Jubilee Hitchhiker (72 page)

 

The Montana Gang (plus some folks from the bars in Livingston), upper Deep Creek, October, 1980. L. To R. (top row): Dr. Dennis Noteboom, Terry McDonell, Rosalyn “Roz” Mina, unknown, Thomas McGuane IV, Max Hjortsberg, Terry de la Valdène, Becky Fonda, Peter Fonda, Justin Fonda, Pete Stein, Ursula “Ushi” Butler, Guy de la Valdène and Michael Butler. (Middle row): Marian Hjortsberg, “Willie Boy” Walker, Benjamin “Dink” Bruce, Russell Chatham, Sandi Lee, Heather Hume, Jeff Bridges, Lorca Hjortsberg, Susan Cahill, unknown woman, lawyer from Hawaii and Dana Atchley. (Bottom row, seated): John Fryer. Laurie McGuane (baby Maggie on lap), Tom McGuane, Richard Brautigan (Teddy Head on lap), Phil Caputo and Tim Cahill. Photograph © Michael Abramson.

 

Richard Brautigan in Oahu, Hawaii (December, 1981) holding a puzzled barnyard rooster while wearing his new “Fighting Chickens” tee-shirt. Photograph © George Bennett.

 

Greg Keeler and Richard Brautigan, Bozeman, Montana, Spring, 1982. Greg helped Richard secure a part-time appointment as a visiting writer at Montana State University. Having recently broken his leg, Brautigan is still using a cane. Photograph © Linda Best.

 

Amsterdam, January, 1984. Brautigan's Japanese visa application photo. “Yes, Europe has been good to me.”

 

Richard Brautigan's mailbox, Pine Creek, Montana, November, 1984. An anonymous admirer left a bunch of flowers shortly after news of Brautigan's suicide was released by the press. Photographer unknown.

twenty-eight: bread and circuses

T
HE HELLS ANGELS threw a big free party in the Panhandle on New Year's Day, 1967, to thank the Haight's doper community for bailing Chocolate George out of jail. Dubbed the “New Year's Wail,” and the “New Year's Whale,” by the Diggers, who put out a flyer encouraging participants to bring along whale meat, the festivities began at 2:00 PM. Music at the “Wail,” performed on an eighteen-foot flatbed truck, featured Janis Joplin and Big Brother, the Grateful Dead, John Handy's jazz ensemble, and the Orkustra, an odd collection of musicians known as the Diggers' house band. (Bobby Beausoleil, the group's top-hatted bouzouki player, later became associated with Charles Manson and was himself jailed for murder.)

Emmett Grogan took credit for planning the whole thing with Pete Knell, but the effort was clearly the work of many Angels and Diggers. The motorcycle club provided a public address system to amplify the rock and roll, along with copious amounts of free beer. “The parks belong to the people!” the crowd chanted when the police cruised by to check things out. Given Richard Brautigan's prominence at the forefront of the march to Park Station, it is impossible to imagine him not grooving among the happy throng at this Digger-publicized event.

The Diggers found a new home for their giveaway emporium at 520 Frederick Street, a storefront with a large basement. They opened for “business” the first week of January, soon after Emmett Grogan stenciled the name, the Free Frame of Reference, above the front window. Among the first visitors were the police, on the lookout for underage runaways and drugs. After being denied entry three times, the cops returned in force around six in the evening with three patrol cars and a Black Maria. Ninety people had gathered within to watch Ben Van Meter's film
Poon Tang Trilogy
on a bedsheet screen. The police ushered them all out, citing fire regulations. Their search trashed the place, causing a disturbance leading to the arrest of four Diggers, including Grogan.

Four days into the New Year, Brautigan took part in a reading at the I/Thou Coffee Shop (1736 Haight Street) along with David Sandberg and young Jeff Sheppard. Another poet, Joe Stroud, had been scratched from the lineup. Sandberg, insecure about his work, referred to his writing simply as “pages.” Richard, the featured reader, stepped to the front of the room carrying a large bucket of clams. The minimal advertising for the event, a narrow printed strip of pale green paper, referred to the bivalves as Brautigan's artistic contribution.

About the same time, Richard Brautigan began a brief, intense relationship with a woman whom most of his friends, even those who met her, could not remember years later. Keith Abbott recalled, “She always remained for me just a face. Even after people told me her name, I forgot it just as fast. Her face was an eraser for names.” For Loie Weber, “she was like a disappeared person. She was there in image.” Her name was Michaela Blake-Grand. She was known as “Mickey.”
David Schaff thought her “genuinely crazy.” Very soft-spoken with dark red hair, tiny hands, prominent buck teeth, and abundant freckles, Mickey was not a conventionally attractive woman. Creating a distinctive thrift shop style all her own, she wore oval wire-framed granny glasses and dressed in a quaint Victorian manner. Richard called her his muse.

Michaela had been the girlfriend of Andy Cole, Brautigan's old pal and roommate. Richard was fascinated with her in part because Blake-Grand had a degree in textiles and supposedly had submitted a piece of knitting as her thesis. The notion of someone knitting a thesis was a concept right up Brautigan's alley. Contemporary photographs of Michaela show her looking prim and straitlaced like a stern old-fashioned schoolmarm, but in essence she was a deeply passionate woman. Loie Weber remembered Blake-Grand as eccentric and very inverted, possessed with “that kind of quiet, indrawn intensity.” Richard's erotic poem “I've Never Had It Done So Gently Before” was dedicated to “M” for Michaela. “The sweet juices of your mouth,” he wrote, “are like castles bathed in honey.” One evening, she unexpectedly showed up at Jack Thibeau's place and spent the night with him. When Jack awoke the next morning, Michaela was gone, leaving behind a note addressed to “Jick.” Thibeau never knew what she meant by that.

Early in January, Brautigan struck up a friendship with Lou Marcelli, a blue-collar guy in North Beach. After working as a letter carrier for the post office and as a fisherman in Alaska, Lou and a bunch of buddies opened a little beer and wine bar called Deno & Carlo at 728 Vallejo Street, next to the police station. “Just five North Beachers,” Lou recalled, “didn't know shit about business or how to run a place.” At first, the joint didn't do very well. Richard started stopping by when Lou was behind the bar. Most of the time, it was deserted.

Brautigan walked in one mid-January day and asked, “What's going on here?” Marcelli admitted he didn't really know. He said he was just trying to start something up, “with entertainment or whatever.” Richard told Lou he'd fill the place for him. “I said, ‘Yeah, sure you will,'” Marcelli remembered. “He says, ‘You ever hear of Allen Ginsberg?' I don't know Allen Ginsberg from a tub of beans. He says, ‘I'm gonna get him here tomorrow night, and there'll be people lined up around the block.'”

This was no idle promise. Ginsberg had flown to Frisco earlier in the month with his longtime boyfriend, Peter Orlovsky, and his sometime girlfriend, Maretta Greer, who'd returned from four years wandering the Himalayas. They came to take part in a Gathering of the Tribes, the great Human Be-In organized by Michael Bowen and Allen Cohen. Allen Ginsberg proved open to Brautigan's solicitations. Richard's friendship with Emmett Grogan helped pull things together. Grogan admitted to being “knocked out” when Richard told him of his idea for the reading.

Brautigan drew a mimeographed poster in the scrawled offhand manner of his recent flier for the reprint of
Galilee Hitch-hiker
. He wrote “San Francisco Poets Benefit for the Diggers” at the top, dotting the page with little cartoon flowers and centering an all-seeing eye in a circle surrounded by the words, “!Free! We love you !Free! We love you.” Scattered about this image, along with Brautigan's own moniker, were the names of his friends: Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, Lenore Kandel, William Fritsch, Ron Loewinsohn, David Meltzer, and George Stanley.

Allen Ginsberg's name did not appear on Brautigan's poster, but Richard held true to his word, and the famed beat poet was there at Deno & Carlo on the promised night, January 12, 1967. Aside from the crude flyer, the only publicity for the event were mentions in the
Oracle
and in Ralph Gleason's
Chronicle
column. Even so, more than a hundred people showed up. “The place
was mobbed,” Lou Marcelli recalled. The occasion launched the North Beach nightspot, which quickly became a popular music venue. Blue Cheer and the Cleveland Wrecking Company played there. Creedence Clearwater Revival got their start at Deno and Carlo.

Because the reading had been called a “benefit,” Ginsberg and Gary Snyder dutifully passed the hat for donations. By the time Emmett Grogan and Peter Coyote arrived a considerable sum had been collected. Ginsberg gave Grogan the hat full of money. Emmett announced the only possible Digger benefit was “one where everything was free!” and handed the hat over to the bartender, telling him to count out the bread and buy drinks for the house until it was gone. “That's a Digger benefit,” Coyote shouted to much applause. Gary Snyder marveled at the gesture, telling Allen Ginsberg they'd given the money “back to the people!”