Jubilee Hitchhiker (7 page)

At sixteen, on January 9, 1873, Madora wed her first cousin, William Ashlock, a tall, charming man six years her senior. The Ashlocks returned to Greene County, Illinois, where William's branch of the family had settled on land made available to veterans of the war of 1812. Altogether, they had nine children. The youngest daughter, Elizabeth Cordelia (called “Bessie”), born in Woodville, Illinois, on September 30, 1881, became Richard Brautigan's grandmother. Mary Lou described her mother as a “big Spaniard woman, six foot two, dark eyes, and dark hair . . . quite a stature about her.”

Life on the Ashlock farm found its way into Brautigan's fiction. The episode when Madora plucked a flock of drunken geese reverberated for a hundred years through family legend until it came to rest in “Revenge of the Lawn.” Knowing his great-grandfather, William Ashlock, signed up with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency may have inspired Brautigan to write
Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942
.

Not much is known about William Ashlock's career as a shamus. Late nights in low-life taverns disguised as somebody else led the dark-haired detective into the company of loose women. It nearly killed Madora Lenora when she discovered her husband's philandering. She sued for divorce, not a common practice in the nineteenth century. Dora Ashlock was the first in her devout Catholic family to take such a drastic step. Like modern single mothers, Madora went off to raise her large brood on her own.

Her daughter Bessie Cordelia Ashlock first married Michael Joseph Kehoe, a Boston Irishman who listed his occupation as “peddler.” The couple settled in St. Louis, Missouri. With Kehoe, she had two daughters, Eveline Elaine, born in 1909, and two years later, on April 7, 1911, Lulu (baptized with the middle name Mary), who was called “Tootie” as a child and “Mary Lou” later in life. Beginning a lifelong habit of reinventing herself, Bessie shed a year from her age on the her second daughter's birth certificate.

Things didn't take with Kehoe. Like her mother, Bessie divorced her husband. She soon remarried. Jesse George Dixon was a carpenter from Kentucky. On July 21, 1914, Bessie had a son by Dixon, naming him Jesse Woodrow, known to the family as “Sone.” This time, Bessie was
three years younger on the certificate. Two years later, the day before her thirty-fifth birthday in September 1916, another son, Edward Martin, followed. Bessie stated her age as thirty-one.

When Mary Lou was six years old, the Dixon family moved to the Pacific Northwest, settling in Tacoma, Washington. By 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment made Prohibition the law of the land. Before the “Jazz Age” was a month old, Congress passed the Volstead Act, and the twenties began to roar. Bootleg booze provided an opportunity for those with ambition and vision. Bessie Dixon, a natural-born business woman, had ample amounts of both. By decade's end, she was known as “Moonshine Bess.”

In 1921, Mary Lou's mother worked at Manning's Coffee Shop on Converse Street in Tacoma. A regular customer, an Italian named Frank Campana, spoke broken English and had been a machine gunner during the world war. Mary Lou remembered him as an insulting man, “very crude and insolent.” Her mother left Jesse Dixon and after an “ugly divorce battle,” began a relationship with Campana that lasted for the rest of her life.

Bessie Dixon never married her bootlegger Italian lover. Frank Campana sold illegal hooch out of a place a couple doors down the street from Manning's. Bessie became his business partner. They opened a restaurant on Pacific Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street, housing a “blind pig” in the rear. In league with several other Italians, Frank and Bessie maintained a still hidden in the woods, cooking moonshine under the towering fir trees. They brought the booze into town in gallon jugs and hid it under the sawdust in a woodshed potato bin behind Bessie's place on 813 East Sixty-fifth Street.

Along with their speakeasy behind the restaurant on Twenty-fifth Street, Moonshine Bess and her Italian cohorts operated another joint known as Ruth's Place above a branch of the Bank of California in downtown Tacoma. Customers slipped furtively up the side stairs to buy hooch while the honest johns down below negotiated short-term loans. The bankers never suspected that bootleggers prospered above their heads.

When Ruth's Place got raided, Johnny Pisanni was upstairs taking a bath as the cops pounded on the door. His brother George thought it was an overeager client. The police stormed in and nabbed him. Hearing the commotion below, Johnny slipped out the bathroom window onto the roof of the bank, clad only in a towel. A neighbor spotted Pisanni prowling around in the rain and called the law, claiming a naked bandit was robbing the bank.

Somehow, towel-wrapped Johnny Pisanni eluded the law. His brother and Robert Columbini went to the slammer but didn't rat out their partners. George Pisanni was deported back to Italy and Columbini sent to McNeil Island Penitentiary for a three-year stretch. Frank Campana and Bessie Dixon got off scot-free. When Columbini was released from prison they paid him off for his silence.

In 1923, Bessie Dixon asked her mother to come live in Tacoma. Over six feet tall and pushing two hundred pounds, Dora Ashlock knew how to whip some sense into her unruly grandkids. With her mother keeping an eye on things, Moonshine Bess moved with Frank Campana to St. Helens, Oregon, a little town north of Portland on the Columbia River. They opened a restaurant there called The Boy's Place.

Tensions ran high in the little house on Sixty-fifth Street. Eveline's rebellious spirit did not take well to Grandmother Dora's restrictions and strict discipline. At sixteen, within two years of Dora Ashlock's arrival, Eveline ran away from home and went to live with Johnny Pisanni, Bessie's old bootlegging partner. They kept house together, as the saying went in those days.

The year before, in the summer of 1924, Mary Lou met Ben Brautigan for the first time. She worked in her mother's Twenty-fifth Street grill for $2 a day, helping out wherever needed. Brautigan worked nearby as a planer in the local plywood factory for the same princely wage: twenty-five cents an hour. He lived in a workingman's hotel above Bessie's restaurant and ate there day and night. She called him Benny. He was sixteen that summer. Mary Lou was thirteen.

Ben Brautigan kept coming around. Mary Lou observed he was a good steady worker, five days a week at the planing mill. He got a raise of ten cents an hour. At sixteen, Mary Lou said yes. Bernard Frederick Brautigan and “Lula Mary Kehoe” were married in the Pierce County courthouse in Tacoma on July 18, 1927, by Judge Frank A. McGill. Asked to designate “Spinster, Widow or Divorced,” on the Marriage Return, Mary Lou wrote “spinster.” Underage, she lied on the form, stating she was eighteen on her last birthday. The groom's mother and stepfather were the witnesses.

Within a couple years, the marriage was in trouble. So small he could wear Mary Lou's shirt, Ben Brautigan considered himself something of a dandy and a lady's man. A pint-sized sheik with a size 9 shoe, he fancied patent leather footwear and by 1929 was waxing his mustache, wearing his sideburns long, and putting on mascara. Half-inebriated, he'd flirt with the flappers and shebas crowding the speakeasies of Tacoma. “He'd go koochie, koochie, koo, and rolled his eyes around,” Mary Lou said, scornfully recalling Ben's gin mill shenanigans. “My god, it was sickening.”

When she was nineteen, during one of her numerous separations from Ben Brautigan, Mary Lou drove with Eveline and her now brother-in-law, Johnny Pisanni, down to St. Helens to visit their mother. When not running The Boy's Place with Frank Campana, Bessie Dixon raised canaries in the apartment upstairs above the tavern, and her musical flock numbered around two dozen. Before Mary Lou left, Bessie gave her a canary.

Back in Tacoma, Mary Lou was drinking pop at the New Country Grocery, the business her sister and Pisanni operated across from the Union Pacific depot on Pacific Avenue. Jealous because she didn't also get a gift canary, Eveline stepped up and smacked the bottle into Mary Lou's mouth, knocking out her front teeth.

Eveline ran. Mary Lou nailed her sister between the shoulders with the empty bottle. Eveline gained the safety of her bedroom, locking the door behind her. Furious, Mary Lou got an ax. Johnny Pisanni interceded, dropping to his knees before his sister-in-law as she prepared to chop down the bedroom door. “Please, Tootie,” he pleaded, “I just rent this place. I'll be evicted. Don't do it! Don't do it.” In the end, Mary Lou relented. She put down the ax, collected her canary, and left.

Nineteen thirty was a bad year for Mary Lou Brautigan. On March 13, she came down with appendicitis and had surgery. A month or so after the appendectomy her grandmother grew sick with cirrhosis of the liver. In May, Ben moved back into the family home on sixty-fifth street to help take care of Mary Lou.

Not long after, the police came by the house looking for Mary Lou's brother Jesse. An older kid in the neighborhood used a pair of handcuffs to restrain younger children and beat them up. He sold the handcuffs to Jesse for fifty cents. When the cops found the cuffs, they arrested Jesse Dixon and took him to jail. He got sick while locked up. Once released, the boy came home and grew worse, lying in his upstairs bedroom, burning with fever.

Dora Ashlock's liver problems developed into cancer. When the doctor came out to treat her, no mention was made of the teenager lying above their heads. Jesse was dying from peritonitis brought on by a ruptured appendix. Mary Lou called an ambulance the next day. She and Edward kept a lonely vigil at their brother's bedside in St. Joseph's Hospital. Bessie Dixon refused to grant permission for an operation until she came up from St. Helens. By the time she arrived, it was too late. “I'll be operating on a dead boy,” the physician in charge told her. She insisted they go ahead. Jesse lived less than a day, slipping away on May 8, 1930.

Jesse Woodrow Dixon was buried in the Calvary Cemetery on Mother's Day. At the funeral, Mary Lou and Eveline made a vow over “Sone's” casket. They'd never fight with each other again. Two months later, Madora Ashlock and her daughter Edith (who perished from locked bowels) were also dead. Moonshine Bess lost her son, her mother, and a sister, all within sixty days.

After Jesse's funeral, Bessie took her surviving son, Edward, back to St. Helens, to live with her and Frank Campana. Mary Lou and Ben Brautigan nursed her grandmother until her death on July 17, 1930. Another funeral left the couple alone at 813 East Sixty-fifth Street. Mary Lou slept by herself in a little room off the back porch.

Edward didn't do well at The Boy's Place, barely lasting a year in St. Helens. He couldn't get along with Campana. One night, while studying in his room, a bullet came whistling through the wall, missing Edward's head by inches. The Italian bootlegger claimed it was an accident. “I was just cleaning my gun,” Frank Campana said.

Edward didn't wait around for another “accident.” He ran away from home the very next day, a departure so swift he barely took anything with him, a teenage rebel clad in blue jeans and a black leather jacket. He left a short note behind under his pillow along with his bank account book and a picture of his dead brother. Bessie Dixon notified the police but they were unable to determine where he might have gone. Edward never finished high school. He disappeared, swallowed up into the vast immensity of America.

four: tacoma ghosts

T
HE DIXON FAMILY home, recently alive with laughter and raucous teenage pranks, crowded with the polite comings and goings of elderly church ladies, now seemed peopled only by ghosts. Edward and Jesse were gone. Grandmother Ashlock's few possessions had all been packed away. Mary Lou and Ben Brautigan coexisted uneasily in the gloomy silence. She had her private hideaway. He made beer.

Ben turned the kitchen into a brewery. A galvanized washtub burbled with barley malt mash. Rows of empty bottles lined the counters. The sweet stink of fermentation pervaded the house. Ben stored the sealed bottles in the cold cookstove oven, since Mary Lou wasn't in a domestic mood and prepared few meals. Anxious to drink his suds as soon as possible, he capped the bottles before the brew finished working. Many exploded, adding to the alcoholic reek.

At last Mary Lou heard from Edward. He was living in Los Angeles, earning a living doing odd jobs: yard work, gardening, mowing lawns. “He was a kind of handyman for the wealthy rich widows,” Mary Lou recalled. On Friday evening, March 10, 1933, Edward was playing cards in Long Beach with a young married couple. At five minutes to six, everything began to shake. A massive 6.4 earthquake struck the area. Edward grabbed his two friends and pulled them into the safety of a door frame. The terrified husband broke away, attempting to run outside. The house collapsed, and he was killed “right in front of their eyes,” one of 120 people who died in the quake.

Fearful of losing her surviving brother, Mary Lou persuaded Edward to come back to Tacoma and live with her. Ben Brautigan had moved out. She was pregnant. After Jesse died, an older man named Michael Connelly, who “did a lot of gardening work for people,” asked if he could help. He started dropping by on a regular basis, so Mary Lou had some company. She never told her mother of Edward's return, fearful Campana might finish his dirty work if her brother went back to St. Helens.

Edward and Tootie spent the summer of 1934 building a wooden boat in the backyard. The day Mary Lou went into labor, her brother was out on Puget Sound, fishing in their boat. He caught a twenty-five-pound salmon just before a storm blew in. Anxious to show his sister his prize catch, Edward raced the swelling whitecaps back to shore and tied the boat up at the dock, where the storm smashed it to splinters against the pilings. When he got home, Tootie had already left for the hospital.

Richard Brautigan was born at 12:30 AM (under the sign of Aquarius) just as the day began on January 30, 1935. He had big blue eyes and a full head of ethereal white hair. January 30 was also President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's fifty-third birthday. Richard was a well-behaved infant who
had no colic and never cried or threw any screaming tantrums. Mary Lou recalled that “he had a kind of beller [
sic
] if something was bothering him.”