Jubilee Hitchhiker (87 page)

Richard accepted the assignment and wrote an off-kilter, oddly moving introduction, bringing his own peculiar sensibilities to the 114-year-old manuscript. The book was published at the end of the year as
The Overland Journey of Joseph Francl
in an edition of 540 copies. Wreden hosted a reception early in 1969, celebrating the book's launch at his Post Street showroom. His invitation quoted a line from Richard's introduction, describing Francl as a man “who cared for his beer and other liquors, too.”

Trout Fishing in America
's San Francisco success did not go unnoticed in the New York offices of Grove Press, and they decided to bring out a trade paperback edition of
Confederate General.
The avant-garde poet/novelist Gilbert Sorrentino, working as an editor at Grove, thought it might be a good idea to reissue the book with cover art in the manner of the Four Seasons' singular
Trout Fishing
photo. He wrote Don Allen, setting the wheels in motion. Allen got in touch with Brautigan. Edmund Shea being unavailable, he contacted Bill Brach, asking him to handle the photography.

Richard showed up in Golden Gate Park with a baby alligator and a hippie girl wearing a full-length belted smock. Years later, Brach couldn't remember the young woman's name. She had straight dark hair hanging well past her shoulders, parted in the middle. With a broad nose, thick eyebrows, and full lips, she possessed an exotic ethnic appearance. Brautigan posed her between two columns holding the eighteen-inch-long reptile, her long dress dragging on the ground, looking a bit like a gypsy. Bill Brach took several shots.

Richard brought his favorite prints over to Don Allen. He wanted the title printed in red across the top of the photo and “Turn to page 100 for an interesting story about alligators . . .” at the bottom of the cover. Allen didn't think the alligator had sufficient light but sent the picture off to Grove.

Gilbert Sorrentino spent the next two weeks working with Grove's production team on the cover design. He respected Brautigan's work and had recently written a favorable review of
Trout Fishing in America
for
Poetry
magazine. Sorrentino wanted to satisfy the author's wishes. It was not to be. Grove decided to keep the same Larry Rivers cover art they had used on the hardcover edition.

The gypsy girl was perhaps only a brief fling after Marcia Pacaud's departure. Richard soon met Valerie Estes, who had majored in home economics in college and went on to earn a PhD in anthropology. Brautigan was attracted by her quick, lively mind. He liked to say that “there was no more powerful aphrodisiac than intelligence in a woman.” Valerie later worked as an assistant to Donald Allen. He expressed surprise at what she “saw in this guy who was sort of unattractive.” Estes thought Brautigan “physically not very attractive,” but felt “his presence was much more than the sum of his parts.” Brautigan “was truly charismatic, and you don't say that about too many people.”

“Richard was always on the make, you know,” Valerie Estes said. In the era of free love, Estes carved a few notches herself, but Brautigan “had more notches on his gun than almost anyone.” Tall, attractive, and dark-haired, an Aries with large intelligent eyes and the brains to back them up, Valerie Estes grew up in Berkeley and Reno, Nevada. She moved to San Francisco in February of 1967 after almost four years of wandering in Eastern and Western Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East with her husband, Bob Morrill. (In an odd coincidence, Bob's best buddy in Catholic school, from first grade all the way through graduation, had been Barney Mergen, who befriended Richard when he passed through Reno in 1956.)

Morrill got a job as a corporate attorney, and the marriage lost most of its luster. Valerie split in September '67, leaving their place on Russian Hill for a tidy three-room Kearny Street apartment on the slope of Telegraph Hill. That fall, Valerie volunteered to register people for the Peace and Freedom Party, a radical new political organization. Eldridge Cleaver was their candidate for president. She set up a card table in front of City Lights and handed out leaflets. One day, pamphlet in hand, she approached a bearded man with “great blue eyes,” asking “if he might be interested in signing up for Peace and Freedom.”

“Sure,” came the laconic reply, “but I think my name is on that pamphlet.” The man turned out to be Lawrence Ferlinghetti. They began “some sort of friendship,” which led to a brief affair and a general introduction “to the City Lights crowd, although not to Richard.”

KQED recruited Estes to help out with an arts festival planned in Washington Square Park in May 1968. She was given the task of finding poets willing to read at the festival. While living in Greece, she had met a poet named Robert Dawson. Having seen Dawson's name on a poster advertising a reading in the Haight, Valerie wondered if it was the same man. She went to hear him read, and they renewed their friendship. Dawson gave her Richard Brautigan's name and phone number.

When she called Richard about the arts festival, he said he'd like to talk to her in person about the matter. “What I now realize was he probably liked my voice on the phone,” Valerie recalled, “you know, the potential, and he had no intention of reading.”

“Why don't I come by tonight?” Brautigan asked in his most winning manner.

“I'm having dinner with some friends,” Valerie replied. “I can't do it tonight.”

Richard thought this over. “Well, I'll come by and pick you up after dinner.”

Valerie's friend Betty Kirkendall, a reporter at the
Chronicle,
lived in the neighborhood. After their meal, Richard arrived right on time. “I think we probably went back to my house, and I really don't remember clearly,” Valerie said. “I'm willing to put money on it that we drank a lot of wine and ended up in bed.”

Brautigan did not read at the art festival in Washington Square Park. He accompanied Valerie to the event, which was a great success. Bob Dawson read, along with several others lost to time. “Richard and I rather quickly became some kind of an item,” Valerie recalled, “enough so that I didn't see Lawrence any longer. In fact, I didn't see anybody else. All right, that wasn't true, but all things considered my percentage of time with him was fairly high.”

For Richard, being with Valerie became a self-fulfilling prophesy. Around this time, he wrote an (unpublished) short story in his notebook he called “An Apartment on Telegraph Hill.” Largely autobiographical, the story contained several revealing personal revelations. The narrator was a sculptor, whose work “had long ceased to yield any satisfaction.” He “had no interest in women except to get occasionally laid when I got bored with getting drunk and it took a really good woman to get me away from the bottle,” and dreamed of having “a girlfriend on Telegraph Hill.” He fantasized about her apartment full of “lots of fine stuff.” Brautigan wrote, “Coming from a poor family, I've always been attracted to women above my station.”

Richard soon took up residence in Valerie's North Beach apartment at 1429 Kearny Street (the address was changed to 1427 when the building was remodeled), while maintaining his squalid museum out on Geary Boulevard. Richard had always been self-sufficient and preached a form of sexual equality, but Valerie remembered that she “always did the cooking, except when Richard made his spaghetti sauce. Breast of lamb was another thing.” When Brautigan bought a cheap cut of meat, what he called “a protein wallop,” at their local North Beach market, he'd bring it home and roast it. Valerie recalled him “throwing this hunk” in the oven. “I don't know what else we ate with it. Red wine, probably.”

The three-room Kearny Street flat was reconfigured to suit Brautigan's work needs. The middle room, which had been Valerie's bedroom, was converted into an office for Richard. They moved the bed into the front room, and Brautigan brought over his electric typewriter, setting it on a table painted purple. In October, he wrote a poem he called “The First Lady of Purple,” which he dedicated to Valerie. Richard worked “from mid- to late morning, and then he would wander the rest of the day,” she recalled. He composed directly on the typewriter and “was pretty disciplined about it. When he was writing he drank almost nothing.” His work “was something that was very private,” Valerie said. “He didn't share this with anybody, including me.”

“Alcohol was always the escape.” Valerie Estes knew the part booze played in Brautigan's work habits. Whenever Richard “finished whatever that piece of work was then the constraints were removed and he drank again.” In the downtime, he wrote poems. Poetry never had the constraints of discipline that prose did. “He didn't work on the poems. He didn't set aside time to work on the poetry,” Valerie said. “The poems were on napkins. So, he drank during that time. Poetry came during the interims of the prose work.”

Several of these poems were written for Valerie. “As the Bruises Fade, the Lightning Aches” celebrated their robust sex life. Brautigan was proud of his ability to withhold his climax for an extended period of time. Valerie felt he was mainly concerned with his own pleasure, never asking
what she might enjoy. They were noisy lovemakers. Their neighbors in the building on Kearny Street complained often. Of the pair, Richard shouted the loudest.

Valerie first met Don Allen through Brautigan. He took her to a cocktail party at Allen's apartment in honor of the expatriate writer Kay Boyle, recently returned to the Bay Area. There were eight or ten people present, and Estes remembered drinking “a lot of wine.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti was among the guests. They all piled into the back of his little pickup and drove to a restaurant. Allen was taken with Estes and asked her to be his assistant. In need of a part-time job, she said yes.

Once, after Donald Allen fired her, Valerie and Richard went on a trip to Kirkwood Meadows, an isolated spot in the Sierras near Carson Pass, where Barden (“Bart”) Stevenot, her new boss, owned a mountain retreat he planned to turn into a ski area. Crews of loggers and dozer operators were already at work in a high valley with the greatest variety of wildflowers in all California. At the time, the only structure on the place was the Kirkwood Inn, a venerable log building along what once was the Kit Carson Emigrant Trail. Built in 1864, the old inn had seen some wild times. The saloon and a kitchen were downstairs, with places to bunk above. Stevenot asked Valerie and Richard to move to another bed at the far end of the building because their raucous sex kept him awake at night.

One evening following an afternoon's fly-fishing on Caples Creek, Stevenot took Valerie and Richard to dinner at the J&T, a Basque family-style restaurant in nearby Gardnerville, south of Carson City across the Nevada state line. After their meal, they walked up to the Overland Hotel for a drink. An old woman saw them passing and, fearing a hippie invasion, phoned the sheriff's office. When the deputies arrived at the Overland bar, they spotted Richard playing the slots, the only longhair in the place. A tough local lawman looked hard at Brautigan and asked, “How long ya been here? How long ya stayin'?” He made his meaning clear. Hippies weren't welcome. Bart Stevenot was furious, threatening to call his lawyer. “They gave that the consideration of asking us to leave town at our earliest convenience. They had never run into the likes of Richard yet, with the granny glasses and Buffalo Bill hair.”

Back on Kirkland Meadow, the Outcasts of Gardnerville went over to June Roof's bar, a two-hundred-square-foot establishment where Stevenot's construction crew did their drinking. At first, “the guys had regarded Richard with suspicion,” Bart recalled, “but after several nights hoisting drinks with him they had bonded to the extent that no one was going to throw their new best friend out of some Nevada lowlife town, and they volunteered in their somewhat impaired state to go down and clean up the deputies.” While appreciating their motives, Stevenot and Brautigan politely declined the offer.

A letter came near the end of July from Roger L. Stevens, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Brautigan had been selected to receive an award of $500 under the Literary Anthology Program, established in 1966 “to give greater circulation to work that originally appeared in magazines with limited circulation.” Robert Duncan, Anne Sexton, and Louis Simpson were the final poetry judges this year, and Richard's poem “It's Raining in Love,” published originally by
Hollow Orange
, was one of twenty-nine they selected to receive the award. The $500 came in the form of an unsolicited grant and did not have to be declared as income to the IRS. The poem would be published the following year by Random House in an anthology edited by George Plimpton and Peter Ardery. Two weeks later, Phillip Burton, the congressman from the Fifth District of California, wrote Brautigan to offer his “personal congratulations.”

Back in June, a memorandum had arrived from Gordon Ray, president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Ray had written to inform Brautigan that Josephine Miles, poet and professor of English at UC Berkeley, had suggested Richard might be interested in applying for a fellowship. Accordingly, he enclosed an official statement and a set of application forms. There was no great rush in submitting the paperwork, which wasn't due until autumn. Anticipating a fall publication date for
Watermelon
and
The Pill
, Donald Allen, West Coast editor for the
Evergreen Review
, arranged for Richard's five-year-old piece about abandoned Christmas trees to appear in the December issue. Brautigan received $100 from the magazine. Around this time, Richard asked Dick Hodge to draw up the papers to dissolve his marriage to Ginny.

That spring Brautigan wrote a series of radio ads for KSAN to help out his pal Lou Marcelli. Richard and Lou often started their days together with coffee at the Minimum Daily Requirement. Kendrick Rand remembered them as being “great buddies.” Three or four days a week they'd leave his place and head for the “double bill for a dollar movie theater on Stockton in North Beach.” He recalled that “they had their special seats.”