Jubilee Hitchhiker (98 page)

Sherry remembered a dinner party at the home of Richard and Nancy Hodge not long after Richard asked her to pose for the cover. The conversation centered on
The Abortion
, recently published, “and someone was bugging Richard about Victoria's beauty, and said to him, ‘You know that people are going to buy this book because there's a pretty girl on the cover and not for what's in it.'”

Brautigan disagreed with this point of view. He was “pretty much pissed off” and thought it was a stupid idea. “I'm not worried about putting pretty girls on the covers of my books,” Brautigan said, nodding toward Sherry. “In fact, this pretty girl sitting right here is going to be on the cover of my next book.”

Feeling ornery, Sherry quipped, “No. I've changed my mind. I don't want to be
on
the book, I want to be
in
the book.”

Richard smiled at her. “I could never write about you,” he said. “You are real life.”

Sherry Vetter met Richard Brautigan for the first time early in 1970 at an Irish pub in North Beach. She was there with her friend and roommate, the artist Yuri Nishiyama, and a fellow named Don, who acted as their escort. It was a cold January Frisco night, and Sherry wore a baggy sweater, jeans, and tennis shoes. She had on no makeup, and her auburn hair hung loose about her shoulders. Richard got into a conversation with Yuri, who was familiar with his work. Sherry kept thinking, “I know I've seen this guy's face before.” In fact, she'd gone to a poetry reading a few months earlier, but came in late while Brautigan was at the podium and didn't catch his name.

Richard was attracted by Sherry's face. There was a “wholesomeness” about her. Brautigan thought she looked like an “American teenage girl next door kid sister.” When he asked Sherry for her phone number, she wrote it down on a piece of paper, which she folded into an airplane and sailed out into the middle of the dance floor. Richard later recalled, “It landed at the feet of some people who were dancing to a drummer so different that he could have been pounding away in another galaxy.”

“See you later,” Sherry said, taking off with Yuri, “her smile breaking into a sixteen year old giggle.” Brautigan hurried out onto the dance floor to retrieve the paper airplane from under the feet of the stoned dancing couple. The gyrating space travelers regarded him curiously. “But what the fuck difference did it make,” Richard thought, once he had his treasure in hand. “You make a cute couple,” he told the pair and walked away, clutching the airmail phone number.

A two-week courtship by phone began. The first time Richard called, he got Sherry's roommate. He didn't leave a message and tried again two days later. This time, Vetter was on the line. “I guess you took some flying lessons in the last couple of days,” she said.

“I've had a lot of them,” Richard replied. Sherry “wasn't into hippie guys,” and kept some distance between them. Brautigan called night after night. He read his poems over the phone to her. This produced the desired result. She accepted Richard's invitation to dinner.

Sherry arrived at his place right on time, seven o'clock sharp. Brautigan regarded her with amazement. She no longer looked like the kid sister girl next door. She wore lipstick and enough mascara to emphasize her large green eyes. Her auburn hair was bound up on top of her head. In her ankle-length black velvet skirt and matching high-collared velvet jacket over a white lace blouse, she looked elegant and modishly old-fashioned. “I don't remember you being so short,” Richard said, trying for nonchalance.

“Bastard,” she said with mock seriousness, pushing past him and heading down the long hallway leading into the hundred-year-old Victorian apartment. After glancing at the front room, Sherry stepped into the kitchen. “I thought you were rich and famous. Why do you live in a dump like this?”

“My money is currently tied up in wheat futures,” Richard said, matching her mocking tone. “While we're currently on the subject of grains, would you like a drink?”

“A glass of white wine. We'll toast your wheat futures, so you can get out of this goddamn rat hole.” She sat down in a green wicker rocking chair. “Really, you should think about better ways of investing your money. I have a feeling that your wheat futures aren't that promising.”

When Richard gave Sherry a glass of white wine he wondered why she didn't take off her jacket. He wanted to know what her body looked like. Fifteen minutes later, after another glass of wine, Sherry still had not unbuttoned her coat. “Aren't you warm with your jacket on?” Richard asked. “The dinner reservations I made aren't until an hour, and it only takes a few minutes to get there. Why don't you make yourself comfortable? Don't worry, I'm not going to get you drunk and try to seduce you.”

“I don't trust you,” Sherry said with a smile. “Are you sure you made reservations for dinner? I think you're trying to use the wine to take advantage of a little person's limited alcohol capacity.”

“You found me out,” Brautigan confessed.

“It wasn't hard to do. You may write books but you can be read like one, too.”

“The lady's too smart for burning.”

Sherry smiled and started unbuttoning her velvet jacket. “The wine does make me hot,” she said. “Maybe your plan is working. A man who has all his money in wheat futures has to get lucky sometime.” She finished unbuttoning her coat but didn't open it.

This drove Richard crazy with anticipation. “What in hell did her body look like!” he thought.

“I'm certainly hot,” Sherry continued, holding out her empty glass. “Can I have a little more wine? Maybe it will cool me off.”

Richard filled her glass from the jug in the fridge, facing away from Sherry.

When he turned back toward her, wineglass in hand, she had removed her black velvet jacket and sat with her arms resting on the arms of the rocker, grinning like Sylvester after swallowing Tweety Bird.

Richard stopped dead in his tracks. Sherry wore a sheer antique lace blouse. She wore no bra beneath it. “I saw her sitting there with her breasts totally exposed under the delicate transparent blouse from another century,” Brautigan wrote many years later. Vetter had the face of a teenage girl, and “an incredibly erotic body with very large breasts.” Richard felt momentarily at a loss for words.

“The wine, please,” she said, still smiling.

Richard thought it looked like the smile of someone having a great deal of fun and trying hard to conceal it. “If I can still move, I'll try to bring you the wine,” he said at last.

“I certainly hope that you can move,” Sherry replied, her mischievous smile a promise of further surprises still to come. This began a relationship that was to last, on and off, for almost a decade.

“I was supposed to do the photograph for [
Revenge of the Lawn
],” Erik Weber said, “but Richard was pissed at me.” He and Brautigan got together in New York that May and Weber took
a number of pictures. Richard was mad about a photograph taken of him leaning against a wall in Helen Brann's office. The picture ran in
Mademoiselle
when the magazine published three of Brautigan's short stories in July. “Richard thought it was the worst photograph ever taken of him,” Weber said, “so he decided to use Edmund Shea, rather than me.”

The photo session for
Revenge of the Lawn
took place in the kitchen of Sherry Vetter's Noe Valley apartment. She lived in a big Victorian building “with Yuri and several others—one girl from Sweden—it was great. We had fun.” Brautigan had the idea to include a chocolate cake in the picture, a visual reference to a line in the title story. “He believed that he was six years old and it was a cloudy day about to rain and his mother was baking a chocolate cake.”

Two cakes were used for the cover shoot. Sherry baked the first herself at Richard's request. She remembered Edmund Shea took pictures for about two hours. “Periodically Richard would say, ‘Okay, now change clothes.'” Sherry went through six outfits, searching for just the right look. One choice, “a white nylon thing that was like a halter top,” was particularly revealing. Edmund suggested she lean over and gouge big pieces out of the cake. She tore into it, eating chunks by the handful, at once innocent and carnal, “a sexual thing,” Sherry said. “And Richard thought that was great.”

Sherry's cake was totally destroyed. Richard went out and bought another from a local bakery. Sherry changed her outfit a final time, choosing her Swiss grandmother's handmade lace blouse she wore on her first date with Brautigan. Grinning broadly, Sherry perched on the seat edge of her press-back oak rocking chair with the store-bought chocolate cake on the white linen-covered table in front of her, and Edmund Shea took the cover photograph for
Revenge of the Lawn
. After the story collection was published, the Noe Valley pastry chef baked “a facsimile cake” and placed it in the professional shop's front bay window surrounded by a half dozen copies of Brautigan's book.

The baker's modest window display provided a memorial to Richard Brautigan's singular vision of book design.
Revenge of the Lawn
was the last of his works to feature photographic covers with attractive young women. Three years later, Simon & Schuster published his new novel,
The Hawkline Monster
, and a decision was made to distance the book from Richard's earlier “hippie” publications.
Hawkline
had a traditional mainstream look with commercial dust jacket art.

In 1976,
Sombrero Fallout
followed with an elegant dust jacket painting by John Ansado of a lovely Asian woman holding a black cat. A simultaneous publication in Japan by Shobun-sha featured a color photograph of Japanese American actress Mie Hunt, who had appeared in the raunchy 1971 British film
Sex Clinic
. The photo created an entirely different mood from the American dust jacket painting. Hunt, hair bobbed and coiffed like silent movie star Louise Brooks, sat on a stool, one hand between her legs, lips painted Chinese-lacquer red, black dress slit to reveal her naked inner thigh. A wanton, depraved look glazed her heavily mascara-rimmed eyes. It could well be a poster for one of the soft-core porn movies Brautigan came to love in Japan.

When Jonathan Cape brought out the English edition the following year, Richard had a final chance to dabble in art direction. He didn't ask his girlfriend to pose for him, hiring a professional model instead. The Brebner Agency charged him $225 for the services of Mia Hara, a charming Japanese model. Erik Weber took the photographs in Richard's Union Street apartment. It was all strictly business. Brautigan maintained final approval, but left the designing to the professionals.

In 1980, when
The Tokyo–Montana Express
was published, a photograph of Richard and his friend Takako Shiina floating in a small green boat off the coast of Japan near the town of Ajiro appeared on the back of the dust jacket. Ten years earlier it would have graced the front cover of the book. Instead, the dust jacket featured only the title in large slanted red letters above a photograph of a medallion depicting Japan's last coal-burning steam engine. Richard had seen the bronze disc in the transportation museum in Tokyo. The same train image was used in the book to divide the chapters.

Brautigan promoted the photo to the front wrapper of the Delta trade paperback edition. “Cover concept” was credited to the author. Shiina, Richard's soul-sister, owned The Cradle bar, his favorite hangout in Tokyo. She sits apart from him, leaning against the gunwale, resting her head on her shoulder. A feeling of utter resignation pervades the image. Wearing a black cowboy hat and shirt, Richard slouches in the bow, his hands forming an inverted steeple between his knees. He stares wistfully off into the distance as if searching for something precious he's lost forever.

thirty-six: satori

R
ICHARD BRAUTIGAN TOLD his friend Jack Thibeau this story. It began one night in North Beach around 1970, when fame first exposed Brautigan to the blinding limelight of national attention. Richard picked up not only the tab, but a comely young admirer as well. She was just his type: willowy, blond, a hippie chick with few acknowledged inhibitions. Richard brought her back to his apartment on Geary, where the contrast between the low-rent surroundings and his newfound celebrity only intensified her ardor. Within the confines of his recently purchased brass bed, she gave him the sort of blow job he had once described in a poem as “a circle of castles” around his penis.

When he climaxed, the young blond spat his ejaculate into the palm of her hand, prodding the viscid substance gently with a fingertip as if examining some precious treasure, bright pearls from the crown jewels of an emperor. Looking up with stars dancing in her eyes, she murmured in wonder: “Richard Brautigan's sperm . . .”

thirty-seven: fame's feathery crowbar

“
R
ICHARD'S GETTING LAID by a bevy of 18-year olds,” Keith Abbott wrote to a friend after a visit to San Francisco. Abbott regarded this as “only a convenient shorthand symbol” for Brautigan's newfound fame. He was equally impressed by expensive dinner tabs, endless cab rides, and complimentary tickets waiting at the Fillmore. Like a rock star, Richard “strolled around and collected accolades from the kids. Brautigan hitchhiked until the end of his life whenever necessity dictated but rarely rode a bus again once the money started rolling in. Richard's itemized expenses for 1969 were more than double his total income for the previous year. By 1971, the cab receipts in his income tax folder were bundled together with rubber bands in wads thicker than packs of playing cards.

Among the few luxuries Brautigan bought were a television set and the antique brass whorehouse bed he had long coveted, most useful for a man beset by groupies. Not all were one-night stands. Doralyn Foodym, a fellow Aquarian and student of anthropology at Berkeley, recalled “a time when we were very fond of each other.” Once, in an “absurd” moment, her Mustang was towed away after Brautigan “moved it,” one of several hints that he really knew how to drive when he wanted to. Doralyn remembered sitting on the brass bed at Geary Street with Richard, talking about Edmund Shea, when he told her that there were lots of things she'd be better able to understand as she grew older. At the time, she “resented the comment like hell,” but five or six years later, she wrote to Brautigan from Copenhagen, where she was about to receive a PhD from the Institute of Social Medicine, to say he had been right. Now she knew how odd it felt “to be with those who are naive but don't know it yet.”