Jubilee Hitchhiker (106 page)

Visiting graveyards was another favorite Brautigan pastime. One sweltering afternoon when the temperature soared to 105 degrees, Roxy and Judy drove Richard to the cemetery at Byrd's Store, a tiny settlement close by the Hog Creek cabin, where he took notes and watched an old man with skin cancer raking the graves. Looking at the dry landscape surrounding him, Brautigan judged the view to be “godforsaken.”

“Godforsaken is beautiful, too,” Judy Gordon replied.

Another time, Bill Wittliff took Richard and Roxy to the old Rosario Cemetery, outside Austin. Brautigan scribbled twenty-six pages of notes in his fifteen-cent Velvatone memo book. Of particular interest was the Manderfield Tomb, a crumbling ruin distinguished for its decay even in this decrepit necropolis. Richard made crude sketches of the dilapidated mausoleum. “The Manderfield Tomb is the eyesore of the cemetary [
sic
],” he wrote. “The death slum . . .” Brautigan was fascinated as always with the overt symbols of mortality, and his copious note-taking was intended as research for a projected poem or short story that he never wrote.

Back home in Frisco, after his Texas sojourn, Richard bragged to Joanne Kyger about his time in London. “I got to run with the Creeleys,” he boasted. He began spending more time with Sherry Vetter. At first, she met him for lunch from time to time when Ianthe was visiting. “He got to me because here was this little girl who couldn't handwrite,” Sherry recalled. “She didn't know math. She could barely read, and I started out tutoring her.”

At the time, Ianthe lived up in Sonoma with her mother and attended a “free school,” which Brautigan thought, not without justification, wasn't providing a proper education. He wanted her to go to a “regular school.” Ianthe told her father she hoped to be a veterinarian. “She was really interested in animals and stuff,” Sherry said, “and he knew she could never be that unless she had some math and some science.”

Richard, for his part, tutored Sherry in his literary preferences, trying to influence her reading tastes. He introduced her to the work of McClure, Snyder, and Creeley and to classic writers “he thought were really great, like Baudelaire and Sappho.” He recited poetry to her. Vetter recalled Phil Whalen's poem “Three Variations All About Love,” a personal favorite, misquoting it slightly: “Behind my eyes at Benares, Over my shoulder at Port au Prince.” They took long walks together, studying the turn-of-the-century San Francisco architecture. “He loved Bernard Maybeck,” Sherry recalled, “especially the copper gutters.”

Brautigan often recited favorite poetry from memory to Sherry Vetter during the course of their ten-year relationship. Richard would say, “Let's recite the Robert Creeley poem.” He referred to Creeley's “Just Friends,” from the 1962 collection
For Love
, the first line, “Out of the table endlessly rocking,” a variation on Walt Whitman's famous opening. Sherry remembered wandering hand in hand through Golden Gate Park with Richard, singing old Gershwin tunes. One time in Bolinas, Brautigan, Whalen, and Vetter walked down the street crooning the old George and Ira Gershwin song “Our Love Is Here to Stay” at the tops of their lungs. Philip and Sherry improvised little dance steps.
“In time the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble, They're only made of clay . . .”

Richard introduced Sherry to Lew Welch at the No Name Bar in Sausalito. He gave her a copy of
Courses
, a chapbook published by Dave Haselwood in 1968. “Sign it, Lew,” Richard said. On the back cover, Welch wrote out a poem from the book:

Earlier in the summer, when Brautigan was still in New York, Welch sent Richard a sequence of seven postcards on his journey north and west from Colorado. Lew had spent five weeks as
poet-in-residence at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. Magda and her son Jeff were along on this trip.

Coincidentally, Welch mailed one of his cards from Livingston, Montana. Another one, postmarked the previous day in Rock Springs, Wyoming, read in part, “The talk is about a hippy who ate the heart of a man he killed.” This referred to the cannibal murder of a social worker by two itinerant hitchhikers earlier in the year at La Duke Springs, along the Yellowstone River, about forty miles south of Livingston. Brautigan promised Lew Welch to try and get Helen Brann to represent his new poetry collection,
Ring of Bone.

In mid-September, Tim Leary escaped from the minimum security prison in San Luis Obispo. Helped by the Weather Underground and disguised as a bespectacled, bald businessman with a fake passport identifying him as Mr. William McNellis, Leary, along with his wife, Rosemary, flew first to Paris and then on to Algeria, taking refuge with the exiled Black Panther Party. In an ironic reversal of fortune, they became the virtual prisoners of Eldridge Cleaver, ex-con, information minister of the Black Panthers' American Government in Exile, and author of the best seller
Soul on Ice
.

As Richard's affair with Sherry Vetter moved forward, he felt the need to check her out astrologically. One afternoon, sitting around with friends who were amateur astrologers, Richard offered Sherry's birth statistics and they drew up her chart. Later that day, he knocked on her apartment door in Noe Valley. Sherry found Richard standing outside with a little packet of handwritten papers in his hand. “I've had your horoscope done. You've got every house on fire,” he said, with deadpan solemnity. “We can't see each other again. This is the end.”

Sherry cracked up. “I thought that was the funniest thing I had ever heard,” she said, “because I didn't even know what sign I was.” Sherry also found it amusing that Richard had used the expression “on fire” to describe the aspect of her various houses, instead of “in fire.” Brautigan wasn't joking. He treated the entire matter with utter seriousness, but the young woman's laughter got through to him and he relented, handing over his handwritten notes, which she discarded.

In spite of astrological misgivings, Richard Brautigan knew deep down that Sherry Vetter was a keeper. She was good for him. “You are my map to this other world,” Richard told her not long after they started going out together. “For twenty years, I've eaten spaghetti with no sauce and no meatballs. But now, I want to get into this other world.” Acting as his guide, Sherry took Richard to a party at her brother's house across the Bay. Blaine Vetter worked as a headhunter in the computer industry and lived in a fine house on top of the Berkeley Hills. Later, Richard often played basketball with Blaine on the little court he had at his place, but on that first night, Sherry recalled, “everybody was all dressed up in suits and Richard had his regular outfit,” consisting of blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and his black high-top kangaroo-hide shoes.

Feeling angry “because everybody was sort of looking down their noses at him,” Brautigan stormed out of the party. Sherry ran down the driveway after him. She knew he couldn't go anywhere because she was the one with the car. “Those people,” Richard fumed. “Those people are all dying of terminal ordinary. I make more money in a month than they do in a year.” It was the first time that Vetter realized Brautigan was rich. All the money in the world would never be enough for Richard to escape his impoverished past.

The following summer, on a fishing trip with Vetter to the Upper Sacramento River, Brautigan once again felt completely out of place in the off-season Mount Shasta ski resort where they spent
a couple nights. “Voice of the snow dead,” Richard wrote in his notebook. “And I am always on the outside looking in. The air is blue. Alone, blue and dead. I feel like Gatsby. I've never been skiing. I've never been in a place like this before. I am humbled [. . .] It's my childhood again. And always outside looking in.”

If Sherry Vetter served as Brautigan's road map into the brave new world of prosperity, Loie Weber provided him with a compass. Not that she told him which way to go; instead, Loie validated Richard's choice of direction. “He liked to control everything,” she recalled. “I think he was one of the most measured, the most calculating people. He was terrified of exposure, and he chose his friends carefully. One of the reasons he asked me to work for him was that he already knew me. I was safe.”

Able at last to afford a color television, Richard watched all the talk shows and studied the self-promotional efforts of other well-known authors. “He talked with me a lot about his strategizing in terms of interviews and noninterviews,” Loie said. “Richard was very aware of how available Kurt Vonnegut was in every way to the media, and he didn't want to do that. [Brautigan] was very much sought after by a lot of the media, TV and magazines and newspapers and all kinds of others, the amount of letters that would come in, and he took a very hard-core stance. He was giving nothing to nobody. He was going to be sort of a mystery, unavailable.”

Erik Weber's take on the situation differed. Richard “wouldn't go on talk shows,” he said. “I can understand why. He's not spontaneous. To be sitting there and have somebody ask him a question or make a joke. He'd sit there with a stupid grin on his face and not say anything.” Weber believed Brautigan feared a vast talk show audience far removed from the undergraduate hippies buying his books. “It would have taken him into different places. I think Richard was afraid of all those places.”

Brautigan's mysterious inaccessibility not only kept the outside world at arm's length, it served occasionally to give a cold shoulder to old friends closer to home. When Robert Briggs, who represented Ballantine Books on the West Coast, got David Meltzer a contract to do an interview/ anthology with ten Bay Area poets, Meltzer wanted to include Brautigan. By the time
The San Francisco Poets
appeared early in 1971, the cast had dwindled to five: Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, William (Brother Antoninus) Everson, and Lew Welch, along with Richard, who offered six poems he'd published in
Rommel
. Jack Shoemaker signed on to the project to assist Meltzer with the interviewing. Because David “didn't get along with Richard very well,” Richard became Jack's assignment. “It was my job to convince Richard to participate,” Shoemaker recalled, “and to smooth the way for there to be an interview, which Richard didn't like and would never grant.”

This presented a considerable problem. The lengthy interviews constituted the main body of the book. The other four poets talked honestly and often in great depth with Meltzer and Shoemaker. Brautigan balked, refusing the Q&A. Instead, Richard gave them a charming inconsequential essay four paragraphs long, which he called “Old Lady.” Much annoyed, Meltzer refused to include it, insisting on a proper interview. His position was “Richard won't be in this book on those terms.” Brautigan withdrew from the project.

“When Ballantine found out that Richard had pulled up stakes, they put a tremendous amount of pressure on David and on Briggs,” Shoemaker recalled. “They said, ‘You can't lose Brautigan. He's one of the most famous people in the book.' So we had to agree that we would print this little self-interview Richard produced.” David Meltzer “hated it” but did as instructed in order to save
his book. Five years later, when the Wingbow Press reprinted it as
Golden Gate, Interviews with 5 San Francisco Poets
, Meltzer dropped Brautigan and all his poetry.

Busy dealing with the many demands of fame, Richard Brautigan produced little new work during 1970 and 1971. Every mail delivery brought fan letters, requests from editors, and assorted odd inquiries. Richard never answered any of these letters. They all went into files labeled “Unrequited Publishers” and “Pests.”

Brautigan's work continued to appear in major and minor publications throughout 1970. The demand for his material remained high. Helen Brann sold “Homage to the San Francisco YMCA” to
Vogue
for $350. Along with the three pieces in
Mademoiselle
, other work was published in the
Evergreen Review
(nos. 76 and 84), the
Dutton Review
(no. 1),
Rolling Stone
(no. 63)—“ Greyhound Tragedy” became the last of Brautigan's stories published by Jann Wenner, who could no longer afford him—and
Playboy
, who called Richard a “
hip huck finn
,” paying $2,000 for three short tales they collectively dubbed “Little Memoirs.”

Brautigan asked Erik Weber to take his photograph for
Playboy
's “On the Scene” section. In one shot, Richard reclined fully clothed on his new brass bed, legs provocatively spread in a parody of a Playmate's centerfold pose. “The absurd humor of the situation shines from his face,” Keith Abbott wrote. The
Playboy
editors didn't appreciate the joke. They printed another of Erik's pictures in the magazine.

Brautigan was especially pleased when fiction editor Gordon Lish bought “The Lost Chapters of Trout Fishing in America” for the October issue of
Esquire
. In addition to a $1,000 paycheck, the acceptance washed away the residual bad feelings left over from failing to get “The Menu” published in
Esquire
six years earlier.
Esquire
no longer played around with Richard Brautigan. They wanted more of his stuff and said so. After two Standard Oil Company tankers collided in San Francisco Bay off Fort Point late in January 1971, and the resulting oil spill provided a hint of future ecological disaster (“Quite likely every lagoon and marsh in the Bay Area will be sterile forever,” an alarmed Lew Welch wrote Jim Koller about the event), the magazine called and offered Brautigan an assignment. “
Esquire
is interested in us doing a story on the spill,” Richard told Erik Weber on the phone. “Me doing a story and you photographing it.”