Jubilee Hitchhiker (90 page)

Rounding up eighteen of his friends to all read the same poem resulted in Brautigan's most inspired contribution to the record album. Originally written in April 1966, and later published during the Summer of Love as a com/co broadside, “Love Poem” was only twenty-seven words long but provided an impressive amount of what Tom McGuane once called “perfect power-to-weight ratio.” Richard used this poem because Ianthe had memorized it when she was about eight years old. He paid his daughter $11 for reading “Love Poem” on his recording. She spent it all on Cracker Jack and Archie comics.

Richard's diverse reading group included Valerie Estes, Michaela Blake-Grand, Margot Patterson Doss, Betty Kirkendall, Michael McClure, Price Dunn, Donald Allen, Peter Berg, Bruce Conner, KSAN DJ Alan Stone,
Chronicle
columnist Herb Caen, and David Schaff, whose book of poetry,
The Moon by Day
, had been published by Donald Allen's Four Seasons Foundation. They all assembled in the recording studio at the designated hour without any notion of what Brautigan expected them to read.

Celebrated photographer Imogen Cunningham, then eighty-five years old, was a surprise guest reader. The connection to Cunningham came through Margot Doss, her neighbor on the western slope of Russian Hill. Valerie picked the elderly photographer up in a rented Mustang with Miles and Richard, chauffeuring them all over to Golden State Recorders. David Schaff recalled that Cunningham “wasn't particularly socially adept,” but “Richard had an interesting quality in his affection for people who were strange, who were nonthreatening strange.”

“Each one of us had to figure out a different way to read the poem,” Margot Doss recounted. Michael McClure read with a calculated poet's intonation. Bruce Conner put on a performance, yawning his lines like a dreamer emerging from sleep. Anthony Storrs, a Hispanic/black man who called himself “Antonio,” read the poem in Spanish. David Schaff remembered him in retrospect as “a Six Degrees of Separation type of character, except with more edge.” Don Allen read twice, once alone, and again at Brautigan's suggestion, in tandem with Schaff. Alan Stone used his sonorous DJ's intonation, while Peter Berg, always the contrarian, turned a simple declarative statement into a query. Only the women put on no act, reading honestly and without affectation. Brautigan's straightforward language struck a resonant chord within them all. Richard did not read his own version of “Love Poem.” He concluded by reading “Boo, Forever,” a different sort of poem about the loss of love, set to the whirling mechanical sound of a metal top slowly losing its centrifugal energy as it spins to a stop.

Throughout the month of February Brautigan's mail brought a constant stream of good news. Missy Maytag wrote inviting Richard to read again at the Unicorn (“Come to Santa Barbara and cheer us up”). A week later, he traveled down and earned $150 at the bookshop. Jack Shoemaker mentioned the UC Santa Barbara Renaissance Fair coming up in April, and Richard agreed to participate. When Kendrick Rand heard about the university's offer, he told Brautigan, “You're worth more
than that. This is ridiculous. You are selling yourself really too cheaply.” Richard thought it over and said that if he got more money, he'd pay for an airline ticket for Kendrick to come down with him.

A more lucrative invitation arrived from the United States International University (California Western) in San Diego, a private liberal arts college with an enrollment of around sixteen hundred students. The school was organizing a Creative Arts Conference in August and wanted Brautigan to conduct a two-week prose workshop and give “one evening's reading or presentation for the general Conference.” The university offered a contract for $1,200, plus the use of a suite without cooking facilities on campus. Meals at the commons were available at a 20 percent discount.

A discordant note came in a letter from the Guggenheim Foundation, informing Brautigan that he had once again not been nominated for a fellowship. Having been invited to reapply made this second rejection specially galling. News from Helen Brann in New York turned the Guggenheim business into an ironic joke. Sterling Lord submitted his three-book proposal to a number of publishing houses. The agency was running an auction. E. P. Dutton bid $7,500, Random House upped that to $12,500, and Doubleday, which had earlier rejected
Trout Fishing
, eventually offered $17,500.

An interlocutory judgment of dissolution of his marriage to Virginia Alder arrived at Richard Hodge's Kearny Street office during the first week in March, and Richard breathed a little easier. Single again, he was off the financial hook. Brautigan no longer had to fear losing a big chunk of the good fortune coming his way in a divorce settlement. Wanting to meet Helen Brann and have a look at the famous Sterling Lord agency, Richard planned his first trip back east.

An upcoming visit to New Mexico was on Brautigan's mind when he ran into Gary Snyder at a party after a reading at California State College. Feeling expansive with a $125 paycheck in his pocket, Richard picked up the tab and got drunk with Snyder. Recalling Gary's studies in Japanese Buddhism, Brautigan improvised a brief “Zen” poem for his inebriated fellow poet: “There is a motorcycle / in New Mexico.” Richard called it “Third Eye.”

Six days later, he and Valerie embarked on an eccentric cross-country sojourn. They flew first to Albuquerque and journeyed up into the mountains to Santa Fe, where they stayed in a house and studio on Canyon Road rented by Bunny Conlon and her artist brother, Al Eylar. Bunny had been born in New Mexico and, after her husband's death, came home to live with her young son, John.

The next day, Richard and Valerie visited Professor Charles G. Bell, a Southerner and close friend of the novelist Walker Percy. Bell ran the poetry reading program at the Santa Fe campus of St. John's College. Trained in physics, Bell, himself a poet and novelist, studied English literature as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He spent a summer at Black Mountain, meeting Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, who first suggested meeting Brautigan. Bell found Brautigan “a boisterous sort of man,” but arranged for him to give a reading at St. John's the following Monday.

Richard and Valerie borrowed Al Eylar's car, setting off on what she described as “the Brautigan Hegira.” They traveled west, first to Los Alamos, not knowing their plates had long expired. For years, Eyler painted over the date sticker with the appropriate color to avoid paying the registration fee. It was snowing when Richard and Valerie rattled into the birthplace of the atomic bomb. Stopping at the local Safeway for a sack of groceries, Richard felt “there was a clinical feeling to the town” and wrote a poem about the experience, “The Sister Cities of Los Alamos, New Mexico and Hiroshima, Japan.”

Outside Los Alamos, Richard and Valerie visited Bandelier National Monument, wandering around in a world of flat-topped mesas and sheer-walled canyons, investigating ancient Pueblo dwelling places nestled among the junipers and piñon pines. Next, it was west to Grants, where Richard wanted to see the huge radiation lab. The following morning, they backtracked east and south to the Acoma Pueblo, the oldest continuously inhabited city in North America. Coronado's army arrived in 1540. The Spaniards were the first white men to see the pueblo. Until 1929, when a Hollywood film company built a dirt road along the side of the 367-foot sandstone mesa to shoot
Redskin
, the only way up was a precarious series of ancient footholds carved into the living rock. The road was still unpaved when Richard and Valerie visited forty years later.

Saturday afternoon, they drove north, heading to the Chaco Canyon in the San Juan Basin, for a thousand years the center of the Anasazi culture. In 1969, the place remained remote. Brautigan and his lady explored the area without the supervision of uniformed park rangers. At Pueblo Bonito, built against the cliff face of the canyon wall, they climbed rickety wooden ladders into the archaeological ruins of what had once been the largest apartment building in North America.

While Richard stared at the ruins of an ancient civilization, Helen Brann sat in her East Side apartment at 14 Sutton Place South, surrounded by the glittering towers of Midtown Manhattan, worrying about how to welcome her eccentric new client when he arrived the following week. Helen had overnight guests that weekend. Seymour Lawrence and his wife, Merloyd, were in town from Boston, his home since college days. Lawrence attended Harvard and had been friends there with Robert Creeley when both were undergraduates. Together, they had started a small magazine called
Wake
, serving as its coeditors.

Sam Lawrence had long known Helen Brann, having used her as a reader when he was at the Atlantic Monthly Press. He had started there in his midtwenties as special assistant to the editor. Within three years he was the director and editor in chief. He was afflicted with lifelong stuttering, but his impediment did little to slow him down. At twenty-eight, Lawrence was the youngest publisher at the firm. During his twelve-year tenure, he brought in Richard Yates, Sean O'Faolain, Kenneth Muir, and Katherine Anne Porter. Lawrence missed a couple, having rejected both
On the Road
and
The Subterraneans
. Kerouac derided Sam as “that little queen,” dubbing him “Little shit S.”

After the Atlantic Monthly Press, and a stint as vice president of Alfred A. Knopf, Sam discovered he didn't care for corporate life and walked out, starting Seymour Lawrence, Inc., in Boston. He made an arrangement with Dell to copublish his books as the Delacorte Press. The first novel Lawrence published under his own imprint in 1965 was a reissue, the first “completely unexpurgated” edition of
The Ginger Man
, by J. P. Donleavy. Four years later, Lawrence brought out
Slaughterhouse Five
, elevating Kurt Vonnegut Jr. from an obscure “science fiction” writer into a best-selling author and firmly establishing himself as a literary publishing powerhouse.

“Do you know a restaurant where I can take a very tall hippie writer to lunch?” Helen asked Sam, while getting him coffee and orange juice in the morning.

“Who's the author?” Sam said.

“You've never heard of him; his name is Richard Brautigan.”

In fact, Sam Lawrence had heard of him, earlier in the month, from Kurt Vonnegut, who “mentioned that he had heard of a hippie writer on the West Coast that he had never met, who is creating a cult of his own.” His name was Brautigan.

Sam could barely control his excitement. “My god, Vonnegut was just talking to me about this guy,” he blurted.

Helen told him she was running an auction on the three Brautigan books. “I should have him,” Sam said. “How much have you got?”

“I've got fifteen thousand so far.”

“You've got twenty,” Sam replied, making an offer that soon became the deal. Lawrence also recommended Pete's Tavern down by Gramercy Park for Helen's lunch with Richard. (O. Henry had been a steady customer fifty years earlier.) From that point on, Lawrence became a great champion of Brautigan's work. Where Don Allen considered Jack Kerouac to be “a greater writer” than Richard, Sam thought that Brautigan was “a much better poet and writer than all the beats together, including prose writers like Kerouac.”

Saturday night, while Helen Brann entertained the Lawrences, Richard and Valerie pushed on to the tiny town of Cuba at the edge of the Jicarilla Apache Reservation, where William Eastlake owned a ranch. Most of the roads along this leg of the trip were gravel, and somewhere en route they lost the muffler on Al's car. “Don't know if we paid for it or not,” Valerie reminisced. “Probably not. Many of us were less reliable then.”

After a breakfast of ham and eggs in Cuba, Richard and Valerie drove to William Eastlake's ranch for lunch. The noted author had also invited Lucia Berlin, a young short story writer. Born in Juneau, Alaska, in 1936, Berlin spent most of her youth living in mining camps across Montana, Idaho, Arizona, and Chile, wherever her itinerant mining engineer father found work. A dark-haired beauty, she had modeled for Sears in the 1950s. Berlin suffered from scoliosis, a form of spinal curvature Brautigan also endured. She had published her early stories in the
Atlantic
and the
Noble Savage
. Eastlake told Lucia he wanted her to meet “this brilliant new writer.” When she read
Trout Fishing
, Berlin remembered “being dazzled by that book.”

Later in the day, Brautigan and Estes headed on to Taos, where the spirit of D. H. Lawrence haunted the quiet adobe streets. Richard wrote a poem here that he dedicated to Valerie. “All Girls Should Have a Poem” is a single sentence broken into four lines expressing the poet's desire “to turn this God-damn world upside down” to please the woman he loved.

After returning to Santa Fe, Richard gave a reading on the evening of the seventeenth at St. John's College. Charles Bell remembered the poet as “a showman, a spectacular character and quite a reader. He paced around the room, and then he jumped up on the table.” Afterward, a collection was taken among the student audience, netting Brautigan $25. The money covered gas expenses for the past few days. Charles Bell promised he would endeavor to have the college pay the poet an additional fee.

Early the next morning, Richard and Valerie left with Bunny on a trip up to the tiny village of Abiquiú. The noted eighty-one-year-old painter Georgia O'Keeffe had made her home there ever since buying and restoring an abandoned hacienda in 1945. A noted recluse, O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico on a trip to Taos in 1929. In spite of her reputation as a hermit, Brautigan kept saying he “wanted to meet Georgia.”

“Well, nobody meets Georgia,” Bunny told him. “People that live in her village don't even know she's famous, and she doesn't want anybody to know she is.” Richard was persistent. He wanted to give O'Keeffe a copy of
Please Plant This Book
and kept saying, “Tell me where she lives. Take me there and let me try to get her to talk to me.” Valerie remembered Richard giving
away copies of this rare publication “very selectively to people.” She considered him “the world's greatest PR man.”