Jubilee Hitchhiker (74 page)

The British poet Basil Bunting, a visiting lecturer at UCSB, and his raven-haired daughter, Sima Maria (Persian for “Face of a Virgin,” Bunting claimed), were also in attendance. Bunting had worked in Paris in the twenties as a subeditor of Ford Madox Ford's
Transatlantic Review
and had been associated with Pound and Yeats in Italy in the 1930s. At the time, his modernist work was better known in America than in his own country.

After the reading, Richard and the others came back to the Shoemakers' and he invited Susan to join them in the ongoing festivities. She didn't take much persuading and hopped into a VW van with Brautigan, Hoyem, and five or six others. With Jack driving, they headed north about fifteen miles to Gaviota State Park. Along the way, the group smoked “lots of weed,” loudly chanting and singing. Richard abstained from the marijuana but accompanied the singers by playing a pair of finger cymbals.

The trail to the Gaviota Hot Springs ascended from the parking area for half a mile through the trees. A waning half-moon made it easy going. The spring was only three or four feet deep and smelled of sulfur, but they had the place to themselves, and everyone quickly disrobed and slipped naked into the steaming water. The rain earlier had stopped, and a phosphorescent ring surrounded the moon. Bats swooped down out of the night, skimming over the tops of the bathers' heads. Mud covered the bottom of the pond, and every movement caused streams of tiny tingling bubbles to rise up between their bare limbs.

They soaked for a couple hours. It was a very romantic evening, so much so that Andrew Hoyem later wrote a prose-poem about the experience for Susan Morgan. He called it “Xenovale.” (“In the midst of rising mist a woman's form is discernible. She disrobes and slowly descends to the pool. The outline of her body is blurred, but one may be sure she is statuesque. Her steps are as deliberately delicate as her physique is perfectly proportioned [. . .]” His words made her feel “beautiful,” and Susan appreciated Andrew's sensitivity, but it was Richard Brautigan she took home to her Madrid Street apartment that night.

The next day, Richard gave her an inscribed copy of the 1966 Cranium Press reprint of
The Galilee Hitch-hiker
. That evening, the Shoemakers arranged a poets' get-together at their home. Brautigan came with Susan. Bunting brought his daughter. “Both Hoyem and Brautigan noticed her,” Jack recalled. “Bunting liked company, and he liked company when he drank. Richard and Andrew both liked to drink.” It was the first time Susan saw Brautigan “badly drunk.” She remembered Bunting and Brautigan “really hit it off and emptied many bottles.” Shoemaker understood their connection. “Bunting liked eccentrics and would have found [Brautigan's] wry, fey self amusing.”

Brautigan and Hoyem returned to San Francisco that Sunday. Much had transpired in the hipster community during their fortnight's absence. A dapper dude in a white linen suit had been following Kesey around, hanging out with the Pranksters, and taking notes. Tom Wolfe's series of articles on the Trips Festivals for the
New York Herald Tribune
(combined in 1968 to produce his
best-selling book
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
) did more to publicize the hip life than all the combined headlines about the Great Human Be-In.

From Brautigan's perspective, the most interesting media development was a tiny innovative Haight-Ashbury publishing venture launched while he'd been out of town. The Communication Company had its genesis when Chester Anderson, “a fountain of quips and bon mots who liked to play Baroque music on his harpsichord and recorder,” came out to Frisco at Christmastime and met Claude Hayward and his pregnant partner, H'lane Resnikoff. Anderson, a thirtysomething bohemian, had published
The Butterfly Kid
, a sci-fi novel set in Greenwich Village, and during a previous stay in North Beach had edited both
Beatitude
and a satirical magazine called
The Underhound
.

Claude and H'lane had only recently moved up to San Francisco from Los Angeles, where Claude wrote for the
L.A. Free Press.
Somehow, he ran into Anderson and they dropped acid together on New Year's Eve. The next day, while coming down, they wandered over to the Wail in the Panhandle. When a burly Hells Angel gave Anderson two beers, one for each hand, Chester knew it was time to move back to San Francisco.

At the end of the first week in 1967, Chester Anderson came to stay at the Haywards' third-floor apartment at 406 Duboce Avenue (corner of Fillmore Street) on the slope of Buena Vista Hill, “a brisk walk” away from the action in the Haight. Hayward worked as the advertising manager for the
Sunday Ramparts
, a weekly newspaper published by
Ramparts
magazine. Peter Coyote described him as “a ferret-faced guy with an easy laugh and furtive manner [. . .] an anarchist by temperament as well as a skilled thief.” Emmett Grogan was kinder in his assessment, calling Claude “a Topanga Canyon beat from Los Angeles” with a “graveyard look who though he seldom talked, he made most people laugh just by being around.” Grogan also considered him “a slick hustler,” a high compliment coming from the consummate con artist of the Haight-Ashbury.

Hayward got Anderson a job as the Marin County ad representative for the
Sunday Ramparts
, a position requiring a minimum of actual work, allowing Chester ample time to explore his new neighborhood. Anderson grew a beard, stopped cutting his hair, and began wearing “beads and things” around his neck. In a letter to a friend, he described himself as looking “quite picturesque, but fairly drab within my environment.”

Founded in 1962 as a liberal Catholic news magazine,
Ramparts
metamorphosed into a hip flashy muckraking monthly in 1964, after Warren Hinckle III took over as its editor. Hinckle at that time had failed as a publicist and as a reporter for the
Chronicle
, but in his mudslinging hands the left-wing magazine prospered on the newsstands if not with advertisers. Critic Ralph Gleason served on the editorial board. Jann Wenner, a pudgy rock and roll enthusiast, was the entertainment editor of the Sunday supplement and shared his office with Claude Hayward. The office mascot, a spider monkey named Henry Luce, cavorted between the desks. Claude and Chester fit right in. The unlikely duo talked up the freaks in the acid head community, and Hinckle took an interest in doing a major feature on the hippies. He offered Anderson $2 an hour as a researcher to dig up stories in the Haight.

With his weathered canvas shoulder bag stuffed with composition books, Chester set out on his researching rounds. Among his first interviews, he talked with Emmett Grogan over at poster artist Stanley Mouse's Henry Street studio. Grogan's comment, “Freedom means everything free,” got Anderson thinking. Soon he and Claude started rapping late at night and came up with an idea
for a news outlet based on the Marshall McLuhan dictum “The medium is message.” The
Oracle
wasn't getting the job done. The arty underground newspaper appeared only sporadically and readers had to pay for each copy. Claude and Chester envisioned something more ephemeral and at the same time more immediate, a disposable broadside hitting the streets as often as necessary, many times each day if current events so demanded.

At the Human Be-In, Anderson and Hayward identified themselves as The Communication Company (later commonly abbreviated as com/co) and passed out printed poems and a list of cool places to trip. Three days later, Chester used the second half of his advance for
The Butterfly Kid
to make a $300 down payment to the Gestetner Corporation of California for a brand-new Gestetner 366 silk-screen stencil duplicator and a Gestefax justified electronic stencil cutter. With these amazing machines and an IBM typewriter on loan from
Ramparts
, they set up shop in Hayward's apartment. Able to print up to 10,000 copies “of almost anything we can wrap around our scanning drum,” including halftones and art in four colors, The Communication Company was open for business.

Com/co's one-page purpose statement broadside said it all. “OUR POLICY: Love is communication.” The list of “PLANS & HOPES” promised

The Communication Company lived up to all of these promises. They also pledged “to keep up the payments” on their “MAGNIFICENT” Gestetner machines but, after the initial three hundred bucks, the remaining $672 they owed was never paid. Claude Hayward's mechanical skills (all the more remarkable as he was nearly blind and wore thick corrective black-lens glasses) enabled him to keep the Gestetners running without any technical support from the corporation. Com/co started making some money within a couple months, but the bulk of its support came from Owsley Stanley and various other charitable drug dealers. The Diggers did their part by supplying ream after ream of purloined paper. Com/co held up its end of the deal and printed anything the Diggers wanted. Soon, the neighborhood was flooded with their provocative handbills, a dramatic escalation of Grogan and Murcott's earlier efforts. By the time Richard Brautigan got back to Frisco after his poet-in-residence stint, com/co publications were hitting the streets daily.

On January 20, the Diggers' Free Frame store on Frederick Street (along with Swami Bhaktivedanta's Radha-Krishna Temple, which had set up shop next door in the same building) had a condemned notice posted on the entrance. When Timothy Leary appeared at Winterland a week later, in his one-man Buddha show, he was immediately denounced by a Chester Anderson com/ co poem circulated the next day. During a meeting between the HIP merchants and San Francisco police chief Thomas Cahill four days earlier, a new label was pinned on the psychedelic age. Gertrude Stein had famously named the Lost Generation, and Jack Kerouac came up with the term
“Beat Generation.” Ironically, it was Frisco's top cop who, in the course of this meeting, said to the gathering of hippie store owners, “You're sort of a Love Generation, aren't you?”

Richard Brautigan looked the part (Claude Hayward remembered him always wearing his trademark navy peacoat and battered Stetson, “usually reeking of patchouli”), as did Chester Anderson, but they were both more than a decade too old to qualify for membership in the Love Generation. The two men shared a greater affinity as fellow writers than mere sartorial similarities. Brautigan felt attracted to com/co because of the Digger connection and their pledge to publish literature originating within the hip community.

Trout Fishing in America
proceeded through its various production phases, and Richard expected the book to be out before summer. In addition, with the help of Don Carpenter, who had written a letter to editor A. C. Spectorsky, Brautigan submitted a group of nine stories to
Playboy
, hoping to see them published “together as a group.” Although The Viking Press had rejected
The Abortion
, Bob Mills was “convinced the book deserves to be published” and resubmitted it to Arthur Fields at Putnam's. Failing there, he had “a lot of other places in mind.”

The planned Coyote Books collection of his poetry prompted Brautigan to work mostly in that medium. Citing a newly written poem, he jotted a possible title in his notebook: “Boo, Forever: Some Poems 1957–1967.” He'd also thought a lot about a new novel he planned on writing later that year. What he had in mind was a Western. He'd long loved Western movies, steeping himself in Hollywood quick-draw folklore at countless afternoon triple features and devouring the literature of the West, everything he could get his hands on, from Francis Parkman to Louis L'Amour. Brautigan wrote to Bob Mills about his plan. (“I've always wanted to write a Western and so that's what I'm going to do.”)

The landlord padlocked the front entrance of the vacated Free Frame of Reference, officially closed by order of the health and fire departments, and nailed a wire grate over the rear windows. By early February, the Diggers also had to deal with another problem. Their old Ford station wagon had given up the ghost, and it looked like the Yellow Submarine would soon follow it to the automobile graveyard. Without these vehicles, the Diggers had no way to round up the produce they needed for their free food program.

Richard Brautigan came to the rescue. He knew a beautiful young heiress called Flame who wanted to make a donation to the Diggers. Pam Parker, a member of the fountain pen family, had money to burn, Emmett Grogan's favorite pyrotechnic gesture. A “stunning” redhead with pale ivory skin, Flame had much more going for her than mere good looks. Peter Coyote later praised Parker's “fearless humor” and “steel-trap mind.” The Diggers asked Brautigan if the mysterious beauty would “go for a pickup truck?”

“Sure,” Richard replied without hesitation. Brooks Butcher had been eyeing a '58 Chevy pickup in great condition with brand-new tires. He had Brautigan take him to see Miss Parker and returned that evening driving the coveted truck. The pickup saved the day and became the Diggers' trusty workhorse. Flame in turn became Butcher's “old lady,” moving in with him at a Webster Street storefront in the Fillmore District.

The Diggers located a new and much bigger home for their free emporium at 901 Cole, a corner storefront at the intersection of Carl Street. Tall plate glass show windows faced both streets. A surrounding second-floor mezzanine balcony added needed space. The initial rent money came from a wealthy patron, and Peter Coyote, Sweet William, the Hun, and other Diggers cleaned
the interior, covering the walls with a coat of donated white paint. Soon, the racks and counters overflowed with discarded clothing, secondhand kitchen appliances, used TVs, and hi-fi sets: a Salvation Army cornucopia of consumer culture throwaways.