Jubilee Hitchhiker (103 page)

Rip Torn described the scene in “Blunder Brothers: A Memoir.” “Down to his skivvies, Richard headed for the mattress on the porch. He poked his head in the door. ‘Ah, dammit! No blanket. I hate to ask you, but I'd hate worse to have to get dressed again.' I was going to sleep in the car, where the bedding was. ‘Sure, Richard, I'll get you one.' He sighed and scratched. ‘You see, I talked too much.' But as he lamented, there came a shy knock at the door, and in walked the redheaded nurse. By the time I got back up, they were out on the porch and on the mattress.”

Rip brought the blanket and a snort of Jim Beam, invited onto the porch by Richard, who said they didn't care if he looked. “She's beautiful. Give old Rip a look. It'll keep him warm.” Torn left the bourbon behind. The nurse worked an early shift and was gone before anyone else awoke. She forgot to cover “the bare-assed poet,” and Richard caught cold in the chill dawn.

He had another reading that afternoon at UC Davis, ten miles from Sacramento. The Blunder Brothers provided the ride. After Davis, Richard had four days off from his tour. Or so he thought. A change of scheduling made him pencil in Sonoma State for the morning of May 4. With only three days left for fishing, they drove straight from Davis to Sierra City, in the Tahoe National Forest. By the time they made camp, it was dark.

Richard camped much the same as he had as a boy, sleeping on the ground wrapped in a blanket. They bivouacked right off the road in a clearing gnarly with exposed roots and rocks. Rip wrote of motorcycles roaring by at five in the morning. Fishing the North Fork of the Feather proved slow the next day. “Nobody got any fish,” Miller said. Richard called it “fishing over mausoleums.” They decided to head to Oroville for chicken fried steaks. At a grocery/tackle shop, stocking up on hooks and jars of salmon eggs, they learned from the proprietor that the Feather had been rendered sterile through the misguided efforts the Fish and Game Department. He told them to give the Yuba River a try.

The gang fished the rushing snowmelt of the Yuba that afternoon. Miller admitted to not being much of a fisherman. “I didn't know how to fish,” he said. “I just went up with these guys. And Bruce didn't know how to fish.” Even so, they all had a great time. Rip, a passionate fisherman, marveled “at how a trout could come rocketing up to snatch a bit of bait in the tumbling white water.” He admired the “effortless grace” of Richard's casting. The poet was poetry in motion.”

They fished with spinners and eggs, catching trout in water tumbling past rusted mining machinery. Tired of bait-fishing, Brautigan rigged Torn's line with a light tippet and a Royal Coachman. “See right there?” Richard pointed. “That big boulder in the cascade? There's fish behind that
boulder. You can't see them because of the bubbles, but they can't see you either. Cast right where that rill comes over that crack in the stone.”

Rip did as instructed and hooked into a two-pound rainbow he had to chase down the river, the fish cartwheeling in a quicksilver dazzle above the current. Examining the big rainbow's stomach contents, mainly “sticks and gravel,” Brautigan shared more of his Trout Fisherman in America expertise. “These are caddis houses or casements,” he said, pulling a tiny cream-colored larva from its shell. “And this little fellow is the caddis worm. I've caught a lot of fish using these on a fine hook.”

Having landed enough trout for dinner, the gang gathered at “a ghostly old gold camp [ . . . ] on the river, across the road from a high butte.” Richard got out his cast-iron skillet and displayed a streamside cooking technique he'd perfected during boyhood excursions on the McKenzie. He fried the fish with bacon and onions. In another pan, they cooked up spuds and parsley, a great feast, augmented by lemons and ketchup. “Nothing compares with fish that are taken right from the water to the flame,” Rip Torn reminisced.

By nightfall, Richard wasn't doing so well. Once the sun went down, it turned very cold. Rip felt “it was like opening the door on a freezer.” Brautigan shivered and shook, the phlegm rattling deep in his chest at every breath. He'd speared himself with the barbecue fork while cooking, and his hand was red and swollen. Rip thought it resembled a “lobster claw.” Bundled in his blanket and wedged between two boulders, Richard trembled in his sleep. Bruce Dunn wondered, half-seriously, whether he'd make it through the night.

Rip suggested strong medicine, proposing a run to the nearest bar. After covering Brautigan with an extra blanket, Rip and Bruce set off in search of hooch. The best they could come up with was some cheap California rotgut brandy scored at a local roadhouse. It must have done the trick. Brautigan, much the worse for wear, made it to Sonoma State in time for his reading the next morning.

At the end of the first week of May, Brautigan read to an audience of about seven hundred at the First Unitarian Universalist Church in San Francisco, sponsored by the San Francisco State College Poetry Center. There was a $2 admission. Helen Brann flew out for the occasion, pleased to see copies of
Rommel
in bookstores all over town. It was the first time Helen heard Richard read from his work. Kendrick Rand sat in the pew behind her. He brought a half-gallon of white wine “to share with him in anticipation of sitting around afterwards.” Richard grabbed the jug in its concealing paper bag, carrying it up with him onto the simple Unitarian-style sanctuary, a raised oval stage covered with Oriental carpets. Brautigan poured a glass of wine, setting it on the pulpit to his left, and placed the jug at his feet within easy reach. Richard wore jeans, a blue vest, and a long blue woolen scarf. Terry Link, a reporter for
Rolling Stone
, thought it looked “almost like a priest's stole.”

As the church filled with people, Brautigan swigged wine and paced the platform, nervously swinging his arms. Every so often, he'd “do a few knee squats, like an athlete warming up,” Link observed. Richard began the reading with recent poems. “Voluntary Quicksand,” a reaction to the shootings at Kent State, was written that very morning. Other poetry written during the past few weeks he referred to as “short, flat, funky poems,” saying they “lie like mush on a page.” The audience reaction was muted. Perhaps the sepulchral atmosphere in the church had something to
do with it. “I have a feeling this whole audience is prose writers,” Brautigan quipped. “For a while I thought I was reading in a mortuary. I guess a church is the same thing.”

Changing the pace, Richard switched to more familiar material from
The Pill.
“Surefire things,” Kendrick Rand said, “that always sort of got the audience going.” This time, “they bombed.” Brautigan tried to talk his way out of a tight spot. Between sips of wine, Richard said the purpose of the poet was not to write good poems, but instead “to work out the possibilities of language and the human condition.” The biggest round of applause came when he announced his upcoming book of short stories would contain two “lost” chapters left out of
Trout Fishing in America
.

Afterward, Brautigan asked Kendrick Rand, “Well, what did you think?” His friend told him that the reading “went over like a lead balloon.”

“I guess,” Richard replied.

“I mean, everyone's sitting in pews and there's the Bible and the hymnal in front of you and you're up there reading your poetry about your dick and screwing,” Rand said. “I think everybody was aware that they were in a church and they really felt uncomfortable with the subject matter.”

Helen Brann hung out with Richard for the next couple days. “It was like walking around with a movie star,” she recalled. He took her to his favorite restaurants and bars. When they walked along the street together, strangers approached to ask for his autograph. Richard always took the time to stop and talk politely with his fans. “He was marvelous with them,” Helen said. “He was very more composed and more charming than a lot of movie stars that I've been with.”

Not everyone was an autograph-seeker. Many who passed them on the street simply said, “Hi, Richard,” and Brautigan would return the greeting.

“Do you know that person?” Helen asked.

“No,” Brautigan replied. “I've never seen him before in my life.”

At Enrico's or Vanessi's, “quiet places” where they went to eat, pretty young girls would come over to him, which absolutely delighted him. “When he came east it didn't happen at all,” Helen Brann observed. “Nobody knew him really. He was never happy in New York at all. It was an alien place.”

Brautigan was scheduled to read at UC Santa Barbara in the middle of May. His $200 Reading Circuit Tour standard fee was double what he'd last received there. Richard honored his year-old pledge about demanding more money, buying Kendrick Rand a ticket to fly down and attend the event. Valerie Estes, Kendrick, and his girlfriend, Annie, waited for Richard at the terminal. Carlos Santana and his band were on the same flight, also heading for a gig in Santa Barbara. Kendrick and Richard knew most of the musicians, and they partied together on the short trip down the coast.

The church where Brautigan read this time was not “a big stone edifice” but a more modern structure with folding chairs. Kendrick observed Richard off the top of his form that night after three events in three days. “It wasn't his greatest poetry reading.” Valerie had looked forward to a fun weekend in Santa Barbara with the Rands, but Richard heard from Gary Snyder about a ceremonial walk around Mount Tamalpais he promised to attend. He decided, to her “dismay,” to return immediately to San Francisco. This meant sitting up all night on a Greyhound bus. Kendrick Rand observed “he had a commitment and that was one of the wonderful things about Richard.”

Jack Shoemaker traveled down to a reading in Claremont with Richard during this period, when he telescoped his appearance to what he called a “quick trick,” extremely short readings,
“to leave them wanting more.” Shoemaker thought Brautigan's abbreviated turn “annoyed lots of folks who felt ripped-off by Richard accepting a decent fee and then reading two dozen short poems.” At Claremont, it was all over in under fifteen minutes. Brautigan “cackled” and walked off the stage.

The California Poetry Reading Tour ended at 8:00 pm, on May 27, at UC Santa Cruz. Posters around the campus advertised the event as a “poetry diddey-wah.” Lew Welch shared the stage. Brautigan began by begging for something to drink: “Water, water. Can anyone get us a pitcher of water?”

“They promised us water,” Welch complained. “We came here for free, man.” Not exactly the truth. Richard received $200 for his appearance.

Waiting for water to arrive, Brautigan and Welch discussed the reading order. Richard listed a number of new poems, and Lew asked, “What are you rejecting?”

“Lighthouse,” Brautigan replied.

“All right. Enough! Enough!” the audience cried.

After more easy bantering, Richard read a few of his most recent poems. “It's very hard to follow Richard,” Lew said, when he took over the podium. “Oh, he's bringing out his new book, folks. He has a new book every two weeks. They call it prolific. You know what we say about girls when they do that?”

“The muse has made me an easy lay,” Richard replied.

“Right on!” Lew Welch shouted.

Rommel
's sales remained brisk, propelled by the energy of Brautigan's meteoric success, but this time around the reviews were somewhat less than scintillating. Many of the poems were slight, even by Richard's minimalist standards, and four were merely blank pages with titles attached. “A cloying, cute, half-assed collection of rather uninteresting tripe,” sniffed the
Los Angeles Free Press
, suggesting Brautigan “may yet turn into the Rod McKuen of the hip set.” Jonathan Williams, poet and publisher of the Jargon Press, wrote in
Parnassus 1
that “there is less here than meets the eye [. . .]” saying Brautigan “writes for kids who eat macrobiotic food [. . .] You'd starve to death on these no-cal poems.”

In early spring, two East Coast journalists showed up in Frisco wanting to talk with Brautigan. Richard had met John Stickney in Boston. The proposed
Life
magazine article had been approved, and he was in town on assignment. Stickney spent some time at “the Museum” and traveled with Richard and Valerie up into the mountains outside the city, where photographer Vernon Merritt posed Brautigan crouching on a rock beside a stream turbulent from recent rains. They spotted a celery stalk sweeping along on the runoff, and Richard launched in on an improvised verbal riff, his voice rising in high-pitched excitement: “That could be the first hors d'oeuvre! Suppose there were more, an entire table full of them, canapés and all? Then a bar, with drinks and setups for everybody! And finally an entire cocktail party, man, floating down this crazy stream!”

Brautigan was more reserved when he met Bruce Cook in a North Beach coffee shop. Cook, the book review editor of the
National Observer
, was writing about the Beat Generation. Richard sat at the top of his list of younger authors “who had come to be known as writers of the 1960s.” Richard brought Valerie to the interview but didn't have much to say. He had known most of the principal actors in the beat drama and had shared an apartment with Welch and Whalen, but
Brautigan remained reticent about the whole affair. “My involvement with that was only on the very edge,” he told Cook, “and only after the Beat thing had died down.”

Brautigan described his work methods, typing away at a hundred words per minute, which reminded Cook of Kerouac's “old Spontaneous Prose technique.” “I get it down as fast as possible,” Brautigan acknowledged. “I can't spend time on character delineation and situation. I just let it come out.” Whenever he got stuck, Richard went out and saw two or three movies, “the worse they are the better,” and that got his juices flowing again. Cook thought Brautigan appeared “spooked” and “uneasy,” uncomfortable that he had said too much. Before rushing off in such a great hurry he almost left Valerie behind, Richard mentioned Michael McClure. “McClure's a good friend,” he said. “You ought to talk to him about this stuff. Not me.”