Jubilee Hitchhiker (36 page)

The long walk into town often became an ordeal. Rain turned the thick red clay soil of the surrounding cornfields into a nearly impassable gumbo. Staying at home wasn't a whole lot of fun. Frustrated by his inability to learn more than a few words of Spanish, Richard began drinking more and more. Ginny remembered him hurling his brandy glass against the wall, furious at having almost no one to talk with. Brautigan's alcohol problem intensified. For the first time in his nascent drinking life, he was able to afford hard liquor. Brandy was very cheap and the local
mexicalli
, in black ceramic flasks, cheaper still. Distilled from the fermented juice of the agave, rainwater-clear, and potent as liquid fire, mescal was rumored to have hallucinogenic properties.

Fueled by mescal, Richard wanted to get hold of some peyote. Marijuana was readily available, but Brautigan had no interest in
mota
. “We were always looking for peyote,” Virginia
remembered. “Richard never wanted to smoke marijuana.” The search for the elusive mescaline-rich cactus took them as far afield as the little town of Ixtlan, with its fine old colonial church. (A year later, Brautigan wrote a never-published poem titled “Ixtlan,” in which he reflected on the cobblestones of Calle de Eternidad, “the Street of Eternity,” and drinking mescal “under the century plants.”) As far as the peyote hunt, Ixtlan became just another wild-goose chase in a bizarre and futile quest.

Trips up to Monte Alban were more satisfying. An ancient ceremonial center located atop the treeless hills southeast of the city of Oaxaca, thirteen hundred feet above the valley floor, Monte Alban is one of the oldest inhabited sites in Mexico, a sacred mountain top first settled as early as 1000 BC. Constructed around 500 BC, about the time Cyrus the Great roared out of Persia and conquered Babylonia, the fabled temple-city endured through many diverse cultures (Olmec, Maya, Zapotec, Mixtec) until the Aztec conquered all in 1469.

Richard and Ginny explored every inch of the metropolis where ancient architects leveled the mountain top to create a vast central plaza longer than seven football fields. They investigated the restored palaces and frescoed tombs, wandered around the ball court and the observatory, and climbed the looming central temple complex by each of its four monumental stairways. They found numerous obsidian knives. Most of the urban center surrounding the plaza had not been excavated, and quantities of flakes and pottery shards littered the shrub-covered mounds.

The Brautigans ventured south to Mitla, one of the best-preserved sites in Mexico, about forty kilometers from Oaxaca. Aldous Huxley found Mitla “strangely unlike any of the other pre-Columbian ruins.” He called the geometric patterns on the low temple facades “petrified weaving,” thinking them based on textile designs. Richard and Ginny caught a ride with an amorous dentist who owned a big green Dodge station wagon. The DDS fell in love with Richard's buxom wife after the poet consulted him about a toothache. He chauffeured the young sightseers down to the “Place of the Dead” in a frenzy of unrequited machismo.

After a Oaxacan stay lasting more than two months, it was time to head for home. Ginny thought they remained “a little too long. There was way too much alcohol available.” The Brautigans had planned on returning by the same route they had followed down from the border, but when they got to Mexico City they discovered that torrential rains along the Pacific Coast had washed out several bridges and the road was closed in many places. Their only option was to travel up through the interior. Richard and Ginny caught a bus bound for Aguascalientes at midnight.

Two hot and dusty days later they made it to Ciudad Juárez on the banks of the Rio Grande. It was night when Richard and Ginny crossed the border into El Paso and took a room in a cheap hotel smelling of disinfectant. The next morning, they were on the road again, catching a ride to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where a traveling salesman picked them up and drove them as far as Phoenix, Arizona. The Brautigans figured they would spend the night in a hotel there. Richard decided “to try my luck with my thumb for a few minutes before looking for a place to stay.” After two vehicles passed them by, a truck stopped and drove the couple straight through, “all the way across the Mojave desert in the cool of the night to be in Los Angeles at dawn.”

Back in San Francisco, Richard and Ginny crashed with friends while looking for a new apartment. Although everything seemed much the same, a lot had changed while they were away. Joanne Kyger and Gary Snyder had become an item. At a Sunday afternoon gathering at George Stanley's apartment, Snyder read from his remarkable new work,
Myths and Texts
, sitting underneath a
table with Jack Spicer perched cross-legged above. Spicer approved of Snyder's poetry, remarkable considering his scorn for the Beats, an affiliation not entirely of Snyder's choosing.

Literary gossip buzzed about Russell FitzGerald, Jack Spicer's live-in lover, and his blatant seduction of Bob Kaufman (“I took him to the Colombo Hotel and sucked his big cock”). Kaufman, dead drunk at the time, must have had ambivalent feelings about the whole affair, for he married his wife, Eileen, that same year. “Half-Jew and half-black,” crowed Robert Duncan, recalling the Kaufman incident years later. He knew Spicer's prejudices and how FitzGerald's betrayal must have stung.

Lew Welch had quit his job in advertising, left his wife, and was driving a cab for a living. He and his college buddies Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen formed a circle, centered on Buddhist-inspired poetry, which included Joanne Kyger, who also lived at the East-West House. Both Welch and Snyder read at Bread and Wine that summer. Kyger noted how Welch said, “That's over,” as he hung his wedding ring on a nail sticking from the wall of Marin-An, Snyder's Mill Valley shack. Lew started spending time with Joanne and her pal Nemi Frost. “He's not interested in your poetry,” Snyder told his lover. “He just wants to go to bed with you.”

Loving Gary Snyder didn't stifle Joanne Kyger's ironic take on just about everything. After Viking published Jack Kerouac's
The Dharma Bums
(in which a fictionalized Gary Snyder is the main character), she and George Stanley formed the Dharma Committee, a mock organization growing out of the weekly Spicer/Duncan poetry meetings devoted to drinking, getting high on Velo inhalers, and having a good deal of hilarious fun. “These are famous times I am sure,” Kyger wrote in her journal.

That summer, while the Brautigans were away in Mexico, Price Dunn moved up to Oakland from Big Sur. He arrived with a sculptor named Gene Flores and took up residence in the L-shaped corner storefront building Madge Boyd owned on Fifty-fifth Street. They built a big bedroom/ studio supported on telephone poles. Believing that “a man needs space to breathe,” Price always removed all the interior walls with a chainsaw when he rented a new house. In Oakland, Dunn illegally tapped into the PG&E gas line. “I had this big stove with this enormous gas pipe,” Price recalled. “This flame would shoot out.”

Keith Abbott reported that Dunn held “a firm belief that utility companies had more than enough money and didn't need his cash.” He was so frequently delinquent on his phone bills that he listed his new numbers under such pseudonyms as Delmer Dibble, Commander Ralph G. Gore, Jesse James, and Rufus Flywheel. For a time, Price was joined in Oakland by painter Frank Curtin, who was trying to “get straight.” They were both broke, taking “slave labor” menial jobs and “playing Captain Garbage, raiding the Safeway garbage Dumpster.” Price summed it all up with a shrug. “I mean, it was grim,
grim
.” A few months later, he got married.

After a bit of searching, Richard and Ginny found a seven-room apartment with hardwood floors at 461 Mississippi Street on Potrero Hill in San Francisco. The place was much too big, so their artist friend Kenn Davis offered to share it with them. He had no job, and Ginny resented his inability to contribute much to the household. Kenn's saving grace was his car, a two-tone blue and white '55 Chevy, which made the distant Potrero neighborhood seem a lot less isolated from the rest of the city.

The electricity had not yet been turned on when the trio moved in. That first night, the Brautigans stuck a candle on a saucer for light. The dim flickering illumination gentled the chaos of
the recent move and suffused the surrounding disorder with a romantic glow. Richard and Ginny made love among the stacks of unpacked carton boxes and rolled carpets. They muted their passion, trying not to make too much noise and wake Kenn, who lay sleeping in the next room.

There was no denying that it was a great pad. The Brautigans filled one room completely with plants. Sliding doors divided the two largest rooms. When these were opened the resulting expansion provided a perfect space for impromptu badminton games. Without a net, the three roommates modified the rules. Getting the birdy caught up in the ceiling light fixture resulted in an immediate out. Ditto if someone opened a door to announce a phone call and the birdy flew into the other room. They played in their stocking feet, sliding over the varnished floor, batting the shuttlecock back and forth, back and forth. “That was a fun time,” Ginny recalled.

Kenn Davis recorded this happy domestic activity in his sketchbook. He drew Richard eating watermelon, reading the morning paper, sitting at his typewriter staring out at the rain, and playing indoor badminton. On two occasions, Kenn attempted to teach Dick to drive in the '55 Chevy. Once was in a long graveled area down in the Marina District, a wealthy flatland neighborhood of pastel houses built atop landfill rubble from the 1906 earthquake.

“What I liked about it,” Kenn recalled, “was the fact that you could actually drive a car without hitting anybody.” He later taught Frank Curtin to drive in the same place. “Frank turned out fine. But Dick, he just never—him and machinery. After about twenty minutes, I realized this is hopeless.” The second attempt took place on a camping and fishing trip to Yosemite and ended with similar results. Kenn made better use of his time sketching Richard casting on a trout stream.

One moonlit evening, the three apartment-mates were out having fun near the yacht harbor far from Potrero. Nine years after San Francisco rose anew from the ashes, the Panama–Pacific Exposition of 1915 blazed into life along the waterfront in the Marina. Officially a celebration of the opening of the Panama Canal, the big bash became an enormous party to honor the city's rebirth. The centerpiece of the festivities was the Palace of Fine Arts, Bernard Maybeck's fantasy re-creation of a Roman ruin surrounded by a reflecting pool. Framed in wood and covered with staff (a mixture of plaster and fibrous materials), the romantic structure was intended to last only for the life of the fair. So beloved by San Franciscans, the building was spared while a Turkish mosque, the 435-foot-high “Tower of Jewels,” and all the other palaces (education, industry, and horticulture) were demolished.

A half century later, the Palace of Fine Arts itself stood in ruins, lathe work showing through where staff
putti
had crumbled. Kenn Davis found the place “very romantic and secluded.” One night, he took Richard and Ginny to this magic spot. Wandering under a full moon, they marveled at the decaying colonnaded dome rising dreamlike above its own wavering reflection. “Entrancing,” Ginny recalled.

The trio felt caught up in the zany spirit of romance and scaled the decaying walls of the imaginary moon-pale palace. They climbed upon a shed and from the roof up onto an iron framework supporting the statuary-adorned colonnade. Huge urns perched on large steplike platforms. They climbed these like giant stairs. Iron posts thrust from broken sculpture like time-blackened bones. “The heads were off of a lot of the statues.” Ginny remembered fear gripping them when they tried to figure out how to get back down again. “It was scary.”

Potrero Hill, a remote neighborhood with fabulous views of downtown San Francisco, provided Brautigan a home, but the focus of his intellectual and social life continued to be in North
Beach. The couple depended on bus transportation to take them everywhere, to work as well as play. Aside from their roommate, Richard and Ginny knew very few other people on Potrero. Their friends Tom and Shirley Lipsett lived at the top of the hill. Ginny and Richard frequently walked up to visit with them. Ginny made friends with a Spanish-speaking sandal maker who lived down the street in a lovely old Arts and Crafts house designed by Bernard Maybeck. Later, the place was torn down to make room for a freeway. She enjoyed conversing in his native tongue as he taught her how to work with leather.

Following the publication of
After Lorca
, Jack Spicer worked on a sequence of cryptic cautionary poems he called
Admonitions
. Not published until 1970, most were written in 1958. Each poem was addressed to a specific friend, but only two (those to Joe Dunn and Robin Blaser) were purely epistolary. Other designated subjects included Nemi Frost, Ebbe Borregaard, Russell FitzGerald, Graham Mackintosh, and Charles Olson. Spicer's poem for Richard Brautigan went straight to the recipient's heart. “For Dick” concluded with the lines, “Look / Innocence is important / It has meaning / Look / It can give us / Hope against the very winds that we batter against it.” Having a personalized poem from a man he admired as much as Spicer pleased Richard Brautigan a great deal, but it didn't help buy the groceries, the wolf on the doorstep being more troubling than any poet's wind rumbling like a “sabre-toothed ape.”

Ginny continued working for the law firm downtown. Richard wanted to pull his weight, too. After a bit of searching, he found part-time employment with Pacific Chemical Laboratories, Inc., at 350 Clay Street. Richard remained secretive about his peculiar job. He kept it for years, telling few of his friends exactly what it was he did those two or three afternoons a week. Many thought he worked developing photographs. Price Dunn knew it was “some esoteric laboratory where he mixed the brews.”