Jubilee Hitchhiker (11 page)

“I looked older than I actually was—” Dick described himself at thirteen. “I was tall for my age, so that I could easily be mistaken for fifteen—” Porterfield's rapid growth caused scoliosis, a permanent lateral curvature of the spine. His chest developed asymmetrically and gave his upper back a slight hump, forcing his right shoulder higher than the left. “He could not hold his neck up straight,” Mary Lou remembered dispassionately. “He had therapy and everything.”

Melvin Corbin recalled a skinny kid with a sunken chest, an undernourished genius allowed to go through the cafeteria lunch line again and again because he was poor and his family received some kind of assistance. Their fifth-grade teacher was much impressed with Dick Porterfield's photographic memory. “Whatever he read, he remembered.” Dick's reading consisted mainly of the Reader's Digest Condensed Books his mother kept around the house. Mary Lou said her son could “flash read” any book and, when given the page number, repeat what was printed there. “I checked him out on it, and it was incredible.”

Sixth grade marked a period of ambition and enterprise. Dick and Gary went into the worm business. A lot of kids gathered worms, selling them to filling stations for a penny apiece. The retail price for night crawlers was twenty-five cents per dozen. Dick and Gary figured they could make a profit undercutting the competition by a dime. They searched damp lawns at night with flashlights and stored their catch in a box of dirt down in Gary's cool dark basement. “We'd put a sign out in front of my house because I was on a busier street closer to town,” Gary said. “When somebody would want some, we'd go down and dig them up and put them in takeout boxes like you get at a Chinese restaurant. We sold them for fifteen cents.”

Both Barbara and Sandi remembered their big brother taking them hunting worms at night with a flashlight. They pulled on their rubber boots and went out into the pitch dark around eleven o'clock. Dick taught B.J. to feel in the wet grass of a freshly watered lawn. “When you see a worm you have to be fast,” he said. Night crawlers stretched like Plastic Man over six inches through the grass. “They keep one end in the ground,” Dick instructed. “If you miss, they snap back inside.”

Delivering newspapers became another Horatio Alger enterprise for Dick Porterfield. Melvin Corbin had an
Oregonian
route that went out Chambers Street, down Eighteenth, and up River Road into the hills. He had been assigned a different route and gave the old one to Dick, who was
suddenly in need of a bicycle. Melvin just got a new bike and offered to sell his old one. Dick had never owned a bicycle. During the war, they were almost unobtainable. The price was $25.

Dick made a deal with Melvin to pay him back monthly with the proceeds from the paper route and took immediate possession of a bicycle that “always looked shitty.” Barbara remembered Dick's “old broken-down bicycle.” B.J. never had a bicycle either and was “always taking off” on her brother's. “Seemed like every time he came back to ride it, it had a flat tire. Thanks to me.” Barbara never mentioned the flat. Dick often made the unhappy discovery in the early morning, waking up to patch a tire before delivering newspapers.

Dick Porterfield “was a kid who didn't like to do his chores.” He lived in a household where cooking and heating required wood and “always hated to chop wood.” Dick also disliked working in the big vegetable garden the family depended upon and loathed pushing the hand-powered lawn mower across the vast expanse of surrounding yard.

“He didn't seem to have any ambition as far as physical work went,” Melvin Corbin remembered. Fixing flat bike tires at four in the morning provided a special challenge for a kid utterly unfamiliar with tools. “Richard didn't even know what a screwdriver was,” his mother claimed, “or a vise.” He regarded lightbulbs with trepidation. As an adult, he instructed his teenage daughter never to change a bulb on her own, warning “instant death and dismemberment might result.”

Dick Porterfield abandoned his paper route after nine months but did not give Melvin Corbin back the bicycle. Mary Lou recalled the predawn mornings: “He lost money every month. People would order the paper and then they would move out, you know, deadbeats.” Melvin remembered it differently: “I think he didn't have the guts to go out and collect afterwards. He probably went once and didn't go follow up.”

Eventually, the
Oregonian
route manager made the collection. He asked Melvin Corbin to take Dick Porterfield's route back. Melvin still wasn't getting his monthly bike payment and started going by Dick's place on West Thirteenth, looking for his money. “The house was always clean around it. It was never junky-looking. It was run-down, but never junky.” Even with his sharp eye for real estate, Melvin never spotted Dick. “Each time I went there for the money, he would always seem to disappear.” B.J. fronted for her brother, telling the strange angry boy that Dick wasn't at home. Melvin finally spotted Porterfield one day, pedaling his battered bike down Chambers Street. “So I turned around and went back after him, and he just threw the bike in the ditch and took off.”

Along with Gary Stewart, Dick's other classmates at Lincoln were the Hiebert twins, Donald and Ronald, both prankster outcasts who formed the instant nucleus of any gang. They lived further up Dick's street on the edge of town and spent most of their time, “day and night,” hanging out with Porterfield. Melvin Corbin also sometimes “ran with the twins.” The Hieberts were part of a large family. Richard's mother thought there were ten children. Melvin Corbin remembered seven.

The Hieberts' old man worked in a slaughterhouse. His violent profession carried over into his personal life. Mary Lou described a strict disciplinarian who beat his kids with a length of garden hose. Mrs. Hiebert had shown Dick Porterfield a large pair of scissors she kept hidden under the pillow on her bed. She had said she would kill her husband if he attempted to have sex with her again. Dick had been deeply affected by this domestic melodrama. “Worried him an awful lot,” his mother recalled.

Like Dick Porterfield, the Hiebert twins were wild practical jokers, delighting in playing pranks on everyone. Melvin Corbin remembered Halloween mischief. Eugene had no sewer system yet on the outskirts of town. Dick and the Hieberts tipped over outhouses or moved them back in the night, just far enough so the next customer would “accidentally” step in the hole. Another wild Halloween stunt involved collecting human excrement in newspaper. “They'd all take turns crapping in the paper,” Corbin said. Porterfield and the twins placed the night soil bundles on the front porches of the unsuspecting, lit the newspaper on fire, rang the doorbell, and ran, watching from a safe distance as their victims stomped on the flaming shit.

Richard's mother recalled a more malicious prank: “We had a bunch of pullets in the backyard—they were sick—[we] got out the bolo knife and went out there and killed them all and buried them up there in the ground. So, they dug them up on Halloween.” After disinterring the rotting chickens, Dick Porterfield and the Hieberts smuggled their stinking corpses into the supermarket at Eleventh and Chambers and put them in the freezer.

Like the Porterfields, the Hieberts were a poor family. The kids earned their own way doing odd jobs and picking beans in the fields around Eugene. Only Johnnie, one of the younger brothers, didn't work in the summertime because he had a hernia, ruptured, as they said in those days. Johnnie Hiebert loved to drink Kool-Aid, never imagining his addiction would be immortalized many years later in
Trout Fishing in America
.

Mary Lou remembered making Kool-Aid for Johnnie Hiebert by the pitcherful. “Put it out there on the shelf, you know, with a glass. Everybody was giving him food and stuff. We called him the Kool-Aid Kid.” Neon-colored Kool-Aid reigned supreme as the poor man's soft drink. At a time when a seven-ounce bottle of Coke cost a nickel, a package of Kool-Aid for the same price yielded two quarts. “We drank a lot of Kool-Aid,” Barbara remembered.

Watermelon provided another memorable summertime treat. Although cheap by the pound, watermelons weighed a lot, and poor kids had to save their pennies. “Sometimes we'd go around to the stores.” Gary Stewart smiled at the memory. “Sometimes they'd drop one. They'd come in big trucks and they'd toss them.” Broken watermelons were set outside the back door of the market, and the kids gathered up sweet juicy hunks of scarlet fruit, delighting in the arching trajectory of spit black seeds.

“One time we went and bought a watermelon.” Barbara laughed as she told the story. “I was around eight or nine years old. We walked downtown. It was real hot, one summer day, and this store was selling watermelon for like a penny and a half a pound.” Dick Porterfield picked out a huge one. Twenty-five pounds. He paid for it with his own money. “He says, ‘Okay, we're going to take turns carrying this watermelon back home. I'll carry it a block, and you carry it a block.'”

Barbara was small for her age, and it was a long trudge back to Hayes Street. After about eight blocks, changing off and on with him, Barbara said, “Richard, you've got to help me. I'm going to drop it. My arms won't hold it anymore. And then,
crash!
I dropped it on the grass. Broke into like twenty pieces. And he looked at me, and he said, ‘Well, we'd better sit down and eat it. I don't want it to go to waste.' So, right then and there on someone's lawn, we sat down and ate that watermelon. Ate the whole thing.”

Gary Stewart also cherished juicy watermelon dreams. One summer afternoon, he and Dick Porterfield were hanging out on the U of O campus. They spent a lot of time roaming the open stacks of the college library. Over a million volumes. “The library was sort of our home. We got
full run of the University of Oregon library.” In those days, Thirteenth Street traversed the campus and on that particular afternoon a watermelon dropped off a passing truck just as the two kids happened by. “We went out, and we just ate the heart. Something you've always wanted to do. Just eat the heart.”

In the fall of 1947, Dick Porterfield, Gary Stewart, and the Hiebert twins began their first year of junior high at Woodrow Wilson school on Jefferson Street. In a bizarre life coincidence seemingly lifted from the pages of Brautigan's fiction, among their classmates in the seventh grade were two other sets of identical twins. The edge-of-town boys soon became fast friends with Charles and Arthur Wical and with Jerry and John Wicks, each pair mirror-image bookends. They all shared a passion for basketball. Dick Porterfield played center for Wilson Junior High during his first year. This didn't last long. By the time they reached high school none of them tried out for the team for fear of spending most of the season warming the bench.

The Hiebert twins were Baptists and attended a church on Ninth and Broadway that had a gym. They'd all go there after school to shoot some hoops. “We'd slip in the back door,” Gary Stewart recalled. Art Wical remembered the ceilings in the downstairs gym at First Baptist were less than ten feet high. “It was a shortened court, and we used to have to shoot shorter shots, and we'd try to learn how to slam the ball there because the basket was smaller.”

Being tallest, Dick Porterfield played center. The other four starting players were the Hieberts and the Wical brothers. The impromptu clandestine games evolved into an official church team. First Baptist played against Eugene's other denominations in a league organized by the YMCA. The same group of kids also played noon intramural ball at the Wilson school playground. Don Hiebert dubbed this gang of look-alikes the “Vagrant Varlets.” They all got in on the gag, taunting their opponents with mock Old English insults in the heat of the action. “Fie on you,” they'd shout, whenever a point was scored against them. “A pox on your head; you fouled me!” It drove the other teams crazy. “A pox on you all!”

Along with their pithy archaic epithets, the Varlets had a talent for ball handling. They won the league championship and went on to the regional YMCA finals in Walla Walla, Washington. Here, luck ran out and they got their asses kicked. Not even extravagant extemporaneous wit saved the day.

Nominally a Catholic, young Dick began attending the First Baptist Church about the same time he started sneaking into their basement gym. During his first year at Woodrow Wilson, he received a signed certificate for his attendance at the Junior High Week Day Church School. In grade school, Dick attended Bible class for an hour each day. He took his Bible to bed with him every night until he was twenty, but Dick Porterfield's affiliation with any organized religion was short-lived.

The family never prayed or went to church together. “We never did anything together as a family, let alone pray,” Barbara said. Gary Stewart remembered his friend as “sort of a teenage philosopher.” Peter Webster, another friend from those years who played for the First Christian Church basketball team against the Varlets, recalled that “Dick claimed to be an atheist. We had long discussions about God, church, and religion. But they consisted mostly of Dick talking and my listening.”

Don Hiebert stated that Brautigan seemed “angry” at those whose religious feelings did not coincide with his own. Whatever his spiritual beliefs, Dick Porterfield soon stopped going to church
altogether. “He believed in God and in the Bible but he didn't like preachers,” Mary Lou commented. “‘Because, Mother,' he says, ‘It's all graft. You have to donate 20 percent of your income to the preacher.' He said all the preachers in Eugene are millionaires.”

Dick Porterfield's true religion was going to the movies, worshipping at the altar of the silver screen. In the period after World War II, there were six movie theaters in Eugene. The McDonald and the Heilig (“holy” in German) featured first-run shows. Boasting plush seats and gilded ornamentation, the Heilig Theater was the finest building in town when it opened in 1903 (as the Eugene), hosting touring vaudeville companies before converting to motion picture use in 1926.