Jubilee Hitchhiker (30 page)

The stairs, landscaped on either side by banks of fuchsia, ivy, lilies, and roses, intersected private paths and country lanes where bohemians once lived among flocks of feral parrots after the'06 quake, building shacks of salvaged lumber in sloping pastures thick with nasturtium, wild mustard, and dog fennel. Dick and Ron soon encountered someone they both knew, a two-hundred-pound brawler called “Big T,” coming down the steps with a bunch of his friends. Big T had just backhanded a junkie across the face for “acting like an asshole.” The junkie's girlfriend fainted, and it was time to leave the festivities. “Where's the party,” Dick wanted to know.

“There.” Big T pointed to a house by the stair-turning, every window ablaze with light. “He didn't sound too happy,” Brautigan observed.

Dick and Ron “swirled through the party like water through the cooling systems of a car.” Tatami mats from Chinatown covered the crooked floors. The place resonated with the discordant vibes of the recent Big T incident. The two young poets were both quickly drunk.

According to Brautigan, Loewinsohn “was on a big Rimbaud kick. He was writing his season in hell and sleeping in the back seats of strange cars.” Ginny's apartment had a fabulous view overlooking the Bay. In the nineteenth century, quarries gouged away the eastern side of Telegraph Hill, leaving blasted cliffs in exchange for landfill and ballast. The old wooden building looked down a hundred feet through vines and bushes and treetops to the rusting factories and abandoned brick warehouses clustered among unused train tracks in a “bleak industrial neighborhood” below. Ron climbed out through a window and sat on the roof to enjoy the view, “saying weird things at the stars.” The Rimbaud thing shifted into high gear. Dick wandered off looking for a girl to kiss, “and that's how I met my wife, as they say in Rome.”

Ginny remembered being struck by Richard's personality. She found him “very naive,” an attractive attribute in the world of North Beach cool. She took the tall shy blond boy by the hand, led him to her room, and discovered a total innocent. Ginny had never guessed he was still a virgin. The two became a couple right from the start. Les Rosenthal bowed out gracefully. “They were just absolutely starry-eyed,” Ron Loewinsohn recalled. “They were really in love, and it was delightful. They were a delightful couple to be around.” Ginny called him Richard, at a time when he was still “Dick” to most of his friends. She had a brother named Richard, so it seemed natural.

Richard had recently vacated the Hotel Jessie and was living in the apartment of a young single mother in exchange for babysitting services. They spoke to each other in a “secret Venusian language” of their own improvised invention. Richard moved in with Ginny after she broke things off with Les. In keeping with the relaxed attitude of the time, all three remained fast friends. Richard quickly became familiar with the wooden steps outside, walking to buy milk and bread at the corner market over on Union and Montgomery. Ginny noticed he could not pass his reflection in a mirror or shop window without looking at himself. She thought Richard wanted reassurance that he was really there.

On his next visit to the apartment after Richard moved in with Ginny, Ron Loewinsohn saw that she had “set up a kind of shrine” to the new poet in her life. Ginny placed a photograph of Richard along with handwritten copies of his poems mounted on cardboard display stands on an orange crate in the company of several “small candles and terra-cotta Buddhas.”

During this period, Brautigan continued reading his poetry regularly at The Place. Carol Lind, an artist from Minnesota who lived downstairs from Ginny, painted a large canvas featuring all the regulars that she titled
Which Poet?
Richard was featured prominently in the painting, distinguishable by his long blond bangs. He took a liking to the picture and brought it over to The Place, where he hung it on the back wall directly behind him when he read.

Brautigan was reading a lot of William Saroyan when he first met Virginia Alder. Saroyan's deft early stories spun the straw of life's commonplace moments into magical gold, creating a distinctly personal world in an easy offhand manner. Richard recognized familiar territory. Lean. Minimal. The wise comic voice. Ginny remembered his fondness for Saroyan and others. “He loved Jack London, and he loved Hemingway, and he loved e. e. cummings in the same way. Eudora Welty. But if you asked him if Hemingway was an influence, he would have said no. He said that ‘all poetry simply goes into the air and then you breathe.'”

Richard Brautigan felt inclined toward poets who practiced a sinuous stripped-down art. Sappho and Bashō were particular favorites. Robert Briggs, a fellow writer who first met Richard in North Beach in 1957, remembered Brautigan's high regard for the work of Kenneth Patchen and their discussions of Patchen's famous poem “The Lute in the Attic.” According to Virginia, Patchen's poetry “was one of the first things we talked about.”

Brautigan also admired the Patchen novel
The Journal of Albion Moonlight
, a book whose evanescent charms presaged many of the attributes of his own later work. Briggs recalled Richard's deep concern about Patchen's health. The older poet suffered from a degenerative spinal disease and endured continuous pain. He needed a cane to get around in North Beach and had recently moved to Sierra Court, a dead-end street just off the freeway in Palo Alto, where he was confined to the house under the care of his wife, Miriam.

Always eager for literary conversation, Brautigan never talked about his past. For entertainment, he and Ginny hung out at The Place and other joints along upper Grant. One Sunday afternoon, while visiting Mike Nathan's new storefront studio in North Beach, they encountered a hefty mustachioed painter who took classes with Mike at the Art Institute. Born in Salinas and a veteran of the Korean War, Kenn Davis was the brother of Zekial Marko. Nathan had invited him to have a look at his newfound space, having promised to “break open a bottle of red and celebrate.” Davis enjoyed Nathan's company because they both “had the same kind of goofy sense of humor.”

Humor later provided a close connection to Richard Brautigan, but when Kenn first encountered “this tall blond guy,” Dick “seemed a little off-put by the fact that I was even there.”

Mike Nathan quickly made the introductions, calling Brautigan “a wonderful poet.” The young painter sounded enthusiastic. “You've got to read his stuff,” he insisted. As they shook hands, Davis's name “struck a bell,” and Richard turned to Ginny, saying, “Remember that guy? The painting we saw at the Artist's Cooperative last week and I said I really liked it? It had some nice magical provocative kind of qualities.” Ginny remembered, and because Mike Nathan had things to do, the three new friends left the gallery together. Kenn Davis, a self-described “sucker for flattery,” responded to their enthusiasm for his work. They ended up spending the remainder of the day “just talking—sitting on park benches and stuff.”

This first meeting took place a couple months after Kenn's twenty-fifth birthday. “I remember we got into a bit of comic interlude about people who are pushing thirty,” Davis said. “Anybody past twenty-five as far as [Brautigan] was concerned was pushing thirty, and that was me.” Kenn recollected that not too long after he met Richard, Mike Nathan's “brains got scrambled. The state got their hands on him and sent him off to some sanitarium and gave him shock treatments for about three months. My God, I could barely even talk to him. Mike could have turned out to be one hell of a painter. But after he came out of the hospital, I'd see him on the street and he'd be talking to himself and moving his hands around in the air like he's touching angels.” Davis knew nothing at the time about Brautigan's similar ordeal but remembered that “Richard was much more sympathetic with Mike about this.”

Dick and Ginny frequently went to the cheap rerun movies at the Times Theater with a group of friends. Along with Ron Loewinsohn and Les Rosenthal, this diverse gang also included Kenn Davis and another artist, Frank Curtin, whose father was an editor at the
Call-Bulletin
. The films they enjoyed were mostly B-movie trash. Frank Curtin and Richard soon became regular drinking buddies, vodka being Curtin's beverage of choice, while Brautigan favored sweet red port at a
dime a glass or cheap Cribari jug wine. Ron Loewinsohn remained much impressed with Richard's capacity as a drinker. “He was incredibly able to hold his liquor,” he recalled. “He really was astonishing.”

A printed form letter, dated April 10, 1957, arrived from Inferno Press soliciting contributions for
Five New Poets
, a softcover collection in preparation and scheduled for release before Christmas. Leslie Woolf Hedley asked for “at least” twelve published or unpublished poems, a brief biography, and a stamped self-addressed envelope. Payment for acceptance would be ten copies of the book. Hedley himself did no editing on this book. Someone else involved with the press suggested the idea, and Hedley said, “Okay. You pick out your own.” Dick Brautigan brought a dozen poems to the Inferno Press office.

At the same time, Richard entertained his own publishing notions. One of his poems, “The Return of the Rivers,” struck him as worthy of appearing om its own as a broadside. Leslie Woolf Hedley agreed to print a hundred copies at no charge as a favor to the young poet. Inferno Press expected no percentage of any eventual sales. Hedley just wanted to give “orphan” Dick a helping hand.

Sometime in May, Richard picked up the finished sheets of
The Return of the Rivers
and bought a pack of black construction paper. With Ron Loewinsohn joining in, they sat in Ginny's living room folding and gluing the folio pages into improvised black covers. They pasted white two-by-three-inch labels onto the center of the front covers. Richard signed his name in ink above the printed colophon of Inferno Press, a final step in the production of his first “book.” Ron thought his new friend “a pretty enterprising young man, always on the lookout to publish, occasions to read, even though he always wanted to make an appearance of being above that.”

Many copies of
The Return of the Rivers
were given away to friends. Richard peddled a few in North Beach bars for a buck a copy. The rest went to City Lights and other “obscure” local bookstores. Kenn Davis held a day job at an insurance company and was the only one in the group with a car. He transported copies to Berkeley bookstores in his old Chevy. Ginny remembered “a big argument” over how much to charge. The profits were quickly spent on wine and a couple cheap Chinatown dinners. A surviving copy of
The Return of the Rivers
sold recently on the rare book market for $7,500.

In June, Richard proposed. “Why don't we go to Reno and get married?” he asked in a matter-of-fact way. Ginny agreed. For a wedding present, she gave him a used pink electric Royal typewriter. They rode a bus together to Nevada to tie the knot. Methodist minister Rev. Stephen C. Thomas pronounced them man and wife on Saturday, June 8, with Ace W. Williams (a stranger, who just happened to be in the wedding chapel) and Agnes Thomas, the minister's wife, standing up as witnesses.

After returning from a brief Reno honeymoon, Richard and Ginny moved into a two-room attic apartment with a shared kitchen at 1565 Washington Street, above Chinatown on the slope of Nob Hill right on the corner across from the cable car barn. There was a small struggling theater downstairs, no more than ten or twenty seats. Performances competed with the continuous grinding noise of the cable under the street outside. Late at night, when the Powell–Mason Line shut down for a few hours, Richard and Ginny were startled awake by the sudden silence.

The newlyweds were quite happy in their new apartment, in spite of various inconveniences. The bathroom was off the hall. When it rained, the roof leaked by the door. Love always helps in
such circumstances. Ron Loewinsohn remembered how Ginny and Dick “just fell madly in love.” He also observed that Ginny was “madly in love with [Brautigan's] work,” an asset for an aspiring young writer. Ginny typed his manuscripts, edited his copy, organized his business affairs, encouraged him to keep in touch with editors and publishers. She also paid the rent.

Wanting to do his share, Brautigan came up with an amusing contribution to the family's monthly expense needs. He organized a rent party. Such affairs had been commonplace in New York's Harlem and Greenwich Village during the twenties, when a hot piano player and a bathtub full of rotgut booze provided the come-on. Richard had no live entertainment to offer and invented an ingenious promotional device. He posted handbills all over North Beach advertising the event as a fund-raiser to buy the host a gorilla suit.

Kenn Davis remembered Brautigan's rent party on Washington Street with much amusement. “And we actually had total strangers. Total strangers! Like tourists wandered in and said, ‘Where's the guy that wants to buy the gorilla suit?' And here are these guys from like Tuscaloosa or Tampa or San Jose. And Dick was, ‘Well, I've always wanted to wear a gorilla suit. Don't you think I'd look great in a gorilla suit?'”

Richard Brautigan wasn't unemployed yet, but his paycheck remained marginal at best. In mid-July he made another trip to the Irwin Memorial Blood Bank. He had quit work as a bike messenger and had a new part-time job “folding pieces of green paper” at an office on Clay Street, down from the Federal Reserve Bank. Brautigan described this experience in Part 3 of “A Couple Novels,” an unpublished story from the sixties that survives only in fragments. He had no idea what the green paper was for or why he was folding it. “Nobody ever told me and I never asked.”

Part-time employment allowed ample time for writing and provided the luxury of leisure. Richard Brautigan loved to wander the city and people-watch. “He did a lot of hanging out,” Ron Loewinsohn said. “He walked a great deal, all around the Financial District, Chinatown, North Beach, that whole area in San Francisco. I don't know that he ever took notes so much, but certainly he was taking mental notes. He would hang out in bookstores, not just City Lights, but any bookstore. He would hang out in parks, sit on a park bench and watch people go along.”