Jubilee Hitchhiker (100 page)

Richard Brautigan was “honored” to be reading at Harvard, as Peter Miller recalled. “I'm going to read at Harvard,” Richard announced to the students at the Trout Fishing in America School, “but I want you all to come. The whole school.” When Brautigan mounted the podium in the “neoclassical lecture hall,” they were all there. “Twenty-five or thirty of 'em,” Peter Miller said. “Little ones, short ones, tall ones, fat ones, all went and got onstage. Very ragtag.”

The Harvard students in the audience looked equally ragtag. John Stickney described them as “the hirsute, sueded, fadded, and fringed crowd of neo-surrealistic young people.” At one point during the reading, a cat wandered onto the stage, stared curiously at the poet, and sat at his feet. Richard swigged chablis from a gallon jug and read his poetry for about half an hour before jumping down, amid shouts for more, inviting the crowd to take his place onstage.

Brautigan urged his fans to come up and read their favorite work, either his poetry or anyone else's. Numbers of students took up the challenge, reading all manner of poems and even a political manifesto. Upon hearing an absurd newspaper article, Richard clapped his hands in delight. Someone began playing a blues harmonica into the microphone, and couples started dancing in the aisles. “I love chaos,” Brautigan declared.

At one point, Richard suggested to the students that they read “Love Poem” over and over as it was done on his recording. Several of them accepted his invitation, experimenting with different voices and inflections. Sarah Ulerick, a Radcliffe freshman, read the poem with a Southern drawl. She charmed Richard, and later they walked together across Harvard Yard toward the reception, talking in fake German accents. Brautigan knew he'd score tonight. “I'd like to get to know you better,” he said.

“What would you like to know?”

“Do you use contraceptives?”

When she said “No,” he lost interest and drifted on to other possibilities. His paycheck for the evening came to $400.

Another attempted pickup during his time in Cambridge didn't end quite so politely. Brautigan was drunk, out on the town with Peter Miller, and asked a young woman to come home with him. When she refused, Richard “got real pissed” and kicked a dent in the front door of her car. According to Miller, Brautigan “threw some money on the ground and walked away from it. It was not his greatest moment.”

Richard took great pleasure in being hailed as a poetry hero on the Harvard campus. His happy mood dampened when friends in the know pointed out a discrepancy between the just-published Delta edition of
Trout Fishing in America
and the original Four Seasons Foundation printing. Brautigan had decreed that both editions be identical. The Four Seasons' press plates had been purchased to facilitate this plan, but the new edition was ever-so-slightly different. Pages 42 and 77 of the original edition had included the facsimile signature of Trout Fishing in America, written in Richard's distinctive crabbed hand. On the same pages of the new Delta printing, the two signatures were conspicuously absent. The book had already gone into a second printing, and fifty thousand copies had been shipped to bookstores across the country.

An “extremely unhappy” Brautigan telephoned Helen Brann to complain about the situation. She wasted no time expressing her displeasure to Sam Lawrence. Richard insisted that “the dropping of this signature changes the entire meaning of both these chapters, not only in structure, but continuity of feeling.” He considered it a breach of his contract.

Two days later, Richard contacted Helen with a suggestion for how Delta might rectify their error. He wanted the publisher to run ads “as simple as possible, pointing out the omission” and instructing readers to go to a bookstore and get stickers bearing Brautigan's “Trout Fishing in America” signature, which could then be pasted into the appropriate spots in the novel. Richard knew this would be expensive. As it was the printers' fault, they should bear all the costs of such an enterprise.

Soon after, Peter Miller, his girlfriend, Kat, and John Stickney saw Brautigan off to Buffalo. Stickney talked about writing an article on Brautigan for
Life,
and Richard instructed him to give Helen Brann a call. Peter and the Trout Fishing school gang headed up to Vermont for Thanksgiving. Richard spent the holiday at the home of Bob and Bobbie Creeley in Eden, New York, a small town about fifteen miles south of Buffalo. He discussed the problem of the missing Trout Fishing signatures with the Creeleys, who convinced him the bookstore sticker notion would never fly due to the prohibitive costs involved. Bobbie came up with a simpler solution.

She proposed a long thin newspaper ad running the full length of the page, a column of Richard's repeated Trout Fishing in America signatures. The short text, written by Bobbie, warned those who bought the novel of the defect on pages 42 and 77. “Please cut out and paste where necessary. The extras are for your friends. P.S. Congratulations! You have one of 50,000 collector's items.” Brautigan suggested Bobbie Creeley be sent “a size 12 navy blue maxi coat” as payment for her freelance copy writing,

Bobbie never got her coat. In the end, the problem was solved by Dell designer Rosalie Barrow. The resourceful Roz came up with a number of rubber stamps reproducing Richard's Trout Fishing in America signature. She mailed these to all Dell warehouses across the country,
instructing the recipients to stamp the missing signatures on the appropriate pages. “The line should be stamped in black ink and kept clean.” This fix involved only Delta copies not yet shipped, creating two future categories of collectible books, those with the stamped signature and copies that had none.

“Warmly received,” Brautigan appeared before a “packed hall” at SUNY Buffalo. John Barth wrote, “The campus prided itself, in those years of antiwar sit-ins and teargassing riot police, on being ‘the Berkeley of the East.'” Richard brought along Edmund Shea's punctuation slides and had a reel-to-reel tape recorder set up beside the lectern. After being introduced by Barth, Brautigan greeted his audience, “pushed the Play button [. . .] and disappeared into the auditorium's projection booth.” While everyone listened to the tapes recorded for Richard's Zapple album, “the invisible author projected slides of giant punctuation marks: five or ten minutes each of a comma, a semicolon, a period,” which John Barth thought were “entirely without bearing on the taped recitation.” This went on “for a very long three-quarters of an hour.”

Robert Creeley, also in the auditorium, felt it “was very charming.” Barth held the opinion that “had it been anybody but Brautigan, that audience would never have sat still for it.” Even Creeley believed the students really “wanted him to read.” Barth found the whole affair “eye-glazing.” When the tape came to an end, a “beaming” Brautigan reappeared and “gestured grandly toward the tape machine.”

“There you have it, folks,” Richard announced, “the twentieth century.”

Hearing this, one of John Barth's “seriously avant-garde graduate students” leaned toward him and quipped, “Yup, about 1913.” For this performance, Brautigan was again paid $400.

In San Francisco, Richard got back together again with Valerie on the first of December. September had been a rough time for both of them. They had been mostly apart for the past couple months. He told Valerie he'd cried himself to sleep every night in September, dreaming of her continuously, kissing and loving her in his troubled slumber. Hoping to resume their relationship, Brautigan took her shopping at I. Magnin's, an upscale department store, and bought her “a wonderful [Burberry-style] full-length tan overcoat.”

They went to see
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
, which immediately became Brautigan's favorite film. Flattered by all this attention, Valerie “responded totally.” She had been feeling “so horny, hurt, alone,” and after a “long drunken evening at Enrico's” they staggered up the hill to her apartment for passionate lovemaking. The next day, one of her neighbors asked Valerie if she'd heard someone “freaking out” in the middle of the night. Estes didn't know how to reply.

Early December brought an announcement from New York of a “free” Bay Area concert by the Rolling Stones, at the conclusion of their eighteen-venue
Let It Bleed
U.S.A. tour, a “thank-you gift” for their American fans. The Stones began touring two months after Woodstock. They played twin evening shows in Oakland in November, charging ticket prices double those of other leading bands, such as the Doors. Acting through the Grateful Dead, the Stones management contacted the Diggers. The Peters, Berg and Coyote, suggested a multiple-stage event in Golden Gate Park, to “ensure a collaborative frame of reference and minimize divisions between the community and its entertainers.” This collective approach didn't sit well with the Stones. Their manager, using Emmett Grogan as a go-between, got in touch with the Hells Angels, saying the Rolling Stones “wanted to do something for the people.” In exchange for a hundred cases of beer, the Angels agreed to act as “security” at the proposed concert.

After the city denied the band use of Golden Gate Park, the location for the event, scheduled for Saturday, December 6, changed twice more in a three-day period. Finally, on Friday, twenty-four hours before the start of the concert, the Stones announced the event would take place at the Altamont Speedway, in the bare rolling hills near Livermore in Alameda County on the east side of the Bay. Hells Angel Bill Fritsch called the place “a goddamn, fucking, bereft pasture. In the middle of nothin'.” Numbers of wrecked stock cars lay scattered around the old track. Sweet Willie Tumbleweed described the barren location: “Couple barbed wire fences. Cow shit. Not even a barn.” Thousands of eager fans waited through the night for the gates to open at seven on Saturday morning.

Thousands more joined them as the day progressed. By the time the music started, over four hundred thousand people were in attendance. Richard and Valerie joined the vast crowd. They needed a ride and inveigled Lew Welch and Magda Cregg to take the long way round and swing through Frisco to pick them up on their way from Marin City. “We had to park miles away,” Magda recalled. As they walked along over the empty golden hills, joining the approaching throng, people began recognizing Brautigan and called out, “Hey, Richard! Richard! Richard!”

“He was feted everywhere,” Cregg said, “and this made him feel very good.”

“What a sweet California morning,” Richard Brautigan remarked amid the adulation.

Once they arrived at the performance area—where hot air balloons soared overhead, tie-dyed banners waved in the wind, and a four-foot stage (built for an earlier location and transported here the night before) stood surrounded by three-story-high scaffolding hung with huge speakers and dozens of lights—the two couples separated. Lew and Magda didn't see Richard and Valerie again for months. Brautigan, cashing in on his celebrity status and friendship with the Hells Angels (particularly Bill Fritsch), went backstage, where the other illustrious gathered.

Owsley Stanley, the acid mogul, chatted with the organizers of the Woodstock Festival. Survivors of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement mingled with the rock aristocracy of San Francisco. Timothy Leary, between court dates, was there with his wife, Rosemary. Emmett Grogan roared in on his “chopped red Harley fandango '74.” No love lost between Grogan and Leary, the psychedelic guru considered the founder of the Diggers “a junkie street-warrior, darling of the chic leftists [. . .] a notorious
agent provocateur
and seeder of dissension.”

Rolling Stone
had dispatched writers John Burks and Greil Marcus along with photographer Baron Wolman to cover the event. They arrived the night before and soon saw this outlaw impromptu happening was not going to be Woodstock West. Santana started playing at 10:00 am. As the group broke into their second song, an enormously fat man stripped off his clothing and began gyrating wildly amid the mass of people crushing in close to the stage. All at once, several Angels leaped forth, sawed-off pool cues in hand, and beat the naked kid into a bloody pulp. Jefferson Airplane were up next. When singer Marty Balin pleaded for sanity, he was coldcocked by an Angel and lay comatose on the stage as his band played “Somebody to Love.” Things were getting out of hand.

The Grateful Dead had been scheduled to follow the Airplane but canceled at the last minute after the attack on Balin. The Flying Burrito Brothers took their place and played beautifully. Their set was interrupted by the roar of choppers when the Oakland Angels arrived and drove their bikes down through a crowd pressed as close together as rush hour commuters. Up next came Crosby, Stills and Nash, their delicate harmonies upset by the violence erupting around them. The Angels
swilled beer and bashed at an overenthusiastic crowd attempting to clamber up onto a stage built too low for safety.

Gatz Hjortsberg was at Altamont, along with his wife and young daughter and several friends from Bolinas, who had given them a ride. Just back from his first stay in Montana, he marveled at the size of the crowd, equal to half the Treasure State's population. The Bolinas contingent had set up with blankets and picnic baskets high on the hill above the stage. Here the mood remained happy and calm. The music sounded far away, like the approach of a distant parade. Children played; food and joints circulated freely; the only violence to be seen was through a pair of binoculars. The little Bolinas group headed home at sunset, before the real trouble began.

As it grew dark and cold, bonfires built of creosote-treated fence posts were lit. The fiery scene reeked of damnation. More than an hour passed, and still the Rolling Stones had not appeared. The impatient crowd grew increasingly restive. Backstage, the band chatted and tuned their instruments. Furious, Bill Fritsch told Mick Jagger, “You better get the fuck out there before the place blows beyond sanity.” When Jagger replied they were “preparing” and would go “when good and ready,” Sweet William got really pissed. “I want to slap his face,” he said. “I told him, ‘People are gonna
die
out there. Get out there! You been told.'”