Jubilee Hitchhiker (59 page)

Richard and Janice spent frequent evenings over at the Webers' apartment on Geary, getting high and shooting darts. Often, they played all night. “We had a real English dart board,” Erik recalled. Brautigan “was really good. I don't think I ever beat him. He was tall and long, and he could kind of reach out and just set the dart in.” Pot smoking was a novelty for all of them. One evening, they “got stoned and for something to do we went to Sears, which was across the street.”

The happy trio roamed the aisles of the Sears, Roebuck depot on Geary, gawking at the mountainous excess of American consumerism. Attracted by the jewel-like glitter of a button display, Erik and Janice worked their way back to the fabric department, where buttons of all sizes, shapes, and colors were housed in a cabinet crowded with tiny drawers. They began rummaging through them, stoned treasure-hunters marveling over the enchanted baubles. “Janice and I had these buttons all over the place, and Richard's standing up, just frozen and afraid,” Erik remembered. “He got very upset that we were acting like this, and he was sure that we were going to get caught, sure that something was going to happen to us.” In the end, Brautigan's paranoia got the best of them and they fled the store before being spotted.

Richard's fears were justified. Back in April, armed with a search warrant, eighteen officers from the sheriff's department crossed the narrow footbridge over La Honda creek onto Ken Kesey's property and busted the famous author for possession of marijuana, a felony beef that made all the papers and provided a lively topic of conversation among the literary community. Everyone buzzed about whether Kesey was jailhouse bound.

Financing his bohemian life by writing fiction remained a precarious proposition for Brautigan. Along with the tales of Moonshine Bess he hoped to shape into a new novel, Richard worked on other short stories while still trying to place portions of his first three books with periodicals. On the same day, early in June, he wrote three letters to magazines. He requested that
Ramparts
and the
Partisan Review
return his novels if they didn't plan on publishing selections from them and asked Charles Newman if he would be interested in considering some of his recent work for
TriQuarterly
.

For a loner, Richard maintained a wide circle of friends. After putting in his hours at the typewriter, he embarked on an active social life, always open to the possibility of meeting new and interesting people. A recent friend from this period was actor/poet Jack Thibeau, who had worked as a merchant seaman following a stint in the Marines. Three days after getting off a ship in Frisco, Thibeau walked into a rehearsal for Frank Wedekind's
Pandora's Box
(he knew the woman playing Lulu) and promptly landed the part of Jack the Ripper. At the time, Jack lived in a cheap hotel behind the opera house. With the Civic Center as his backyard, Thibeau began spending time at the main library. One afternoon, he met an attractive librarian named Ann Kincaid. They struck up a conversation, and she invited Jack to lunch. “We started hanging around together, and she took me down to Gino & Carlo's and introduced me to Jack Boyce.” It wasn't long before he met Jack Spicer there.

Thibeau remembered Gino & Carlo's as “sort of a salon every Friday night of poets and musicians and painters and longshoremen.” Jack Spicer held court over round after round of drinks.
One Friday night, he introduced Thibeau to Richard Brautigan. Around that time, Thibeau needed to find better digs than his $5-a-week hotel, and Jack Boyce brought him back to a big Victorian house on Lyon Street where he lived with Joanne Kyger. The place served as an informal commune and housed a number of transient refugees from Black Mountain. The rent was $125 a month, not a very large sum when shared by all the residents. At one time or another, these included Kyger and Boyce, Lew Welch, Bill McNeill (a Black Mountain painter), and a young artist/filmmaker named Ken Botto, who lived in the garret and used the two front rooms downstairs as his painting studio.

Christopher Maclaine made his last film in 1959, but all over Frisco local artists were shooting in Super 8. The brotherhood of the lens included Larry Jordan, Stan Brakhage, James Broughton, and Bruce Conner. Ken Botto decided to make an autobiographical movie and recruited Jack Thibeau to play the lead. Janice Meissner was cast as his girlfriend. Richard Brautigan had a walk-on as a guy who delivers some fried chicken. Botto shot Thibeau riding a motorcycle borrowed from Gary Snyder. When Jack got into a wreck, Botto kept right on filming in his hospital room. The film (working title, “Rolling Stone”) was never finished. A half hour of partly edited footage burned in a fire in 1967, when Botto was off in Europe. Richard Brautigan's film debut went up in smoke.

Brautigan's other near-appearance in a North Beach motion picture came in 1968, when he had a brief part in James Broughton's
The Bed
, an art project much discussed within the bohemian community. Broughton's film showed numbers of (mostly naked) local personalities, one after the other, sitting or lying on the same bed. Brautigan was among those filmed on the bed. “Richard was thrilled about it,” Michael McClure wrote. “He was genuinely excited to be recognized as an art-celebrity by a world-known filmmaker like Broughton.” Richard Brautigan ended on the cutting room floor, an omission he complained about bitterly to his friends. “For a long time Richard went around with damp eyes, lashing his tail,” McClure observed.

Charles Newman finally got back to Brautigan early in July, asking to see his recent work. Richard sent five short stories (including “Revenge of the Lawn”) off to
TriQuarterly
four days later. Brautigan's only recent publication had been in the second issue of
Now Now
(a small San Francisco magazine edited by writer Charles Plymell), which ran “Banners of My Own Choosing,” a short prose piece written the year before.

Wild Dog 18
, a mimeographed magazine published at 39 Downey Street (down the block from Mike McClure's place), appeared for sale in July. Joanne Kyger and Ed Dorn were among the editors. Along with work by Dorn, Kyger, Gilbert Sorrentino, Harold Dull, Lewis Warsh, and Ron Loewinsohn, two new poems (never reprinted) by Richard Brautigan appeared on page 19. “The Busses” and “Period Piece” (a charming bit of magical nostalgia involving an unemployed dragon cutter: “and I remember great green chunks of dragon / sliced and stacked in the ice wagons”) accompanied “At Sea,” Brautigan's amusing “review” of
Ghost Tantras
, Michael McClure's new book of poetry.

Michael McClure wrote that Brautigan's notice of
Ghost Tantras
in
Wild Dog
“was one of the few reviews that book ever had [. . .] Richard really knocked himself out to please people he liked or loved [. . .] [He] believed in my work the way I believed in his.” Always generous with friends and fellow artists, Brautigan had written in April to Donald Hutter, his editorial connection at Scribner's, recommending
The Mad Club
, Michael McClure's newly completed novel.

While Richard Brautigan's star ascended, life became an ever-accelerating downhill slide for Jack Spicer. Recent poems were rejected by
The Nation
and
Poetry
, evoking more amusement than regret from Jack. His drinking increased, and he seemed to subsist on a single peanut butter sandwich (washed down with brandy and milk) each day. Fran Herndon noted the shabbiness of his clothing, observing “a pretty rapid decline [. . .] In the end, in his drunken state [. . .] he was so drunk he could barely lift the bottle [. . .] Jack would just not stop drinking.” Lewis Warsh, back for the Berkeley Poetry Conference that summer, recalled seeing Spicer at Aquatic Park one afternoon, “and he couldn't get up. He put his hand on my shoulder and pulled himself up.”

The Berkeley Conference was the big poetry game in town all throughout July. Dozens of readings and lectures had been scheduled at the University of California. The list of the invited included Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, Gary Snyder, and Jack Spicer. When Leroi Jones had to cancel, Ed Dorn was enlisted as a replacement. Spicer gave a talk called “Poetry and Politics” and later read
The Holy Grail
, his book from the year before.

Aside from these two appearances, Spicer mostly boycotted the conference, hanging out at Gino & Carlo's across the Bay, waiting for his acolytes to bring all the gossip and tales of poetic in-fighting. The notion of fame both intrigued and repulsed Jack Spicer. His final poems dealt with being caught between the siren song of celebrity and the honest dignity of anonymous toil. In one of his lectures, Spicer said, “I don't think that messages are for the poet any more than the radio program is for the radio set. And I think that the radio set doesn't really worry about whether anyone's listening to it or not, and neither does the poet.” According to Graham Mackintosh, “Jack was amused by chance.”

That summer, Spicer's closest friends all sensed his health was seriously declining. Robin Blaser observed, “It was a very quick downhill path.” Jack Thibeau recalled stopping by Aquatic Park around one o'clock on a sunny afternoon in the last week of July and finding that Spicer had not shown up for his regular outdoor salon. Nemi Frost came by with a “bagful of aspirins and all kinds of store-bought painkillers.” Nemi tossed the bag down on the grass and said, “If anyone sees Jack, give him this stuff.”

Thibeau lived just around the corner from Spicer's one-room apartment on Polk Street and volunteered to deliver the bag. “I went up and banged on his door about five in the afternoon. The room was matted with wet dried newspapers all over the floor. It was like a collage, the entire room. And it was just the bed in there and nothing else. And he was laid out on this bed. I said, ‘Nemi asked me to bring this by for you.'

“He says, ‘I'm dying.'

“I said, ‘Oh, okay.'” Thibeau also brought Spicer a little taste. “A pint of brandy, which was his favorite drink. I left that and the aspirin. He was so ill he couldn't even talk. And so I left and he said, ‘I'll see you at the bar tonight.' Which meant Gino's. And I didn't go down to the bar.” A couple days later, Jack Thibeau heard the bad news.

Drunk at the end of a long hot afternoon at Aquatic Park (July 31, 1965), Jack Spicer staggered home munching a chicken sandwich dinner. He collapsed in the elevator of his building and lay there for hours, befouled by shit and vomit, his half-eaten sandwich still clutched in his hand. A fellow tenant discovered the sodden body, and the landlady phoned for help. Spicer had no identification in his shabby suit, and the ambulance crew, thinking him just another nameless drunken bum, hauled the poet off to the poverty ward of San Francisco General Hospital in the Mission District.

Spicer lay in a coma for days. When he didn't show up at his usual table at Gino & Carlo's, his friends started wondering, “Where's Jack?” Robin Blaser began searching in earnest and determined that the unknown man lying unconscious over at General was his old friend. The diagnosis was not good. Spicer had pneumonia, jaundice, critical hepatitis, and intestinal bleeding. Blaser hurried across town. After a furious argument with the young doctor in charge, he succeeded in having Spicer moved to a nicer room.

Jack Spicer lingered for three weeks, lapsing in and out of consciousness. During that period numerous friends came to visit. The Gino & Carlo's crowd all stopped by, as did the Herndons and the Tallmans. Robin Blaser was there almost every day. Spicer was often unable to speak. Paul Alexander recalled “he looked radiant—when he would recognize a visitor his smile glowed.” Jack Thibeau passed by Spicer's bedside and introduced himself. Spicer's “lips moved, and he was sort of in a coma, and he said, ‘Real people . . .'”

Nemi Frost was another he recognized, and he asked her for the all the latest “glossip,” struggling to pronounce “gossip.” Joanne Kyger remembered Spicer's splinted arm, bristling with tubes, rising up reflexively. She feared he was about to hit her. Get-well cards and flowers crowded the nightstand. The nurses posted Herb Caen's column wishing the stricken poet well up where he might see it had he the strength to look. Everyone understood that Jack was dying.

All through the beginning of August, the waiting room remained crowded with visiting poets and writers. Larry Kearney was there twice a week. Finding it “too painful,” Graham Mackintosh showed up only once, as did Robert Duncan. “Duncan came to the door of the hospital common room, but didn't come in,” Robin Blaser remembered. “He was not good at handling the illness of others.” Stan Persky, Deneen Peckinpah (novelist niece of film director Sam Peckinpah), Bill Brodecky, and Kate Mulholland (Spicer's only serious heterosexual partner) all paid their respects at one time or another.

No one remembered seeing Richard Brautigan at the hospital. He had already said goodbye to Jack Spicer the previous summer. Toward the end, Spicer's attempts at speech grew increasingly garbled. “He was desperately trying to speak what had happened,” Robin Blaser recalled. “It was that the extreme of the alcoholic condition separated his mind from his vocal cords.” Making an enormous effort, crapping in his hospital diaper from the struggle, Jack Spicer spoke his final discernible words to Blaser. “My vocabulary did this to me,” he whispered. “Your love will let you go on.”

Spicer died at 3:00 AM on August 17, 1965. He was forty years old. Two days later, the poet and printer Andrew Hoyem dropped by Richard and Janice's apartment on California Street and read Brautigan's short story “Revenge of the Lawn,” which Richard still called the first chapter in his “novel about his grandmother.”
TriQuarterly
had accepted it for publication, along with a story called “A Short History of Religion in California” (about meeting a group of Christians while on a camping trip with his three-and-a-half-year-old daughter). The two poets talked about the death of Jack Spicer, agreeing that his friends “were quite resigned to his fate.”