Jubilee Hitchhiker (91 page)

Bunny directed them to O'Keeffe's house in Abiquiú. Richard got out of the car, holding a copy of his seed-package book, and approached a large front gate. He rang the big bell hanging there. Nothing happened. He rang again. Still no reply. An elderly Spanish-looking woman dressed in black hobbled out the hacienda door. She limped to the gate and asked, “
Que quieres?
”

“I'm Richard Brautigan,” the poet replied, “and I'd like to give my book to Georgia O'Keeffe.”

“
Dame
,” the tiny old woman said. She put her arm up and Richard handed her the book. “
Gracias
,” she said, turning without another word. Richard watched, speechless, as the taciturn crone walked back to the house and closed the door.

Frustrated and upset, Richard returned to the car. Bunny and Valerie sat silently watching him. “I don't know why she couldn't have let me see Georgia,” he complained.

“You just did,” Bunny told him.

The following day, Richard and Valerie said goodbye to Bunny Conlon, who was returning home to Washington, D.C. shortly. They agreed to visit her there when then they got to the East Coast in three days' time. The couple traveled next to Placitas, a small settlement north of Albuquerque, where they stayed with Robert Creeley and his second wife, Bobbie Louise Hawkins. Creeley had settled in the area in 1956, after a four-year stay in Europe, followed by another two years teaching at Black Mountain College. Creeley had received an MA from the University of New Mexico in 1960, capping an academic career interrupted when he dropped out of Harvard in 1946. Publishing five books of poetry between 1952 and 1956 was an accomplishment far more distinguished than any mere college degree.

The Creeleys lived in a beautiful century-old adobe house with earthen floors soaked in the blood of slaughtered oxen and buffed for a hundred years or more to a polished cordovan sheen. “A wonderfully romantic touch,” Creeley observed. Renewing his acquaintance with Bob Creeley meant a lot to Brautigan, who considered himself “a minor poet.” Not only was Creeley a major poet, at this time almost unheralded, enhancing his appeal to Richard, but the older man had lived a life of far-flung adventuring that made Brautigan's own provincial high jinks pale by comparison.

All the next day the wine and conversation flowed. At one point, Brautigan told the Creeleys that when he and Valerie first “were thinking about trying to live together,” he took some of her furnishings and moved them over to his apartment “to see how the furniture would get along.” Richard had always invested mystic importance in inanimate objects. “That was an incredible business,” Creeley recollected with a laugh.

The next morning, Richard and Valerie flew from Albuquerque to Los Angeles. While Valerie visited with friends, Richard headed over to the Apple office in the Capitol Records Building on Vine Street just north of Hollywood Boulevard. The thirteen-story circular tower, designed to resemble vinyl forty-fives stacked on a turntable, was built in 1956 and housed the recording company founded by songwriter Johnny Mercer. A red light on a rooftop spire blinked out the word “Hollywood” in Morse code at night.

After a hamburger lunch in the cafeteria, Brautigan met with George Osaki in Apple's art department to discuss the layout for his record album sleeve. They hit it off. Richard felt Osaki understood what he had in mind. Brautigan asked if the prints Edmund Shea had supplied would suffice for mass reproduction. Osaki said they'd work just fine. Apple held an additional five
pictures of Brautigan in their files, but Richard preferred the cover photographs be used for all publicity, “as it will establish a visual image of the record.” He also agreed to write a publicity release and send it from New York the following week. Brautigan insisted on being informed of all changes and demanded “final approval on any publicity, advertising, artwork, and on the master.” Richard Hodge put the finishing touches on the contract, stipulating these points.

The following morning, Richard and Valerie flew to New York. They stayed in a room at the Chelsea Hotel on West Twenty-third Street, a red brick Victorian with ornate wrought-iron balconies. Built originally as the city's first cooperative apartment house in 1884, it was the tallest structure in New York at the time. Since converting to a hotel in 1905, the Chelsea provided sanctuary to writers, artists, and musicians, including Mark Twain, Sarah Bernhardt, O. Henry, Edgar Lee Masters, Virgil Thomson, Tennessee Williams, Brendan Behan, Arthur C. Clarke, Christo, Arthur Miller, and George Kleinsinger, composer of
Shinbone Alley
and
Tubby the Tuba
. Thomas Wolfe wrote
Look Homeward, Angel
in a room at the Chelsea. Dylan Thomas died while a resident. His namesake, Bob Dylan, composed the song “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” there. William Burroughs once had a room, as did pop artists Larry Rivers, Claes Oldenberg, and Jim Dine. Andy Warhol celebrated the hotel in his film
Chelsea Girls
. Richard Brautigan was happy to add his name to the illustrious guest register.

That evening, Valerie and Richard had dinner with poets Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh at Max's Kansas City, a restaurant on Park Avenue South made trendy by the patronage of the Warhol circle. Waldman and Warsh, both twenty-four, had been a couple ever since they met in San Francisco the summer of 1965, when Anne came out to the Bay Area to attend the Berkeley Poetry Festival and Lewis lived in a spare sublet apartment on Nob Hill. The next year, they founded and edited
Angel Hair
, a literary magazine lasting (for six issues) until 1969.

A native New Yorker, raised in Greenwich Village and educated at Bennington College, Waldman went to work for The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery after she and Warsh returned to the city. In 1968, Anne became the program's director, and over dinner with Brautigan (Richard feasted on steak and lobster tail) she asked him if he would like to read there the following week while he was in town. The honorarium would be $50. Richard agreed on the spot.

The next morning, Richard and Valerie took a train from Pennsylvania Station to Washington, D.C. They stayed with Bunny Conlon in her house close to Capitol Hill. Bunny remembered Brautigan's kindness to her four-year-old son, John, who was sick and wouldn't take his medicine. “Richard said, ‘Go outside and don't come back for half an hour and he will have taken his medicine.” She obeyed his instructions. Brautigan worked the special magic he had always had with children. The medicine went down without further complaint. John “was really happy and I was just amazed that [Richard] could get him to do it. He was wonderful with kids.”

On a morning in the last week of March, Bunny drove Richard and Valerie on a tour of nearby Civil War battlefields. Richard wanted to see Manassas, now a suburb of the greater District of Columbia metropolitan area. A century before it had been the site of the two battles of Bull Run, military engagements so close to the capital that curious civilians rode out in their carriages with picnic baskets “to see the Rebels run.” Instead, they witnessed a complete rout of the Union forces.

From Manassas, the trio drove on to the Wilderness, a wooded area in northern Virginia ten miles west of Fredericksburg, where the forces of the North and South engaged in two bloody battles nearly a year apart, in 1863 and 1864. In the first, now known as the Battle of Chancellorsville,
General “Stonewall” Jackson was mortally wounded by his own troops after the Confederates had flanked and nearly annihilated the Union army under the command of General “Fighting Joe” Hooker. The second Wilderness campaign comprised a number of engagements in May and June, with Lee and his army facing off against the Federals, now commanded by Ulysses S. Grant. After a horrible slaughter at Cold Springs, Grant withdrew, having lost sixty thousand men.

At one of these historic places, Richard got out of the car “and started running around and marking, taking big steps, measuring the battlefield.” Bunny and Valerie remained in the car, watching him with amusement. Valerie commented that Richard ran “like a wounded antelope,” because “he had one leg shorter than the other.” When Brautigan rejoined them he said, “I wish I had come here before I wrote
The Confederate General.
I would have written it completely different.” According to Bunny, she and Valerie “just about died laughing. But he was serious. He was very serious.”

That night, Richard and Valerie had dinner with Conlon in Old Town Alexandria, where Brautigan ate cherrystone clams for the first time in his life. The next day, they were back on the train, heading north to Boston. They stayed in Cambridge with Ron Loewinsohn and his future wife, Kitty. Loewinsohn was attending Harvard, working toward a PhD in English literature, and had arranged for his old North Beach pal to give a reading the following evening at Quincy House.

For a reunion feast, they all went to Durgin-Park, a Boston landmark since 1827, still doing business in a decaying and disreputable part of town. A noisy place with famously rude waitresses, tin ceilings, bare lightbulbs, and long wooden communal tables, the restaurant had been a favorite of Valerie's ever since she traveled up from DC on weekends seven years earlier to visit her fiancé, a student at Harvard Law.

The morning of March 25, Richard and Valerie took another historic tour, driving up to Lexington and Concord (Valerie remembered visiting these revolutionary battlegrounds had “probably” been her choice). They drove on to Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau built a rude hut on his friend Emerson's land and lived for two years and two months without gainful employment. When Brautigan surveyed the scene, he described an empty paper box in the snow in his notebook.

That same night, presented by the Quincy Poetry Forum, Brautigan read his work in the dining hall at Quincy House, a venerable Harvard undergraduate residence on the banks of the Charles River. A modern architectural “behemoth” had been added on in the sixties, and the influx of new inhabitants gave the place a reputation for rowdy exuberance. Admission was $1, and Richard received $270 for his performance. Valerie stole the show at Quincy House with her homemade outfit, a fur miniskirt and vest constructed from a thrift shop mink coat. It was one of her “favorite hippie outfits.”

In the morning, they traveled back to New York by train and again checked in to the Chelsea. Although their room had no view to speak of, it came with a kitchen, and Richard and Valerie cooked their own breakfasts. The current residents of the old hotel included Gerome Ragne of
Hair
, artists Claude Pelieu and Mary Beach, filmmaker Sandy Daley, pornography writer Florence Turner, as well as Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, both young and unknown, and Leonard Cohen, who was keeping company with Marcia Pacaud.

In one of life's awkward coincidences, Marcia occupied a room upstairs from Richard and Valerie. She was in town “on a long-term basis” for EST training. “I was always incredibly jealous
of her,” Valerie said, “because she was blond and she was beautiful and she was all these things that I wasn't and Richard, it may have been unconscious, but Richard didn't hesitate to talk about Marcia and how blond and beautiful she was.”

It was Brautigan's practice to introduce each new girlfriend to her successor. (“My lovers become my friends.”) Valerie remembered they “ended up being a threesome in some of our roamings.” At some point during their stay, Marcia even fitted Richard for a new pair of Levi's. Valerie managed to anesthetize her feelings (“we were drunk so much of the time”), but after a week of uncomfortable togetherness, she exacted a small measure of revenge when they all went out to eat at Max's Kansas City. At this point in time, Richard's favored libation was the Brandy Alexander, a cocktail composed of cognac, crème de cacao, and heavy cream. Valerie recalled that they drank “lots and lots. I was stupid enough to drink along with him.” After dinner, awash on an ocean of brandy, they drifted out of the restaurant and hailed a taxi. “Richard got in on one side of the cab and I got in on the other,” Valerie said, “and I shut the door and left Marcia outside.” They roared off with Miss Marcia Pacaud of Montreal, Canada, standing alone and inebriated on the curb.

On the evening Richard and Valerie returned to Manhattan from Cambridge, Brautigan read his poetry at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, his second reading in two days. The cornerstone of St. Mark's was laid in 1795. Located on Second Avenue between East Tenth and East Eleventh Streets and enclosed by an iron fence, the old churchyard, with its trees, grass, and weathered eighteenth-century tombstones, remained a rare pastoral oasis amid a concrete urban wasteland. Richard read on the altar of the barrel-vaulted sanctuary on the same program with Aram Saroyan, son of William Saroyan, one of Brautigan's favorite writers.

In the eight days remaining on their trip, Richard and Valerie took in the town. They went to see
Dracula
, checked out the Old Masters at the Metropolitan Museum, and spent time with J. D. Reed, a twenty-eight-year-old poet whose first book,
Expressways
, had just been published in hardback by Simon & Schuster. Something of a wild man, J. D. Reed distinguished himself from the herd mentality through bizarre fits of unpredictable public behavior.

On Lawrence Ferlinghetti's introduction, Richard linked up with Claude Pelieu and Mary Beach, an art-scene couple in residence at the Chelsea. Mary, an American heiress raised in France, began painting at an early age and had been interned for a time by the Nazis during World War II. She was a relative of Sylvia Beach, proprietor of Shakespeare & Co. and the first publisher of James Joyce. Claude, fifteen years younger, was born in France and had his premier show in Paris at the Galerie du Haut Pave, under the purview of Henri Matisse and Raoul Dufy. He met Mary Beach in 1962 and they traveled together to San Francisco, where they formed creative liaisons with Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Plymell. Claude worked in collage, wrote poetry, and translated the Beat writers into French. He gained a measure of notoriety in New York after he pissed in Norman Mailer's pocket at a party in the Dakota.