Jubilee Hitchhiker (94 page)

Early in August, following another disagreement with Valerie, Brautigan moved back to Geary Street. Aside from having brought his typewriter and a few changes of clothing, he had never actually moved in, so this didn't involve more than filling a couple shopping bags with his stuff. A week later, Richard and Valerie had dinner at Enrico's. The next week they went to see the film
Midnight Cowboy
, so the split was not yet a complete separation.

Mad River's eponymous first album had not been a hit. The band members' names mismatched with their pictures on the sleeve, and Capitol had sped up the tracks in postproduction. This made Mad River's music “sound like the Chipmunks.”
Rolling Stone
panned the release, which didn't sell. Greg Dewey called it “one of the biggest heartbreaks of my life.”

When Capitol failed to renew their contract, the band got another chance and recorded a second album in Berkeley with their old pal Jerry Corbitt of the Youngbloods as their producer.
Paradise Bar and Grill
turned out better and was released at the end of July. The record included Richard Brautigan's musically accompanied reading of “Love's Not a Way to Treat a Friend” (recorded the previous year) as its third track on side A. Richard received a check for $136 for his performance.

In August, Brautigan was invited by his friend Lew Welch to join in a reading for a group of prisoners at San Quentin. Welch had been having a hard time that summer, suffering from depression and “big changes [he didn't] seem able to handle very well.” These included the approach of his forty-third birthday, making him “feel old and feeble,” and his fifth attempt at going dry and “stopping the booze absolutely.” The event marked Richard's first return to the big house since he researched “The Menu” in 1965. He and Welch agreed the prisoners were among their “warmest and [most] appreciative audiences.” The convicts' favorable reaction was the only recompense the poets received that afternoon. They donated their time.

Preparing for his trip to San Diego to direct the prose workshop at California Western's Summer Conference, Richard asked Edmund Shea to make him a series of black-and-white slides of punctuation marks to be projected onto a screen. Long accustomed to working with artists, Shea
never questioned Brautigan's odd request and had the slides ready before he left. Two days prior to his departure, Richard sent a letter to Sam Lawrence listing the writers he wanted to receive complimentary copies of Delacorte's hardcover three-in-one edition of his books. Along with friends like Don Carpenter, Lew Welch, Ron Loewinsohn, and Michael McClure, and long-standing supporters such as John Ciardi, Tom Parkinson, Josephine Miles, and Kay Boyle, Brautigan added Herbert Gold, Anne Waldman, and Ishmael Reed to his list.

Don Carpenter described the San Diego beach campus of United States International University as being “on the sandspit.” He said the suites the school provided for the participants were “little barracks, it was horrifying.” Robert Creeley described them as having a “plastic cement block design.” Richard called the place “Stalag 19.” The poster advertising the event featured an Edmund Shea photograph of Brautigan, clearly the “star” of the weeklong celebration. Along with Brautigan, the literary gathering included Carpenter, Creeley, Edward Dorn, Stephen Schneck, Michael McClure, and Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors, who was there to present his sixteen-millimeter documentary film,
Feast of Friends
.

After the screening, Morrison sat out on the lawn “in a circle of poets and writers with a few of the students,” passing around a bottle of whiskey. Don Carpenter remembered the rocker “making an ass of himself.” Creeley recalled “this awful sad evening” and Morrison as “extraordinarily drunk.”

Creeley quoted T. S. Eliot, and Jim Morrison began teasing him, “the vulnerable square, the poet.” Morrison grabbed the whiskey bottle (and here the memories of eyewitnesses vary). Don Carpenter thought the rock star broke it over his own head, while Creeley remembered “and he just goes
whop
on the head of his friend Babe, and the bottle breaks. Wow!” In his book
Lighting the Corners
Michael McClure recalled the Jim Morrison incident, remembering it both ways.

It was the middle of the night. Everybody was extremely intoxicated. We were sitting out on the greensward. Creeley had his clothes off and was rolling down the hill, drunkenly yelling that he was his body. It was wonderful. Richard Brautigan was sitting under a tree brooding about noble Brautigan thoughts. Jim, Babe, and I were there sort of cross-legged under another tree. I don't remember what anybody was saying, but Jim reached over with a bottle and broke it over Babe's head. I said, “Jim, that was a rotten thing to do,” and he said “Oh yeah?” and he picked up another bottle and broke it over his own head.

Bob Creeley had a notion about the nature of Brautigan's “noble” thoughts. “Richard, he's not at all pleased by this,” Creeley said. In fact, Brautigan “was very turned off by Jim Morrison.” According to Creeley, “he loathed that sense of public disorder or public indifference.” Richard hated having broken glass lying about and borrowed a flashlight to look for pieces of the whiskey bottle. Bob Creeley recalled him earlier “on the beach picking up plastic.” For his part, Jim Morrison jumped to his feet and sauntered off. Two “sad groupies” passing by asked, “Where do you think they're going?”

“Nowhere you'd like to go,” Creeley muttered.

Three days later, at a party following Carpenter's reading at the Solomon Little Theatre, Creeley and Don sat and talked with a student when Richard approached and said, “We have to leave now.”

“Why . . . ?” the student protested. “Hey, the party's just getting started. What do you have to leave for?”

“You'll never know,” Creeley told him. “We have to leave 'cause Richard said so.” Soon after, they were all barreling down the San Diego Freeway in a Volkswagen with the Creeleys up front and Brautigan and Carpenter seated in the rear. Bob and Bobbie were “arguing like murder,” Don recalled. Suddenly, Creeley hit the brakes and stopped the little car beneath an underpass on the freeway. Richard and Don sat terrified in the backseat, “waiting for the semi to hit us, you know, from Mexico, highballing it north with all the toilet seats.” An accident was avoided after Bob got out, walked around, and opened the door for Bobbie. She took his place in the driver's seat, and they sped off into the night.

On another occasion, Bobbie Creeley remembered going to “this funny bunkhouse” where they all were staying, to pick up Richard. “We were going to go up the coast to this woman's house to have something to eat and sit on the beach and then come back.” Brautigan was sleeping in his room, naked, covered only with a blanket. When they woke him, Richard sat up, the blanket across his lap. Bobbie noticed his body was covered with bruises, “the kind of bruise that looks terrible when it starts to get yellow.” Don Carpenter stuck his head into the room, took one look, and said, “God, that woman should go to prison.”

Brautigan gave his presentation on August 23 in the Little Theatre auditorium. Creeley had read his exquisitely honed poetry the evening before, and the students doubtless expected a similar performance from the author of
Trout Fishing in America
. Richard neither read nor gave a talk. Instead, he stood at the back of the hall with a projector, showing Edmund Shea's slides of punctuation marks. Don Carpenter sat in the audience. “It was terrifying at the beginning,” he remembered, “because they didn't know what to do. This went on for forty-five minutes of punctuation marks. There aren't that many punctuation marks. There were repeats!” Brautigan remained silent, not saying a word as he changed slide after slide.

“The students just sat there in that auditorium frozen with wondering how they were supposed to react to this. And he would hit one, like the semicolon and then the comma. And the comma would be up there five minutes and then the colon. And after a while you can hear first this one and then that one and then this one start to get it. And you hear the laughing. And it's like when Mark Twain got up and told the same story six times in a row until they started to laugh. He was going to tell it as many times as it took for them to get the idea that that's what was going on. And that's what Richard was doing. Pay attention to these punctuation marks, and as soon as we got that, it was like you were real stupid if you weren't laughing.”

Don Carpenter also recalled one afternoon sitting outside under a tree surrounded by a circle of students. “I've never had this experience at another writers' conference,” he said. “I was explaining to them how I felt about certain literary matters. There was Richard sitting there listening to me. Not adding anything, not trying to be another teacher or anything like that. Just one of the students. It was really flattering, an enormously charming thing to do.” Carpenter chuckled at the memory. “The fact that there were a number of pretty girls sitting there wasn't at issue, although it certainly became an issue later in the evening. I think I'm the only poet there that didn't get laid.”

Don Carpenter should have brought his wife along. Most of the other poets did. Bobbie Creeley came with Bob. Michael McClure had Joanna by his side. Ed and Jenny Dorn were there with their baby son, Kidd, their first child, born two weeks before on the D. H. Lawrence Ranch
near Taos. Most of the social activity was purely domestic. Bobbie Creeley remembered sitting on the grass with Richard, talking about their childhoods. Brautigan told her he'd stay in a place for three months and then move on.

“Why did you move so much?” she asked.

“One of my stepfathers had been a fry cook,” Richard replied.

Bobbie understood completely. Her own father had been a fry cook, and she moved around a lot as a child. “Fry cooks,” Bobbie said, “rank below itinerant evangelists and used car salesmen as a bad credit risk.”

Brautigan told her the story of the time his mother abandoned him in Great Falls with Tex Porterfield. Bobbie Creeley recalled that Richard felt this was “the crowning blow.”

“We didn't even like each other that much,” he said.

“How did he treat you?” she asked.

“Well, he treated me well enough. I'd come to where he was working after school, and he'd give me $5, and I'd go out and eat dinner.”

Brautigan formed a lasting new friendship at California Western's Summer Conference with Roxy and Judy Gordon, a young Texas couple who had come down to San Diego from the Fort Belknap Reservation in northern Montana. Half-Choctaw, half-Scottish, Roxy Lee Gordon had been adopted as “First Coyote Boy” by the Assiniboine (Nakota), who shared the reservation with the Gros Ventres (A'aninin). At twenty-four, already an accomplished storyteller and songwriter, Gordon had his own distinctive look, lean and lanky, wearing cowboy garb and mirrored aviator sunglasses. He wrote about his friends up on the rez and of some time he and Judy had spent in Colorado working for VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America). Roxy recalled how “Richard liked a short story I wrote. He hooked on to me. I think also he liked I had a car.” Newly pregnant, Judy was thinking about where she would have her baby. Brautigan suggested the Gordons come up to San Francisco. “I had to find San Francisco on the map,” Roxy Gordon remembered.

Richard's teaching engagement at U.S. International lasted another week, until the following Friday. Most of the other writers cleared out once their presentations were over, but Schneck and Dorn stayed to read during the second week of the conference. The day after Brautigan's reading, Don Allen hosted a big literary gathering at his place in Frisco. Bob and Bobbie Creeley were there, along with Michael and Joanna McClure, both poets having already departed San Diego. The guest list also included Lew Welch and Magda Cregg, Joanne Kyger and Jack Boyce, David Schaff, and Warren and Ellen Tallman. Valerie Estes came wearing a flowered black silk chiffon dress.

Along with gossip about Brother Antoninus and Joanne's tales of the La Mama theater troupe coming to Bolinas and ripping everybody off “without giving a single performance,” Bob Creeley and Valerie talked about Charles Olson's letters. Creeley didn't understand them either. Bob insisted how fond he was of Richard. “It was the first and last thing he told me,” she wrote to Brautigan the next day. Allen's party was just the sort of fashionable bohemian social event that so frequently found a mention in Herb Caen's column. Maybe this one resulted in an additional baronhood for Michael McClure. Richard Brautigan had no regrets far off in San Diego. His days as a baron had come to an end. A coronation into the hierarchy of true literary royalty lay just ahead.

thirty-four: the great public library publishing caper

I
T ALL STARTED with an obituary. Richard Brautigan tore the column from the back pages of the
San Francisco Examiner
in September of 1968, another piece of found art. He kept it among his personal papers for the remaining sixteen years of his life. The headline read, “Mrs. Myrtle Tate, Movie Projectionist.” The widow of Yancey S. Tate died at Kaiser Foundation Hospital at the age of sixty-six and had been a “longtime member” of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Motion Picture Machine Operators of San Francisco Union, Local 317. Richard wrote “Mrs. Myrtle Tate, Movie Projectionist,” a poem about “one of the few women who worked as a movie projectionist.”

Richard's friend actor/poet/screenwriter Jack Thibeau had experimented with a series of Xerox poems later published in New York by Roger Kennedy and transformed by Mabou Mines, the experimental theater group, into
The Saint and the Football Player
, “a massive performance piece,” with music by minimalist composer Philip Glass. Thibeau showed this work to Brautigan. “He didn't know what they were,” Jack recalled, “but he liked the concept that you can put the dimes in, Xerox it, and you're published.”