Jubilee Hitchhiker (99 page)

As the summer of 1969 wound to a close, the book design for the Delacorte omnibus edition was completed to Brautigan's satisfaction. Sam Lawrence wrote, calling it “beautiful [. . .] I'm grateful to you and Roz Barrow for making it possible.” An ad was prepared for the
New York Times Book Review
, the
Village Voice
, and the
Sunday Examiner & Chronicle
in San Francisco. It featured a triple photo of Richard's face above the heading, “The great three-headed Brautigan is now at your bookstore.” Franklin Spier, Inc., the advertising agency responsible, thought it “wacky, to be sure,” but a “stopper visually,” something with appeal for the Brautigan audience. The opening line of their copy read, “From out of the West comes the thundering typewriter of the great Richard Brautigan just in time to save avant-garde writing from the bad guys.” The text went on to quote the well-worn John Ciardi quote from the back cover of
Trout Fishing,
adding “Mmmm, that right, Kimo Ciardi.”

Brautigan hated this ad, and it did not run. Instead, Delacorte followed his detailed instructions to the letter. Richard's own design for a new advertisement had no cute Lone Ranger references,
only a photograph of the book's cover. He simplified the text and included quotes from
Time
and the
Examiner & Chronicle
, eliminating the Ciardi blurb entirely.

Again, Richard's instincts were more on the money than the crass selling notions of the Big Apple publishing wizards. Sam Lawrence recognized a winner and wrote Brautigan, “I like the way you've changed the ads.” Orders began “literally pouring in” at the beginning of September. The “extraordinary” demand for the three Delta paperbacks (scheduled for publication in November) was so great a planned first printing of twenty thousand copies for each title had to be increased to fifty thousand each before the end of September. The Delacorte hardback had its publication date moved ahead to October 31, but the first edition still bore the date September 1969. A second printing had to be ordered by November 5.

One afternoon during the third week in September, Richard and Valerie showed up at the Minimum Daily Requirement with Abbie and Anita Hoffman, who were in town trying to raise money for Abbie's fast-approaching conspiracy trial in Chicago. Paul Krassner was on his way up from Los Angeles with some film they had made of the riots during the Democratic National Convention the previous summer. Brautigan had an idea that the MDR might be a good place to show it and dispatched an employee over to Kendrick Rand's Vallejo Street apartment to say Hoffman wanted a word with him. By the time Kendrick arrived at his restaurant, “Richard had a fair amount to drink.” He and Valerie got into a fight, ending when she poured a pitcher of beer over his head. “They soon left in a huff,” Rand remembered. “I stayed up until about three in the morning with Abbie.” Kendrick agreed to let Hoffman show his film at the MDR the following Sunday.

Rand had some trouble rounding up a projector but “finally got one from someone who was connected with the Committee [Theater].” With only word of mouth for advertising, “the place was mobbed.” They showed the film against the back wall and people who couldn't get in stood out on the sidewalk staring through the big picture window. Richard and Valerie, at peace once again, sat with Kendrick and his wife, Annie. “It was a wonderful night,” Rand remembered.

By early October, Brautigan had received invitations to read at more than ten colleges. John Barth wrote asking him to come to the State University of New York at Buffalo. Richard had been suggested to Barth, who managed the reading program, by Robert Creeley, recently arrived in Buffalo as part of the English faculty.

The second week of October, Brautigan participated in a writers' conference at the College of Marin in Kentfield, California. Among the other authors were Kay Boyle (who gave the keynote address), Jessamyn West, William Stafford, Caroline Kizer, and Josephine Miles. After conducting a morning seminar, “On Writing,” Richard read his work at eight o'clock Saturday evening on a program with Stafford and Miles. For three days, he was paid $180, plus $10 for expenses.

Two welcome royalty checks arrived early in October. (The first, from the Four Seasons Foundation, totaled $3,000; a second, for $695.53, came from Grove Press. After
Rolling Stone
bought two more short stories for $30 each, Helen Brann wrote Jann Wenner demanding a “new payment schedule.” Wenner balked, writing Brann he “would be sorry to discontinue this feature, but we cannot afford to pay the kind of money you are demanding.” He offered “$50 per short story, irrespective of length.” Richard accepted. The publicity value of appearing in
Rolling Stone
was worth it.

Before the end of the year, Brautigan sold the periodical two more stories at their new rate. The smallest amount Richard earned in 1969 came from
Poetry
magazine, which sent him a check for
$3 when his poem “Wood” appeared in the October issue. Somewhat belatedly, Heliotrope (a San Francisco outfit self-described as “a learning environment open to anyone,” with courses including Swedish massage and a celebration of dusk), mailed an honorarium of $20 in October for printing Brautigan's poem “Critical Can Opener” in their summer catalog.

Jack Kerouac died in St. Petersburg, Florida, on October 21, 1969, of massive gastrointestinal hemorrhage brought on by cirrhosis of the liver. A lifetime of heavy drinking caught up with him at last. The King of the Beats was dead. Around the same time, Brautigan, the heir apparent, called Rip Torn in New York. Brautigan had cooked up a fishing trip to Deer Creek in Big Sur with Price Dunn, and they wanted Torn to join them. Rip remembered his words “tumbling over each other and the funny chortling noises he made.”

The actor left the matter up in the air. “If I can get a real cheap flight,” he said. Torn's wife, the actress Geraldine Page, was heading for Hollywood soon to star opposite Clint Eastwood in Don Siegel's psychosexual Civil War drama,
The Beguiled
. She decided to fly out early with Rip and the kids and be part of the adventure. Rip brought along a two-person kayak. The Torns landed at SFO and rented a station wagon, loading the luggage and strapping the kayak to the roof before driving into San Francisco to pick up Brautigan. Richard stashed Willard, his papier-mâché bird, in back along with his gear. After stocking up on road refreshments, they headed south to Monterey.

The Torns and their two-year-old daughter and twin diapered sons stayed with Price's brother, Bruce, and his wife. The Dunns seated them on cushions at a round table, serving linguini with pesto. Keith and Lani Abbott joined the party. Keith found Rip Torn “high strung and nervous,” a chain-smoker of hand-rolled cigarettes. Richard told Rip that Price “knew every inch of Big Sur.” Abbott declined to join their fishing adventure. “Price hadn't been in the Santa Lucia Mountains for years,” he observed.

Gerry put off the trip to L.A., staying at the Dunns with her sons and young daughter. Rip roared down the Pacific Coast Highway with the wild boys in search of the mythic Deer Creek. Richard claimed the stream had “a lot of trout, maybe some steelhead.” Around noon, they turned off onto a narrow dirt road. The ride in was rough. They reached an abandoned farm on a turn overlooking what Torn described as “a deep gorge carved by the tiny glint of water far below.” The fishermen had found Deer Creek.

Armed with beer and fishing rods, they scrambled down past abandoned farm machinery into a canyon choked with poison oak. Forty minutes later, the quartet reached bottom and discovered “the creek was nearly dry.” Sinkers and rusting hooks decorated the surrounding bushes; trees were draped in tangled monofilament. “Looks like an army of hippies has bivouacked here,” Brautigan quipped. After a halfhearted attempt at fishing—Richard caught a water snake—they decided to head for home. It took three hours to struggle out of the gorge.

Along the way, “Richard started to chortle,” improvising a humorous riff on their predicament. “Rip, do you think Hollywood would be interested in a series called ‘The Blunder Brothers'? We've got a fine cast here. We could profit from our blunders, and looking at this crew, I doubt we'd run out of script [. . .] What do you think? Hell, this bunch could never run out of blunders.” Laughing harder, Brautigan announced two cold beers waited in the truck. “First up on top gets'em.” Price and Richard “poured on the coal,” leaving Rip and Bruce far behind.

When the stragglers finally made it out of the canyon, Brautigan tapped his pocket watch. “We've been here [. . .] thirty-five minutes,” he said. “Time to have a game of cribbage.” He tossed
Rip a can of beer. “Here—we saved you laggards a brew to share.” Back at the Dunn's place in Monterey, Richard related his adventures with the Blunder Brothers. Weaving Willard into the fantasy, he concocted a fable about “capturing the dreaded water snakes of Big Sur.” It was all in fun, but Keith Abbott felt “under the fantasy was a sour feeling, as if Price and Bruce hadn't come up to the mark.”

Richard Brautigan arrived in Boston just before Halloween, when Delacorte published his big three-in-one book. Sam Lawrence owned a fashionable brownstone townhouse on Beacon Hill, “very unlike the hippie atmosphere,” and when Brautigan came to visit, Lawrence remembered him dropping to his knees and staring at the floor.

“What are you doing down there?” Sam demanded.

“This is real pine,” Richard muttered in awe. “Real pine.”

To Sam Lawrence such domestic refinements were no big deal. His house had the original pine floors with “an orangy, lemon patina.” Richard reminded Sam that neither Edmund Shea nor Erik Weber had been paid for their photographs on the Delacorte and Delta editions of his books. Lawrence promised to take care of the matter. Weber was still in India, so Sam would have Roz Barrow send the check to the Chelsea Hotel in New York, where Richard was headed in the morning.

When Richard returned to visit Ron Loewinsohn in Cambridge, he came across a green and white pinback button advertising an alternative educational institution at the Grolier Book Shop, the oldest and best-known literary bookstore at Harvard. Sam Lawrence introduced Brautigan to the owner, Gordon Cairnie, an early supporter of his work. “He always had Richard's books,” Lawrence said. “Even the early ones.” The pins were on sale to benefit eight little storefront establishments located all around the Cambridge area, collectively called the Trout Fishing in America School. Founded by Peter Miller, a Williams College graduate (a second-year student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education), with five other like-minded academics, the experimental school provided a learning environment where kids who didn't particularly like formal academics could earn a high school diploma. The curriculum ran from English, math, and science to criminology, theories of revolution, and motorcycle repair. Tuition was $10 a month.

Brautigan got hold of Miller's phone number and called him up. “I heard you named a school after my book,” he said. Peter Miller “was shocked to hear from the guy.”

“I want some pins,” Richard told him. “Saw some pins.” Miller said the school sold the pins to earn extra money. Brautigan asked to come over and buy a few, and soon after, he showed up with Ron Loewinsohn. Richard told Peter about his upcoming reading at Harvard. Brautigan became a benefactor of the school named for his novel. “He was great,” Miller recalled. “When his book came out, he would send us a box of books, which we would sell. We didn't have any money.” From time to time, Richard visited one of the eight Trout Fishing schools. “He would come,” Peter Miller said, “he'd sit there all afternoon. He could find somebody who was real shy who he'd end up talking to. It was very sweet.”

In and out of Cambridge for book signings and other business prior to his reading, Brautigan stayed with Peter Miller and his girlfriend, Kat, in their apartment on Broadway near Harvard Yard. Richard's presence caused immediate tension on the domestic front. “He was murder on anyone's girlfriend,” Peter remembered. “It only took him a moment to get jealous. He wanted real attention.”

A big parade for Trout Fishing in America, Inc., on the first day of November provided a happy moment. Around fifty students, teachers, and parents marched along Massachusetts Avenue through Central and Harvard Squares to Cambridge Common, where they gathered for a rock concert by three local groups: Peace, Catfish Black, and Cloud. They carried signs; banners; red, yellow, and blue balloons; and large staff-mounted papier-mâché fish. The parade included a pair of balloon-decorated motorcyclists, two guys running for the city council, and a cheetah named Natasha riding in the backseat of a battered station wagon. Recalling Brautigan's happy participation, Peter Miller said, “He got in it, walking down the street. It was great. It was the sweetest side of the sixties.”

Richard went with Peter Miller on a return trip to Walden Pond, along with John Stickney, a visiting
Life
magazine reporter, who had volunteered to teach a journalism course at Trout Fishing in America. Brautigan knew what to expect from his previous sojourn with Valerie and expressed dismay at all the litter strewn around. “Where the hell are all the trash bins?” he fumed. “What would Henry David Thoreau think if he could see this place now?” Pointing at a discarded beer bottle lying submerged on the bottom, Richard calmed his indignation with wit. “Look there! Right below the surface. A glass-backed trout is sleeping.”

By the time of Richard's reading at Harvard, he “almost had a room” in Peter Miller's apartment, having stayed there “four or five times.” Brautigan told Miller of his plans to write a history of the Confederate side in the Civil War. “We didn't have a dime,” Peter said. “So he would say, ‘Come on, let's spend this money,' and we go to the public market and buy five bags of groceries and fill up all the cupboards.”