Jubilee Hitchhiker (39 page)

Other residents of the “Hyphen House” (as the place was sometimes called) were John Montgomery, Lenore Kandel, and Joanne Kyger. Whenever Richard came over to hang out with Albert, he spent time with the others as well. Saijo, a Buddhist who had often sat zazen at Marin-An with Gary Snyder, was further described by Welch as “a saint,” who “builds beautiful things out of old lumber.”

In November 1959, Welch and Saijo drove Jack Kerouac back to New York, taking Route 66 to Chicago in “Willy,” Welch's battered Jeep. They improvised collaborative haiku about derelict Aermotor windmills and lonely grain elevators all along the way. In
Lighting the Corners
, Michael McClure maintained that, according to Shig Murao, Albert Saijo “got Richard the job testing meat samples that he had in the early sixties.” Brautigan remained reticent regarding his job at the chemical laboratory.

Poet Jory Sherman moved to Frisco in 1959, gaining immediate local fame by being arrested for having eight hundred outstanding parking tickets. Sherman's first book of poetry,
So Many Rooms
, was published on the same day he appeared in court, accompanied by his pregnant wife. The presiding judge had little sympathy for Sherman's alibi (the tickets “blew away in the wind”) and told him to “Give up being a poet and get a real job digging ditches or something.” Sherman was sentenced to spend fourteen weekends in jail.

The local newspapers picked up the story. “Herb Caen went ape shit!” Sherman recalled. Prominent San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli took the case pro bono and got the poet off after only his second weekend in the slammer. Jory Sherman became a local hero in North Beach. “I never had to buy a drink after that.” Pierre Delattre “grabbed” him right away, and he gave his very first public reading at Bread and Wine. “Everybody was there,” and the event “launched” him.

Jory Sherman no longer remembers when he first met Richard Brautigan. “Richard was so quiet, and I don't think hardly anybody knew him,” Sherman recalled. “We were both outsiders.” They would meet at Vesuvio on Columbus, always sitting in the back under the balcony. “I liked talking to him. He was different. He was very serious, but he also just had a different path that he was taking.” The two poets felt drawn together “because we were just incompatible with everything else.” When Richard Brautigan gave Jory Sherman a copy of
Lay the Marble Tea
, he was touched by the gesture.

It was a good time to be a young poet in North Beach. Jory Sherman thought it the most exciting time of his life because of all the “creative ferment.” Life was easy. There were readings every night at the Mission, the Fox and Hound, or the Old Spaghetti Factory. Some of these gigs actually paid. Brautigan earned twenty-five bucks each turn from the Coffee Gallery. At the hungry i, Eric “Big Daddy” Nord's bar and nightclub located in the basement of the green-patinated copper-clad 1907 Sentinel Building (now known as Columbus Tower), a poet could always get a free sandwich and a glass of beer. “You didn't have to pay anything in that place.” City Lights provided another refuge. Poor poets like Brautigan and Sherman often spent the day there, reading books and magazines without making a purchase. “It was like a library.”

Richard made another new friend that summer who seemed to have come from a distant world. In a notebook from the period, Brautigan jotted these words: “Lou Embree: soldier, printer & newspaperman.” His spare three-word synopsis only hinted at Embree's exotic history.
Born in British Nigeria, Lou moved with his “Okie parents” to the Pacific Northwest at the age of two. After serving as a machine-gunner in France and Germany during the Second World War and rising to the rank of sergeant, Embree attended college in Idaho, returning to Europe to live the existentialist life in Paris after graduation. Back at home, he worked on tugboats in San Francisco Bay, in a railroad roundhouse in Filer, Idaho, and as a newspaper reporter and editor in Arizona before settling into a career as a linotype operator and printer for a Bay Area avant-garde press.

In the fall, while Ginny kept busy typing follow-up letters tracking consignment copies of the first Carp Press chapbook, Richard's poetry continued to find new publishers. A letter arrived from E. V. Griffith, editor of
Hearse
, saying how much he'd enjoyed
Lay the Marble Tea.
Brautigan struck Griffith as “among the very best and most exciting of the new younger poets.” The editor found the poems “sharply beautiful” and “magically alive,” inviting Richard to submit new work to his magazine, making no mention of the poetry
Hearse
had reprinted without payment in two earlier issues. Brautigan immediately mailed a batch of poems up to Griffith in Eureka.

September 1959 saw the first appearance of
Foot
, a new magazine edited by San Francisco–born poet Richard Duerden, in his spacious two-story Haight-Ashbury apartment on Rivoli Street. A handsome production,
Foot
boasted clean-set type, sewn signatures, and orange wrappers with a cover design of paired feet by Robert Duncan. The first issue contained five poems by Richard Brautigan, as well as work by Duerden, Philip Whalen, Ebbe Borregaard, and Robert Duncan.

Richard Duerden's artistic philosophy struck a sympathetic chord with Brautigan. “I never look back,” Duerden said. “I find it distasteful. The art of my life is like driving on the freeway. I go from place to place, never revise.” Duerden was three years older than Brautigan, who wrote “A Poem for Richard Duerden” about the gap in their ages. Still unpublished, the poem imagines “the difference / in years between us, is like a long line of salmon / stacking up in the pools, waiting to / go up the rapids.”

Sitting with Brautigan in a North Beach bar, Duerden said, “Richard, I'll tell you what. You write a poem for me, and I'll write a poem for you.” Brautigan immediately jotted a few lines down on a slip of paper and passed them over to Duerden.

Duerden read what his friend had written and added a penciled footnote to the right-hand margin: “Well all right.” Brautigan told Duerden he was quitting poetry for prose. Duerden asked why. “I don't want to sit at the children's table anymore,” Richard Brautigan said.

Jack Spicer's mimeograph publication
J
was another new magazine born that same September. Inspired by the launch of
Beatitude
and “made envious, scornful, and competitive” by Bob Kaufman's editorial participation in a successful venture, he envisioned a deliberately “amateur” magazine at the opposite end of the spectrum from the inbred university journals he detested. Spicer selected all the material for
J
himself, soliciting work from friends and leaving a box for random contributions on the bar at The Place. The first issue, sixteen pages long with a print run of
three hundred copies, contained poetry by Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, Joe Dunn, and Richard Brautigan (“The Fever Monument”), among others. It sold for a quarter.

J
made a point to appear homemade. Spicer was influenced by the growing “funk/assemblage” art movement blossoming in San Francisco. Artists such as Bruce Conner (who had moved to Frisco the previous September), George Herms, Jess (pasting up fanciful collages and reimagined comic strips), and Wallace Berman (whose 1957 show at the Ferus Gallery in L.A. was credited with starting the entire trend) were all working with discarded objects (nylon stockings, scraps of fur and feathers, all manner of assorted junk), the throwaway detritus of an overindulgent society.

Wallace Berman's beautiful and singular publication,
Semina
, lasting for only nine “issues” from 1955 to 1964, had a distinctive handmade look, no two numbers being alike either in size or format and each taking up to six months to produce.
Semina
was not for sale. Berman gave the copies away to friends, just as he solicited friends for material and help in the assemblage. It was produced in limited editions, its impact felt throughout the Frisco literary and artistic communities. “
Semina
's a real outlaw act,” Michael McClure observed, “as complex as outlaws in the Old West, as sexy and cool and hip and pop—and at the same time religious.” The erudite Jack Spicer was well aware of
Semina
. Richard Brautigan's later seed-packet self-publication,
Please Plant This Book
, paid unspoken tribute to Wallace Berman's visionary creation.

Spicer soon tired of the effort involved in putting out a magazine, even with Fran Herndon assisting with the typing and layout and writing rejection letters. (“‘Stick this poetry up your ass!' I had to say. I can't believe I did it. But I did.”)
J
quietly folded after five issues. Spicer's attention seemed more focused on his new book of poetry,
Billy the Kid
, which appeared in October with illustrations by Jess. The fifth and final issue (December 1959) ran “1942,” Richard's moving elegy on the death of his uncle Edward.

From the start, Brautigan set his sights on broader literary horizons than the small in-group audience delineated by the limited circulation of little poetry magazines. Just as he had submitted short stories to
Playboy
after graduating from high school, Richard mailed many of his new poems to establishment publications back east. His wife handled all the office work, typing the poetry, keeping up with correspondence, making sure the envelopes had enough postage. “I sent dozens of short poems to
The New Yorker
,” Ginny remembered, “to
The Nation
, to
The Atlantic
. It was long before he started getting popular.”

The fall of 1959 brought Richard Brautigan his first published critical notices. Gene Frumkin, editor of
Coastline 13
, reviewed
Lay the Marble Tea
in vol. 4, no. 1. In “A Step Toward Perception,” he praised Brautigan's “crisp, lucid commentary.” The autumn issue of
The Galley Sail Review
ran a two-page review by Robert Brotherson, “A Poet and his World.” Brotherson praised the opening line of “Sonnet” before proceeding to quote the rest of the poem to demonstrate that “Mr. Brautigan has turned cute on us.”

All that fall, Beat-mania turned its mercenary gaze on North Beach. Fueled by intense media attention and the many “beatnik” characters channeled into the American subconscious by the Hollywood dream machine, legions of ordinary Americans descended on bohemia. Daily tour buses cruised by City Lights and Bread and Wine. Pierre Delattre began to feel as if he “was putting on some kind of show.” He didn't like the feeling. “When the tour bus passed, the man with the megaphone would point me out in my sweatshirt and cross. I was another monkey in the zoo.” In retribution,
before quitting Bread and Wine, Delattre and a bunch of North Beach regulars rented their own bus and toured the downtown business district, dressed in outrageous costumes, harassing the “squares” and commenting through loudspeakers on the lifestyles of the men in gray flannel suits.

As the epicenter of hipness moved away from North Beach, the diaspora did not settle in any particular neighborhood. Small bohemian homesteads sprang up in odd corners of the city. Ebbe Borregaard rented two floors of a Victorian house at 1713 Buchanan Street in Japantown and set about converting the space into a gallery. Ginny Brautigan remembered going over during the fall of 1959 to help Ebbe and his wife, Joy, paint the walls white and hang curtains. The place opened as Ebbe Borregaard's Museum. Soon after, in mid-April of 1960, Jack Spicer read the thirty pieces in his new work, “Homage to Creeley,” at Borregaard's. The Brautigans were among the enthusiastic gathering of poets (including Philip Whalen, Ron Loewinsohn, George Stanley, and Robin Blaser) crowding into the small rooms to hear him read the poem through three times, with a break for intermission before the last go-round.

Sometime in January (1960), Richard and Ginny traveled down south to Reseda in the San Fernando Valley to visit her folks. Richard's father-in-law, Grover Cleveland Alder, was seventy and about to become a grandfather for the second time. Everyone called the old man “G.C.”

Richard liked listening to tales of his youth on a farm in Nebraska and of teaching school and later working as a car salesman in the early adventurous days of the automobile industry, when dozens of different brands competed in the marketplace.

Always a military buff, Richard enjoyed hearing G.C.'s aerial adventures in the First World War. Grover Cleveland Alder flew a de Havilland bomber in the flak-filled skies over France, chasing glory and rainbows in the innocent belief that he would live forever. He joined the Army at twenty-seven and had almost been turned down for pilot training because of his age. He was demobilized in 1919 with the rank of captain. Ginny left Idaho with her parents while she was still an infant and didn't know anything of her history there, so Richard asked G.C. about what he did after the war.

His father-in-law told him about moving up to the area around Rexburg, where he went into banking and ranching, married a pretty schoolteacher almost half his age, and prospered for a time before getting wiped out in the stock market crash of 1929. Four small-town banks and a grocery store gone forever, his ranch mortgaged to the hilt, G.C. began raising sheep, hanging on until 1934, when disease wiped out his flocks. After selling the land to pay off their debts, the family moved to California, where Ginny's father worked parking cars in Hollywood and later as a construction company bookkeeper and real estate salesman. Richard listened to the old man chronicle his rise and fall, observing his not-so-secret drinking. Having a taste for sweet wine himself, Richard shared a glass or two with G.C. He certainly knew where the bottles were hidden in the kitchen. Ginny's father could no longer afford the whiskey he preferred.