take down a Robert LaVigne nude hanging in The Place. “The city fathers decided they didn't want any more lifestyles like those being displayed in the Beach,” recalled alto saxophonist Norwood “Pony” Poindexter, who played at both the Jazz Cellar and the Coffee Gallery.

Earlier in the year, Richard Brautigan caught Lenny Bruce's act at Ann's 440 Club during the comedian's first major multiweek performance, when much of the material released on his second album was recorded. Located at 440 Broadway, down the block from the recently opened Enrico's Sidewalk Café, the place was owned by Ann Dee, a cabaret singer whose vocal chords had given out. Formerly Mona's Club 440, Frisco's first lesbian bar, which closed in 1948, Ann's 440 was the spot where a nineteen-year-old singer named Johnny Mathis got his first break.

Robert Briggs described Ann's 440 Club as “a very hard number [. . .] very hard drug scene. Very hard prostitute scene. Very hard criminal scene. Very hard god-knows-what scene.” Briggs worked nearby at the Jazz Workshop (474 Broadway) checking IDs. He remembered Brautigan's initial reaction to Lenny Bruce. “Richard was fractured,” he said. “Richard was stunned. He was a bit lost for words.” Knowing Brautigan to be “very critical with himself and with everything,” Briggs recalled that Richard, who might ordinarily have rejected the comedian's act for its raw profanity, “always thought highly of Bruce.”

Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, and Jack Kerouac's classic twenty-six-minute Beat film,
Pull My Daisy
, came out in 1959. That same year, MGM released
The Beat Generation
, a Cinemascope B movie, while a popular television series,
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
, introduced a bongo-playing, goatee-wearing character named Maynard G. Krebs to a mainstream audience. Ever-larger hordes of curious beatnik watchers crowded into Greenwich Village and North Beach. By January 1960, The Place closed its doors forever. “I got rid of The Place because the scene had changed,” Leo Krikorian remarked. “Everything in the Beach changed, and I didn't dig the scene anymore.”

For Richard Brautigan, the decline of North Beach was not a cause for deep mourning. In an unpublished short story (“Going Home to the Locust”) he described beatniks as “those grunion of Grant Avenue who throw themselves up onto the cement.” Having come to Frisco seeking his future as a writer, Brautigan observed the social intercourse of Hube the Cube, Red Fred, Mad Marie, Badtalking Charlie, and Gene the Scrounge with the dispassionate distance of a lepidopterist studying butterfly migrations. Richard was a regular at The Place, yet when the bar went out of business he followed Jack Spicer and his crowd to Gino & Carlo's on Green Street and did his drinking elsewhere.

Gino & Carlo's was an Italian workingman's place, long, narrow, and nondescript, with the old bar to the left of the entrance. Two tables (one called the “poet's table”), stood up front, flanked by the jukebox and a cigarette machine. A couple pool tables occupied the back room. A black metal mailbox hung on the wall up front, waiting to receive contributions for the many mimeographed publications of the era. Some people called Gino & Carlo's “Jack Spicer's living room,” but Don Carpenter remembered it differently. “The bar is a very tough place and it's a very macho place,” he said. “When you go into Gino & Carlo's you leave your delicacy behind.”

Around this time, Robert Creeley rolled back into Frisco from New Mexico, where he was teaching at a boy's school. One night in a North Beach bar, Ron Loewinsohn introduced him to Brautigan. They hit it off right away. Richard had always been fascinated with World War II, and Bob's wild tales of interrupting his Harvard education to serve in Burma and India in the American Field Service from 1944 to 1945 struck a vivid chord in his imagination. Brautigan and Creeley wandered through the watering holes of North Beach, talking the night away, an echo of the energy Creeley felt on an earlier visit to Frisco in '55, when Ed Dorn, his friend from Black Mountain, met him at the Greyhound bus station (Ed worked at the baggage depot) and they sat up until dawn with Allen Ginsberg, drinking and talking at Dorn's place.

At some point during this later evening, Creeley recalled going up to Richard Brautigan's apartment. Because she had a day job, Ginny was fast asleep. “We sort of drifted in, checked, and then drifted out,” Creeley recalled. “And we went classically back to the bar” and “started roaming around from there.” Just another poets' lost evening on the town. “I can well understand why their marriage didn't work out,” Creeley said in retrospect.

His wife, Bobbie, recalled Richard telling her of another episode that indicated his marriage was not made in heaven. The Brautigans were having a dinner party. It was spaghetti as usual. Upset about something, Ginny nagged at Richard as the bowl of pasta made its way around the table from guest to guest. “She won't leave him alone,” Bobbie Creeley remembered. At a certain point, Brautigan had enough of his wife's harangue. He reached over, grabbed the bowl of spaghetti, and upended it over his head. Richard put the empty bowl back on the table without saying a word. “He's sitting there quietly continuing to eat with his head covered with spaghetti. It was dripping down his face and onto his shoulders like a wig.” Richard laughed out loud when he told this story to Bobbie. “That shut her up!” he howled.

Brautigan continued to see his work appear in print. Early in 1957, the first issue of a quarterly called
Danse Macabre
was published out of a small office in Manhattan Beach, California. Volume 1, number 1, contained poetry by Carl Larsen, Lilith Lorraine, Judson Crews, and on page 18, two poems by Richard Brautigan.”

In the fall of 1957,
Hearse: A Vehicle Used to Convey the Dead
, a little fifty-cent magazine, began publication in Eureka, California. E. V. Griffith, the editor, prefaced his hand-sewn quarterly with “carrying poetry, prose, artwork and incidental cadaver [
sic
] to the Great Cemetery of the American Intellect [. . .]” The second issue of
Hearse
came out early in 1958, and “Coroner's Report” on the inside back cover reprinted one of Richard Brautigan's poems from
Danse Macabre
.

Kenn Davis spent a lot of time with Richard and Ginny, sketch pad always close at hand. He drew them together at Mike's Pool Hall and captured Richard eating pork buns (his favorites, bought by the sack at Sam Wo's) in Washington Square. Davis sketched Brautigan reading at The Place on Blabbermouth Night and on the walks they took together through Chinatown, Richard staring in the shop windows, fascinated by the chickens and ducks hanging on display, his poet's eye drawn to the stacked slabs of smoked fish, iridescent gold and silver like some mysterious Asian treasure.

Many of Kenn's sketches were quick thumbnails. He worked them up later into finished drawings. Davis accompanied the Brautigans on several trips to Big Sur, from time to time, he and Richard flew handmade kites down at the Marina Green. Kenn sketched this and the fishing expeditions he and Dick and Ginny took in the spring over to Sausalito, where they dangled their lines off the end of a pier, hoping “for sunfish and such.”

Kenn Davis lived in an apartment on Francisco Street. “It had a back porch with marvelous north light.” This prompted the artist to ask his friend Dick if he could paint his portrait. Brautigan responded with enthusiasm and sat for Davis “two or three times, an hour or so each,” while Kenn painted in oils on stretched linen. Richard posed without his glasses, and his penetrating eyes burned with a mournful gaze. As Davis worked, Brautigan watched over his shoulder from time to time, making encouraging comments. “That's interesting,” he said. “That's good.”

The painting was shown in the Cellini Gallery as part of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's “little extravaganza” called “The Rolling Renaissance.” Brautigan hung the portrait in his North Beach apartment, taking it with him from move to move. It eventually went along to the apartment on Geary Street in 1966. When fame followed the publication of
Trout Fishing
, a year or so later, Richard gave the painting back to Kenn, saying “it was not the way he looked anymore.” Brautigan had grown his distinctive mustache and had much longer hair. The portrait no
longer resembled the public image he had carefully created. There was talk of having Kenn paint a new likeness, but nothing ever came of it.

In February 1958, Richard completed an ambitious nine-part surrealistic poem he called “The Galilee Hitch-Hiker.” Always a lapidary writer by inclination, Brautigan skillfully crafted elements of his personal biography with a unique abstract vision. The poem's nine sections were bound together by the recurring character of French poet Charles Baudelaire, whose
Les Fleurs du Mal
explored the discovery of hidden “correspondences” between beauty and vice and was deemed immoral when first published in 1857.

In Part 1, Baudelaire, “driving a Model A,” picks up Jesus Christ, hitchhiking in Galilee. The Savior is on his way to Golgotha, where he has a concession “at the carnival.” Part 3, entitled “1939,” recalled Brautigan's childhood “in the slums / of Tacoma.” His mother lets him turn the crank of the coffee grinder, and he makes believe it is a hurdy-gurdy. Baudelaire, the ghostly spectator, pretends to be a monkey, “hopping up and down / and holding out / a tin cup.” Part 4, “The Flowerburgers,” has Baudelaire running a hamburger stand in San Francisco. Instead of meat, the dead French poet places flowers between the halved buns. When customers demand a burger with onions, “Baudelaire would give them / a flowerburger / instead [. . .]”

Part 8, “Insane Asylum,” speaks directly from the heart of Brautigan's painful personal experience and describes Baudelaire going “to the insane asylum / disguised as a / psychiatrist.” He stays for two months, the same length of time that Brautigan spent at the Salem Hospital. When Baudelaire leaves the asylum, it “loved him so much” it “followed / him all over / California,” rubbing “up against his / leg like a / strange cat.” Part 9, “My Insect Funeral,” ends the poem on a melancholy note, recalling the tiny cemetery the poet maintained as a child, when he dug little graves under the rosebush with a spoon, burying insects in matchboxes and dead birds wrapped in red cloth.

Later that February, Richard and Ginny returned to Big Sur for another zany visit with their unpredictable friend Price Dunn. Whenever there was a break in the near-continuous Pacific storms, Richard set out to explore the fishing possibilities. After being cabin-bound for five rainy days, he and Price and Ginny wandered far up narrow, rushing Gorda Creek. They scrambled under the manzanita for a mile or so along the mountain side. The deluge had transformed the creek into a rain-swollen torrent. For reasons beyond logic, they elected to cross over.

Sliding down the muddy slope with reckless élan, Price jumped straight into the raging current. Ginny followed, injuring her left knee on an underwater boulder. The water was chest-high and “running really fast.” Unable to swim, Richard remained on the bank, clutching his fishing pole, of no help to his wife and best pal. “He was running back and forth on the top of the ridge like a madman.” Ginny and Price decided to wade downstream around the tangle of manzanita, where a crossing might be possible. They struggled on, floundering in the rushing torrent. “We just hung on and climbed back out,” Virginia recalled. “It was scary.”