Jubilee Hitchhiker (69 page)

Pete Knell, Frisco chapter president, was pleasantly surprised when the money was handed over. Emmett Grogan observed, “The people had never stood up for the Hells Angels before.” Knell shouted his thanks to the crowd and headed downtown to post bond, accompanied by his ragtag brotherhood and many of the marchers. Chocolate George was released that night. Because of his parole status, Hairy Henry was detained in the city prison without bail until his case was heard weeks later.

In the second week of December, Brautigan heard from Bob Mills in New York. The agent had read
The Abortion
and liked it “very much indeed.” He agreed to represent the book and
proposed sending it on to Dan Wickenden, Don Carpenter's editor at Harcourt, Brace. Richard was very pleased to have this news. Another pleasurable moment in December came with the publication of the second edition of
The Galilee Hitch-hiker
, out of print for eight years. Described as “an or book published by David Sandberg,” the slim volume was actually the work of Clifford Burke, called “one of the finest, and arguably the most influential, Bay Area printers of the '60s.” Burke ran his Cranium Press out of a garage at 642 Shrader Street in the outer Fillmore. He set Brautigan's nine-part poem in letterpress and printed it as a folio on fine watermarked paper.

The red cover reproduced the Kenn Davis illustration from the first edition. All in all, the book was a simple affair, the signatures stitched together by hand. It sold for seventy-five cents a copy. Sixteen copies were numbered and signed by Brautigan in blue pencil on the verso of the title page, accompanied by his primitive drawing of a fish. A number of unbound sheets were left over after the book's production, and Brautigan gave these away on the streets of San Francisco.

David Sandberg's mimeo-magazine,
O'er #2
, also made its appearance in December of 1966. It was printed on pages of different-colored construction paper and contained three of Richard Brautigan's poems. The one worrying about his nose growing older expressed a genuine concern. When an editor from
TriQuarterly
wrote asking for his help on a projected issue featuring writers and artists under the age of thirty, Richard wistfully replied, “Gee, it's kind of sad to realize that I ain't under 30 any more.” He supplied the names of several friends: Ron Loewinsohn (twenty-nine), Erik Weber (twenty-six), Keith Abbott (twenty-two), Steve Carey (twenty-one), and Jeffrey Sheppard, a seventeen-year-old poet to whom Brautigan had recently dedicated “Hey! This Is What It's All About,” a bitterly ironic poem about his lack of fame, fortune, and a love life.

Four days before Christmas, Richard Brautigan gave two poetry readings (at 9:00 PM and 11:00 PM) at the Coffee Gallery in North Beach. There was no admission charge. William “Tumbleweed” Fritsch, Allen Dienstag, and Andrew Hoyem also shared the bill. Brautigan and Hoyem had both been invited to be poets-in-residence at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena for part of the coming month.

The invitation came by way of John F. Crawford, an instructor in the English department, who was collaborating with Hoyem on a new translation of the Middle English poem
Pearl
, which Grabhorn-Hoyem planned to publish as a limited edition in 1967. With this recognition and the planned publication of two novels, the fast-approaching New Year should have shone bright with promise. On Christmas Day, Richard Brautigan wrote, “I am desolate in dimension / circling the sky / like a rainy bird, / wet from toe to crown / wet from bill to wing.”

The Diggers supplied enough turkeys to feed five hundred people at the Hamilton Methodist Church on Christmas Eve. This produced the first mention of the Diggers in the establishment press. Ralph Gleason advertised the event (“Christmas Eve for Hippies”) in his
Chronicle
column. Perhaps this was unwanted publicity. On December 27, city building inspectors cited the garage on Page Street for two violations of the Health and Safety Code. The Diggers quickly stripped the place, and the next day the officials broke the huge Frame of Reference apart and used the lumber to board up the free store.

twenty-six: rx: dr. leary

“
T
UNE IN! TURN on! Drop out!” By 1966, Timothy Leary's slacker slogan had resonated out of Harvard Square, sending psychedelic shock waves across American campuses as it amplified into a national mantra for disenchanted youth. Media hype elevated the former professor from discredited crackpot to pop guru. In December of 1966, Leary paid a visit to San Francisco. He was on the road with
Death of the Mind
, his LSD-influenced stage adaptation of Hermann Hesse's
Steppenwolf
. Around this same time, Dr. Leary encountered Richard Brautigan at a social gathering in Berkeley.

Brautigan had no interest in LSD and had never dropped acid. “I figure I'm crazy enough,” he said. “I don't need to test it.” His conspicuous involvement with the Diggers made him an honorary counterculture celebrity and allowed entrée to the inner sanctum of a world where Tim Leary reigned as one of the principal proselytizing prophets. Always a curious bystander, Richard possessed a keen interest in observing the charismatic few who marched at the head of the parade. Drawn into Leary's orbit, Brautigan fell under the spell of the eternal missionary.

One afternoon the following week, Richard and Price Dunn shared a bottle of red wine at the Geary Street apartment. Slyly and without comment, Brautigan “pulls out this little pouch and pulls out these papers.”

“I'll be Goddamned,” Price Dunn said. “What in hell are you doing?” He had not seen Richard with marijuana since the time he turned him on in Big Sur a decade earlier.

“I met Tim Leary,” Brautigan replied, adroitly dramatizing the moment, “and he gave it to me.”

Price looked on in amazement. “Richard is rolling a joint,” he recalled, “and I couldn't believe this, and I said, ‘God, a disciple of the guru.'”

Richard Brautigan fired up the reefer, doing his best not to cough. He passed the joint to Price, telling him how he planned to see Timothy Leary again soon. Price roared with laughter. Another convert. “You son of a bitch,” he said. “I can't believe this.”

At the same time, word went out on the street that the heat was on. The police were arresting people for pot possession. Brautigan's paranoia got the best of him. He feared his public involvement with the Haight-Ashbury scene might point a finger his way. He didn't want any dope lying around his apartment, so he went next door to visit Erik Weber. “He came downstairs with his stash,” Erik recalled, “and told me he wanted me to hide it because he was afraid that the cops were going to bust him.” A few days later, Richard retrieved his celebrity contraband.

Price Dunn recollected his friend's temporary conversion. “We went down on the North Beach and went to a few places, and Richard had that little pouch, and that lasted about a week, and then finally one day he walked in and pulled it out, and I started laughing, and he says, ‘Oh, shit.'”
Richard joined his friend's laughter, tossing down what was left of Tim Leary's lid onto the kitchen table. “That's more like it,” Price shouted. “What are you pretending?”

“You're right,” Richard said. “Whiskey is my drink.” As a reaffirmation, he poured himself a big glass of Laphroaig, the smoky single malt from the Isle of Skye. The bottle had been a gift from Price. Brautigan savored a potent swallow. It was his farewell to pot. He never smoked the stuff again.

twenty-seven: banzai

T
HE NAMBU 6.5 mm light machine gun weighed twenty pounds and in working condition fired 550 rounds per minute. It was Japan's main light weapon for use in jungle warfare and had a distinctive look with a steel bipod supporting the long thin ribbed barrel and a knurled wooden grip (dainty as the handle of a teakettle) mounted in front of the up-curving thirty-round magazine. The grip, curiously old-fashioned in appearance, allowed the Japanese soldier to pick up the Nambu like a suitcase. It was handy under fire when it came time to hustle, and the weapon smoldered in the hell-furnace of combat. A suitcase looks as incongruous on the battlefield as a machine gun does in a living room. Precisely why Richard Brautigan chose the Nambu as his interior decorating centerpiece. It took a visitor by surprise, like one of his metaphors.

This particular piece of war surplus first turned up sometime in 1967 in the basement of an old industrial building south of Market. Kendrick Rand came with his friend Alvin Duskin, who was looking for a space to locate his garment business. The building had been vacant for years. They poked around, checking things out. Duskin had an option to lease the place. Down in the basement, they found the Japanese machine gun just “sitting there” in the middle of “a whole bunch of stuff” like some prehistoric creature crouching alone in the darkness. “So strange,” Kendrick Rand remembered.

The antique weapon had languished in the cellar for a long, long time. Rendered inoperable by molten lead poured down the barrel, the valiant old Nambu had become just another bit of abandoned rusting junk. Nobody wanted it. A pacifist at heart, Alvin Duskin expressed little interest in the machine gun but, sensing his friend's excitement, said: “Why don't you take it?” Kendrick picked it up by the curious handle and carried the disabled machine gun away.

What happened to the Nambu next remains uncertain. Kendrick never brought it home. His son, Christopher, was “enamored with such things” but had no memory of ever seeing it back then. Rand probably hauled the gun over to the Minimum Daily Requirement, his place in North Beach. From there, it disappeared into the Frisco poetry scene for a couple of months. Ginsberg was said to have owned the Nambu for a time. Also Lew Welch. Michael McClure denied the rumor that he had once possessed the machine gun. Eventually, it turned up in the hands of Richard Brautigan, who placed it dead center in his front room and painted the outline of a fish on the floor around it.

The Nambu sat there gathering dust and comments for another year or so. It provided ample opportunity for Brautigan to repeat his story of how he learned to read as a small child when he spotted a newspaper headline announcing the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The machine gun also illustrated Richard's theory of why the Japanese lost World War II. Because the Nambu's barrel tended to heat up and warp after a couple thousand rapid rounds had been shot through it, the design
allowed for it to be removed and replaced. With the handle welded to the barrel, only six or so fitted into a box one man could carry. The machine guns used by American and Australian troops had removable screw-on handles, allowing twenty barrels to be packed into each wooden crate, giving the Allies a tactical advantage. According to Brautigan, this cost the Japanese the war.

Michael McClure later wrote that the first thing he remembered connecting Richard to guns was “when he was beginning to get goofy with drinking and success and he gave Gary Snyder a broken, vintage Japanese machine gun for his son Kai. ‘So he won't lose his Japanese heritage,' said Richard.”

Christopher Rand was nine or ten at the time. “Gary was living just outside of Muir Woods,” he remembered, “and also was putting together his place up in the Sierras. I was with my mother over visiting him one afternoon and he was just loading up, getting ready to go to the Sierras, loading a bunch of tools into the back of his truck, and lo and behold, he brings out of his shop this machine gun and loads it in.”

Not knowing the amazing exotic weapon had ever belonged to his father, Christopher asked Gary Snyder what he planned to do with it. The poet explained he was taking the Nambu up to “Kitkitdizze” in the mountains for a burial ceremony under the pines. The tools of war laid to rest in a Zen peace ritual. Hearing this, Chris grew frantic. He couldn't imagine such a wondrous treasure stuck away forever under the ground. “So, I pestered him and finally he gave it to me.”

The Rands had an apartment on Telegraph Hill, and Christopher brought the machine gun back to the city. One day, Richard Brautigan paid a visit and spotted the Nambu. He badly wanted it back. Knowing Christopher was completely into building rockets, “incredible rockets,” Richard offered a bribe. Two hundred bucks' worth of rocket gear for the gun. Chris held his ground. Over time it became something of an ongoing gag. Richard forever upping the ante and the stoic little boy refusing temptation. When the Rand family quit the city and moved out to their summer place in Stinson Beach around 1970 or 1971, the Nambu went along with them. “My friends and I would play war games,” Christopher recalled, “dig a big foxhole and have the machine gun, and tourists would go by on the beach and see us playing and be kind of . . . dismayed.”

The Nambu remained one of Christopher Rand's favorite possessions. He kept it into adulthood, wrapped in plastic and safely stored. In the summer of 1984, he was living in Bolinas and working over at Lucasfilm. One night, he ran into Brautigan at Smiley's. “I tapped him on the shoulder, and he was on his way to being drunk and sort of reeled around and said, ‘Don't touch me. I don't know who you are. It's really rude to touch people you don't know.'”

Christopher backed off and hung out with some friends, shooting pool. After last call, Richard started to leave and Christopher followed him outside, introducing himself as Ken Rand's son. It's not surprising that Brautigan hadn't recognized the boy. Chris stood six foot one and weighed over two hundred pounds. After a “cheerful embrace,” they bought a six-pack and walked down Wharf Road to the beach “and just rapped for a couple of hours.”

“And, of course, the machine gun came up in our conversation, and he goes, ‘What do you want
now
for it? I'll still buy you the rockets. What do you want?' It was very funny.”