Jubilee Hitchhiker (95 page)

Richard Brautigan was not looking for a cheap form of alternative printing. For the past couple years, his close affiliation with the Mime Troupe, the Diggers, and the Artists Liberation Front had directed his creative energy toward happenings and street theater.
Please Plant This Book
was one result of this collective thinking. Richard's participation in Candle Opera and The Invisible Circus were others. When Jack Thibeau told him about Xerox publishing, new possibilities for public performance blossomed in his imagination.

Richard made all the arrangements. Poster artist Victor Moscoso remembered getting a phone call from Brautigan. “He said he had a friend, Jack Thibeau, I may have known Jack. And it was Richard's idea to go down to the Public Library and produce a little book.” He had a simple plan. Each of the artists would have his own page to design in any way he pleased. Creative improvisation was encouraged. Richard Brautigan told them to bring their library cards.

Important cultural events needed recording for posterity, so Richard called his photographer friend Edmund Shea, asking him to come along with his camera. More to the point, Edmund owned a car. Not just any old jalopy, but a beautiful classic 1939 flathead straight-eight Packard. They would ride in style. Early in December, the foursome was ready to roll. Richard phoned ahead to the Main Library down at Civic Center to make all the arrangements. He wore a turtleneck sweater, a filigreed medallion (the number “13” enclosed within a circle) on a chain around his neck, the standard navy peacoat, and a new wide-brimmed, high-crowned hat with a leather band. Valerie Estes came with him. At Richard's suggestion, she brought along Zenobia, her purebred
Siamese cat. Jack Thibeau recalled the drive downtown in the big gangstermobile. “Edmund picked us up one at a time like we were going to rob a bank.”

Thibeau remembered “the PR department waiting for us at the door” when they arrived at the neoclassical beaux arts building on the corner of Larkin and McAllister. He was surprised to see Ann Kincaid, the librarian who had befriended him when he first arrived in the city four years before, among the greeting committee. The quartet was graciously escorted inside and led up the broad marble steps to the high-ceilinged, book-lined Reference Room housing the coin-operated Vico-Matic copy machine. A sign mounted on the device boasted: vico-matic copies anything in seconds for 10c bound books, checks, letters, resumes, contracts, legal briefs, etc. (It was a dry copier, actually a Thermofax, not a Xerox, thus explaining the severe age darkening that later obscured the photo-sensitive paper.)

Brautigan had come prepared with rolls of dimes, and he fed a coin into the copier. Turning to Jack Thibeau, he suggested, “Why don't you go first?” Although up until that moment, Thibeau had no idea what he was going to do, he immediately said, “Okay.” For no particular reason, Thibeau had brought along a package of little stickum gold stars, the kind fifth-grade teachers affix to prize essays. He sprinkled these over the glass plate on the machine. Unzipping his black jacket and pulling up his shirt, Thibeau laid his bare chest down on top of them. With the coat collar pulled up over his head, Jack used his jacket as a hood to block the outside light. One dime followed another and photos of Jack Thibeau's hirsute pectorals adrift among the stars, page after page, rolled out of the Vico-Matic. Seven years later, Jack landed a job in the Philippines as Martin Sheen's body double on
Apocalypse Now
because his chest hair matched that of the star.

Next came Victor Moscoso's turn. He, too, had bought a number of stars of different sizes at a stationery store. As Edmund Shea circled around them taking pictures, Victor laid the stars out on the copy machine and provided Zenobia's brief moment of fame. With Valerie assisting, Victor placed the cat on the glass plate and dropped dimes into the machine. Another original art page was born.

Richard Brautigan produced his page by centering a copy of his poem about Mrs. Myrtle Tate on a background of newspaper movie ads, including
The Graduate
,
The Shoes of the Fisherman
, and a revival of
Gone with the Wind.
As a final touch, Richard placed his library card at the bottom of the page. He had also prepared a title page,
The San Francisco Public Library: A Publishing House
, which contained the following information, “This magazine was created and Xeroxed at the Main Library in the Civic Center using their ten cent Xerox machine on December 5, 1968 by: Victor Moscoso, Jack Thibeau, Richard Brautigan.”

Richard had prepared small slips of paper with a typed statement: “This is one of seven numbered and signed copies.” The line below contained a typed number. These were printed on seven of Brautigan's pages, and he signed them all. In addition, Thibeau and Moscoso each signed an undisclosed number of their own pages. According to librarian David Belch, no more than twenty copies were printed. Richard bound each one together with three staples and placed all the copies, together with all the stars and other original material, in a large yellow photography paper box.

Jack Thibeau recalled the moment: “He sealed it with some stuff and said, ‘Well, that's that.'” Eventually, each of the participants received a signed copy. “They shriveled up and died within a year,” Jack said. Moscoso was disappointed that they got so dark. Today, the few surviving copies have turned almost entirely black. Even so, a collector wishing to purchase one from a rare book dealer should be prepared to fork over at least $2,000 for the ephemeral item.

thirty-five: cover girls

A
LONG-STANDING URBAN MYTH holds that the sequence of small stars on the covers of
Playboy
magazine (actually a code indicating various regional editions) stands for the number of times head honcho Hugh Hefner slept with the Playmate of the Month. Likewise, it has also long been rumored that the women on the covers of Richard Brautigan's books were all at one time his lovers. As Don Carpenter said, “Richard's sexual archive is reflected on his book covers.”

Michael McClure summed it up when he wrote, “Richard was crazy about beautiful women, smoothly glabrous ones with long hair and big eyes.” Don Carpenter remembered “lots of women,” getting straight to the point. “Richard did a lot of fucking. A lot of fucking!
A lot!
” Brautigan worshipped the women he loved, elevating a select few to the lofty status of “muse.” Some of these he sought to immortalize by placing their pictures on the front covers of his books.

The first muse thus anointed was Michaela Blake-Grand, pictured on
Trout Fishing in America
. By the time Don Allen published the novel, Mickey had slipped from muse status to the less exalted position of old friend and pen pal. The current muse was Marcia Pacaud, although even that relationship was on the wane when she set out one morning early in 1968, wearing a sleeveless cotton frock, to take some pictures with Brautigan and Edmund Shea. This was the first photo shoot Richard and Edmund worked on together.

The trio was heading for a railroad tower south of Market that Brautigan thought would make a good backdrop when they happened across a large hole in the ground at the corner of New Montgomery and Market Streets. It was an excavation site for the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), then under construction beneath the surface of Market Street. Edmund had read Richard's poem “The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster,” although he was not familiar with most of the other poetry in the planned collection. There had been some discussion about the book's title, and when Edmund peered down into the hole he said, “Well, gee, here's our mine.”

With no cops in sight, the threesome sneaked down into the gaping excavation. Large steel girders reached up like piers to support the sidewalk above. Marcia slipped off her shoes (but kept her watch on) and perched winsomely on a pile of rubble, bare arms crossed over her knees. Edmund snapped several pictures of Marcia alone and then a bunch more with Brautigan posed with her. In some he sat at her side. One shot seemed utterly characteristic of Richard. He stood behind Marcia, his arms over her shoulders, clasping his hands together as if in prayer while she gripped his elbows.

Later, when Brautigan went over the contact sheet with Shea, he selected a photograph of Marcia Pacaud sitting alone for the cover of the poetry book he would dedicate to her. Shea
thought Brautigan included women in these pictures “because he liked girls. All of his writing is kind of romantic in a way. Loving, feelings and things like that. I think our only thing was to do good pictures.”

Their second effort at making a good picture came soon after, when Edmund arrived at Brautigan's Geary Street apartment to shoot the cover for
In Watermelon Sugar
. This time, the muse of the moment was but a passing fancy, a woman no one, not even Edmund Shea, seemed to remember. Richard never wrote her any letters, although he corresponded frequently with his other lovers. Her name was Hilda Hoffman. A graceful Virgo, she had only recently moved to San Francisco from New York, where she had been a member of a singing and dancing troupe. For a brief period, she had been Paul Krassner's girlfriend, although he recalled only her hippie sobriquet and even that recollection remained vague, “Morning Dove . . . Morning Glory . . . Morning Star, something like that.” Brautigan wrote a poem for Hilda that later appeared in
Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt.

As always, Richard took charge, directing the whole operation. They went to work on the rickety stairs leading down from Brautigan's kitchen to the trash-filled backyard. Stacks of old newspapers stood in sodden piles on the landing. Hilda parted her long fine blond hair straight down the middle and wore a cute little summer minidress ending just above the knees. Richard posed her standing alone on the stairs holding a mop, evoking the domestic qualities of Pauline, one of the characters in his novel.

Richard got in on the act himself, sitting on the stairs a step or two behind Hilda, peering owlishly over her right shoulder. Edmund took a couple double-exposure shots as an experiment, showing Hoffman's face framed in the doorway while her full figure hovered ghostlike in front. “I always liked that,” Shea remembered. Richard felt otherwise. After looking over the contacts, he chose a medium-close two-shot, which appeared on the front of the book.

The next cover girl was indeed just that, a two-year-old child. She was obviously the only early model with whom Brautigan was not intimately involved. Caledonia (Jahrmarkt) Batman was the daughter of art gallery owner Billy Batman. For someone whose father was a junkie, she appeared remarkably well-adjusted. Bill Brach, who to this day has never read any of Richard Brautigan's books, encountered Caledonia playing at a cookout in the backyard of a Digger house in the Haight-Ashbury. Many Diggers were in attendance, including Billy and Joanie Batman, Peter Berg, and Peter Coyote.

Bill Brach aimed his camera at Caledonia and took several pictures as she wandered barefoot through the grass. Brach can't remember if Brautigan asked him to take the photos or saw them at a later date. In any event, Bill was never paid for his work. This was appropriate under the circumstances, as the photographs appeared on the cover of
Please Plant This Book
, which was given away for free. Brach printed the pictures in an old-fashioned oval format suggesting nineteenth-century daguerreotypes. Brautigan used three on the folded cardboard covers of his book. Two were close-ups, and the other showed Caledonia from behind, walking away from the camera. Ianthe Brautigan felt jealous when she saw another little girl pictured on one of her father's books. Over the years, Ianthe has often been incorrectly identified in rare book catalogs as the child pictured on Brautigan's singular publication.

The notion of a record album featuring the work of Richard Brautigan first sparked into life in London in October of 1968, when Barry Miles brought a list of poets and writers over to Paul McCartney's three-story Regency house in St. John's Wood. The Beatles started Apple Corps in
April 1967 as a holding company to avoid paying millions of pounds in taxes. The logo came from a René Magritte painting of a big green apple (
Le Jue de Mourre
) owned by McCartney. A year and a half after the start of the Apple record label, the Beatles formed a division devoted to inexpensive spoken word and experimental releases. John Lennon christened it Zapple. (“A is for Apple. Z is for Zapple.”)

In the midst of these trendy times, the only thing London lacked was a hip bookstore on the order of City Lights. Peter Asher (half of the pop group “Peter and Gordon” and married to Marianne Faithfull), John Dunbar (brother of Jennifer Dunbar, who would later marry Ed Dorn), and Miles decided to open Indica, a gallery/bookshop at number 6 Mason's Yard. Paul McCartney helped paint the walls and put up shelving. John Lennon met Yoko Ono at an Indica art opening.

John published quirky poetry and gained a reputation as the “avant-garde” Beatle, but it was Paul who first explored experimental ideas. McCartney wrote, “When [John] was living out in suburbs by the golf club with Cynthia and hanging out there, I was getting in with a guy called Miles and the people at Indica.” Paul regarded Zapple as “the point of connection between Apple and Indica Bookshop.” He and Lennon chose Miles “as the
de facto
label manager.”

When Miles brought his literary checklist over to McCartney's Cavandish Avenue pad, Richard Brautigan was known in England only through
Trout Fishing
and
Confederate General
, but had gained a reputation sufficient to be ranked alongside Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Kenneth Patchen, Charles Olson, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the list of luminaries. Zapple's plans included not just poetry, but electronic music, lectures, avant-garde theatrical productions, “anything off-beat.”