Jubilee Hitchhiker (63 page)

Richard wandered the tourist-clogged streets of downtown Tijuana, a new notebook in hand. Having filled the first, Brautigan scribbled notes in a little three-by-five spiral-bound, which fit more easily in his hand while wandering through the crowd. He described the “heroic” welcoming arch, the Government Tourist Building, and a “big modern Woolworth's.” The presence of an American five-and-dime in Mexico fascinated Brautigan, and he recorded many impressions of the store.

The one location he didn't describe in his notes was an abortion clinic. Not a single word about what was ostensibly his main objective. Brautigan returned to San Diego that same day, in time to catch PSA Flight 631 home to Frisco at 6:25 PM. Get in, get out, and get the job done with no wasted motion had long been his work motto. The daylong jaunt south of the border had not been intended as a pleasure trip.

Back in the apartment on California Street, Brautigan transcribed his notes into twenty-one detail-packed typewritten pages. He used virtually every observation made on the Tijuana trip in writing his novel. Richard's obsession with accuracy and detail served to counterbalance the extravagant fantasy that he used at the start of the book. The notion of a library housing only unpublished manuscripts stands out as one of Brautigan's most appealing conceits.

At the time, he must have been amused by the notion that only in such an institution would his own rejected work ever find a repository. Richard used the Presidio branch of the San Francisco Public Library as the archetype for this fictional creation, even including the address (3150 Sacramento Street) in his text. For years after
The Abortion
was eventually published, this small neighborhood branch library received numerous letters from true-believing readers who inquired about bringing in their rejected manuscripts. Five and a half years after Richard's death, life imitated art in Burlington, Vermont, when Todd Lockwood founded the Brautigan Library, a repository devoted to archiving unpublished works.

In the novel, the first-person narrator had no name but bore a distinct resemblance to Richard Brautigan. Like the author, he was thirty-one years old and didn't know how to drive. He had worked in “canneries, sawmills, factories” and was “not at home in the world.” He had never before been to Tijuana but had visited Guadalajara “five or six years” before. His poverty afforded only instant coffee. In one notable way, Brautigan deliberately distanced himself from his main character. “I felt like having a drink,” he wrote, “a very unusual thing for me [. . .]” The narrator lived alone in his strange library for almost three years before Vida Kramar moved in with him.

In many ways, Janice Meissner served as a model for Vida. Richard gave his heroine black hair (“like bat lightning”), but otherwise her physical beauty mirrored Janice's delicately chiseled good looks. Vida and Janice shared a curvaceous figure (37-19-36). “She was almost painful to gaze upon,” Brautigan wrote of Vida. “Her beauty, like a creature unto itself, was quite ruthless in its own way.” Descriptions of Vida's powerful effect on other men, how they stared at her, awestruck and drooling, and how she brushed off their advances “like flies,” had the clarion ring of personal experience. Writing this at a time when things were going so wrong with Janice can't have been
easy for Richard. It's hard to lose the most beautiful woman you've ever known. In Brautigan's new novel, the narrator got to keep the girl.

Like Alfred Hitchcock seen in an elevator or buying a newspaper at the start of one of his films, Richard Brautigan had a walk-on part in
The Abortion
. Book 1 (“Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?”) was divided into four sections. The third of these, “The 23,” concerned the total number of unpublished books the library had received that day. Always the enumerator and list maker, Brautigan described each in turn, listing every make-believe title and its fictional author.

The ninth of the twenty-three writers to submit manuscripts was Richard Brautigan. Richard described himself this way: “The author was tall and blond and had a long yellow mustache that gave him an anachronistic appearance. He looked as if he'd be more at home in another era.” The novel Brautigan brought in was called
MOOSE
. “‘Just another book,' he said.”

While working on
The Abortion
, Brautigan plugged away at a task he found distasteful, sending out letters of inquiry to editors and agents. “Falling stars,” he called these mercenary missives. Don Carpenter, whose first novel,
Hard Rain Falling
, was published by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1966, had recommended Richard to his Hollywood agent, the legendary H. N. Swanson. Known to everyone as “Swanee,” the cultured ten-percenter numbered Hemingway, Fitzgerald, John O'Hara, J. R. R. Tolkien, Ross Macdonald, and Agatha Christie among his many illustrious clients. Once, when asked what form of writing was the most profitable, Swanson replied, “Ransom notes.”

Don suggested to “Swanee” that
A Confederate General from Big Sur
might make an interesting project for Richard Lester, a director currently red-hot from his recent successes with the two Beatles films,
Help!
and
A Hard Day's Night
. Brautigan immediately sent a copy of his novel to Swanson's Sunset Boulevard office, mentioning conversations with Zekial Marko, who had “a strong interest” in
Confederate General
and “a good idea for a screenplay.”

Early in April, Peter Desbarats, editor in chief of
Parallel
, a Canadian magazine published in Montreal, wrote to say that of the three stories Brautigan had submitted, he found “The Wild Birds of Heaven” to be “a blessed if brief deliverance [. . .] from all the muddled words and confused thoughts that silt down on my desk every day.” He wanted to use the story in his summer (July/ August) issue and offered $125 (U.S.) for the first serial rights. This was welcome news.

As was a letter from H. N. Swanson later in the month. “Swanee” had read
Confederate General
and “found it highly amusing.” Although he thought “the market for this type of book [. . .] rather limited,” he wanted to try and sell it and asked Brautigan to send him more copies of the Grove edition. He inquired about Richard's other novels, including the work in progress. As Richard had included no return address, Swanson sent his letter in care of Don Carpenter.

Brautigan knew his days on California Street were numbered. In April, he dined twice without Janice at Andrew Hoyem's apartment overlooking Golden Gate Park's Panhandle, a green tree-lined strip eight blocks long and one block wide, running between Baker and Stanyan Streets. One occasion was a formal sit-down affair featuring fricasseed hare. Awaiting the inevitable, Richard plugged away on his novel and tended other unfinished business. He sent H. N. Swanson five copies of
Confederate General
, writing on the same day to Seymour Krim and to Sallie Ellsworth at the
Partisan Review
. The little literary magazine had held chapters from
Trout Fishing
for fourteen months without reaching an editorial consensus. Brautigan begged for an answer. “Please, pretty please with sugar on it, get me a decision on that stuff.”

Early in May, Richard Brautigan read from his work at the Rhymers Club in Wheeler Hall on the Berkeley campus, opening the semester's program. The organization, recently founded by Ron Loewinsohn; David Schaff, who once edited the
Yale Literary Magazine
; and graduate student/poet David Bromige (former editor of the
Northwest Review
), had published a single issue of
RC Lion
, their official mimeographed magazine. (“The Pretty Office,” a Brautigan short story, appeared in the second issue around the time of his University of California appearance.) Don Carpenter was among the audience for Richard's Rhymers Club reading. Hearing “Revenge of the Lawn” for the first time, he recalled, “I laughed so loud I literally fell off my chair. Right there in public.” Andy Hoyem was also present for the occasion. Hoyem made no mention in his daily journal entry of seeing Janice there.

The final breakup came four days later when Richard moved out, taking refuge in Hoyem's second-floor apartment at 1652 Fell Street. For all of the emotional pain involved, the transition occurred without incident. Accustomed to a Spartan life, Brautigan traveled light and made himself at home with a minimum of effort. Space for his typewriter and a place to crash were all he required.

Richard found an ideal roommate in Andy Hoyem, who thought at the time that his friend was only coming to stay for a week or so. A fine poet in his own right, the South Dakota–born Hoyem had graduated from Pomona, served in the U.S. Navy, and worked with Dave Haselwood at the Auerhahn Press, learning the craft of printing using hand-set type. He had recently entered into a partnership with Robert Grabhorn, “the consummate fine press printers in the country at that time,” forming the Grabhorn-Hoyem Press. A busy workday schedule kept him at the print shop for long hours, leaving Richard plenty of solitary uninterrupted writing space back at the apartment.

Brautigan made good use of this time. He labored over the growing novel, transforming twenty-one pages of typewritten notes into many short cogent chapters. Everything went in, all the mundane details of the PSA flight, his dislike of San Diego, the old Mexican at the Greyhound station carrying his possessions in a Hunt's tomato sauce box, the Tijuana Woolworth's display window crammed with Easter bunnies and candy eggs, a middle-aged platinum-haired woman wearing a mink coat in the airport café. From these random observed details Richard wove the fabric of his inspired fantasy.

It wasn't all work and no play at the Fell Street digs. Hoyem greatly enjoyed Brautigan's presence and took much pleasure in their witty literary conversations. He thought their time together “was good for both of us.” Near the end of May, the two friends hosted a party celebrating the shared birthdays of nineteenth-century French proto-symbolist poet Gérard de Nerval and Robert Grabhorn, who was turning sixty-six. Hoyem had published a translation of de Nerval's
Les Chimères
that year. The two poets mailed out printed letterpress invitations. Jane Rades supplied an elaborately decorated cake, which the guests devoured while sipping punch à l'Aiglon, a Grabhorn recipe featuring Napoleon brandy. The master printer was a connoisseur of obscure beverage concoctions concealing a lethal kick.

Hangovers rarely deterred Richard Brautigan, and no matter how much of Grabhorn's insidious punch he had imbibed the night before, he most certainly was back hard at work on his novel the morning after the party. His steady approach paid off. Four days later, after six weeks at the Fell Street apartment, Richard finished a draft of
The Abortion
. Andrew Hoyem was the first
person, other than the author, to read the manuscript. He thought the book “very good, going from allegory to reality, to harsh reality.” With the completion of his fourth novel, Brautigan capped one of the most remarkable creative streaks in American literature. Four utterly unique books in five years of work, together with innumerable poems and a distinguished group of short stories, not bad for a country boy come to town with his apple-picking money. Richard Brautigan did not write another novel for eight years.

twenty-three: the museum

F
ROM 1966 TO 1975, Richard Brautigan occupied a shabby apartment at 2546 Geary Boulevard, near Kaiser Medical Center. No one in Frisco ever referred to it as a boulevard, and Brautigan always wrote Geary Street as his address. The decrepit two-story wooden building stood in the middle of a block across from the Sears depot and just up from the Cable Car Drive-in, a greasy spoon on the corner that reminded Ianthe of a little red caboose. The front windows of the first-floor apartment looked out on the tunnel where Geary cuts through the hill from Presidio to Masonic. When he moved in Richard's rent was $45 a month.

Richard first heard about the place from Erik Weber, who lived in the house next door. In the summer of 1966, the current tenant, a painter named Ori Sherman, planned on leaving for a year and a half to travel around the world. There was no lease, and he wanted someone to “sublet” the apartment, holding it for him until he got back. Erik and Loie Weber suggested Richard. Near the end of June, Brautigan moved out of Andy Hoyem's place on Fell Street and came to stay. When Ori Sherman returned from his
Wanderjahr
, Brautigan refused to leave, citing squatter's rights. “Richard was not giving up that apartment,” Loie remembered. “Ori was upset. He was angry, but that was the way it was.”

On the afternoon before moving day, Brautigan had lunch with Robert Grabhorn whose press had proofed his manuscript of
The Abortion
. Andrew Hoyem and his wife, Sally, joined them. Afterward they celebrated with Pimm's Cup on the terrace at Enrico's and more drinks in the open arched window at the Condor (home of topless silicone-enhanced Carol Doda), on the corner of Broadway and Columbus. It was warm and clear, perfect for celebrity watching. “Bob Grabhorn panhandled seventy cents out of Allen Ginsberg,” Hoyem recalled.

The evening ended in high good spirits at the Fillmore. They were entertained by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, along with Lenny Bruce, in his final public appearance. Hoyem deemed the comedian's performance “lousy.” A month later, Bruce (age forty) died of a morphine overdose in the bathroom of his Hollywood home.

Loie Weber thought of Brautigan as a friend who lived next door. “He was just this oddball character.” Nearly ten years younger, Loie found herself drawn to Richard in a maternal way. “I felt his fragility and his vulnerability and how easily hurt he was. How sensitive he was.” Right from the start, she did small favors for him. Not long after moving in, Richard, late for an appointment, asked Loie if she would leave a note on his door for his friend Frank Curtin, who had planned to stop by and read his new novel. She quickly jotted down a simple message. “Frank: come on in—read novel—it's on table in front room. I'll be back in about 2 hours. Richard.” Loie pinned the scrap of paper to Brautigan's front door and thought nothing more about it. When
Richard returned home the note still hung there, another piece of found art. He took the paper slip into his new writing room, typed up Loie's words verbatim, and made them the dedication to
The Abortion
.