Jubilee Hitchhiker (112 page)

Brautigan called her the next day. He was furious. “Why did you do that?” he demanded. “That was so rude! What did you think was going on?”

Sherry shouted, “I never want to see you again,” and slammed down the phone. A couple hours later, Richard arrived at her apartment door, carrying a frozen duck under one arm and a shopping bag containing cans of escargot and a hardback copy of the
Larousse Gastronomique
. “This was his apology,” Sherry recollected. “Will you please cook this duck? And here's the cookbook, and here's the escargot. I remember saying to him, like, never do that to me again. Never try
that again. And that was all that was ever said about it. I cooked
canard à l'orange
and the escargot and everything was happy again.”

Whenever Sherry spied a hard brick-shaped inedible loaf of what Richard called “hippie bread” lying on his kitchen table, she knew it came from a rival. Brautigan would say to her, “I met this girl on the bus, and then she took me to her house, and we made love, and then she gave me this bread.”

Outraged, Sherry responded, “God, you probably got a disease from her, and now you'll give it to me!” Although he called her “his main old lady,” Sherry knew “there would be all these other ones.” She remembered Richard's attitude when he told her Bob Creeley was “dumping Bobbie” and running off to Majorca with a young blond. He boasted to her of the times he and Edmund Shea boarded a city bus and bet each other a dollar who could pick up a girl first. “Get into her pants first,” Sherry elaborated. “I mean, that was exactly the way they phrased it. Whoever got laid first.”

Bad boy grab-ass philandering didn't always bring Brautigan much joy. Ron Turner, founder of Last Gasp Comics, recalled an evening in March of 1972 when things weren't going so well for Richard. Ron, an ex–Peace Corps volunteer, had met Brautigan at The Pub, a bar at Masonic and Geary, a gathering place for artists where Richard often hung out. Allen Ginsberg was in town, on his way to Australia for a monthlong trip with Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

That night, Allen was visiting with Richard at the Museum, while Ron hosted a huge Last Gasp party at The House of Good, an old deconsecrated synagogue. This beautiful building, located a few blocks further downtown on Geary, had been converted into a dance hall by Jonas Kovach (aka John Kovacs), an Auschwitz survivor and former Haight Street gay bar owner hoping to compete with Bill Graham's Winterland. Turner hired several bands for the Last Gasp event and had all his comic publications displayed for sale.

Shig Murao, manager and co-owner of City Lights, came with his girlfriend, among fifteen hundred partygoers at The House of Good. As the evening settled into its groove, Murao's girlfriend, tripping on acid, returned after leaving and confronted Turner near the front entrance. “Shig's had an accident! Shig's had an accident!” she blurted. Ron asked what he might do to help and soon found himself on a street corner a block away from his big party. “The car was a mess, and [Shig] was a mess, and they took him into jail,” Turner recalled. “And so, I've inherited his girlfriend who is stoned out of her mind.” Trying to help, he asked where she and Shig had been going.

“To see Allen over at Richard's house,” the girlfriend replied.

He was shorthanded that night and didn't want to leave the Last Gasp shindig, but Ron did the right thing and loaded Shig's girlfriend into his van, driving her over to Brautigan's place. Richard met them at the door, beverage in hand. He looked depressed, mumbling, “So, you want something to drink?” shambling into the kitchen to pour them both whiskey. Ensconced in the front room, Allen Ginsberg sat “all dressed in robes and white,” reading his poetry to a group of about fifteen devoted young men, who were “just hanging on every word.”

Brautigan seemed dressed in a peculiar fashion, uncharacteristically wearing a necktie. While Ron attempted to describe the predicament: Shig's accident, his own giant Last Gasp function, how Allen seemed obviously engaged—“I don't know what to do here”—the girlfriend noticed Richard's necktie for the first time. Entranced by the vibrating colors, she exclaimed, “That's the most beautiful tie I've ever seen in my life!”

Brautigan burst into tears. “That's the nicest thing anybody has said to me in days,” he sobbed.

Shig's girlfriend embraced Richard. “He's bubbling away,” Ron said. Turner finally caught Ginsberg's attention. “Allen,” he said, “We've got a problem. Shig—”

“I'm staying with Shig,” Ginsberg interjected.

“Not unless he gave you a key!” Ron told him about Shig's accident, told him Shig was in jail. Ginsberg went into immediate action, manning the phone, calling various police stations, “bing, bing, bing,” until he located Shig. “He's thinking really fast,” Ron recalled. “The bail was something like $500 to $800, and I said, ‘I don't think I've got that kind of money on me.'”

“No problem,” Ginsberg said, pulling up his white gown to reveal a bulging money belt containing his Australian travel stash. “He must have two grand in there,” Ron thought, watching Allen count out the bail money. They bundled into Ron's Ford van, gloomy Richard, Shig's tripping girlfriend, all fifteen Ginsberg fans, and Allen “sitting on the engine mount.” After dropping the fan club off on Polk Street, they proceeded to the cop shop on Ellis. Always the loner, Richard went off on his own then, vanishing into the night while Allen Ginsberg found himself surrounded by a crowd of autograph-seeking policemen. “Only in San Francisco,” Ron Turner said.

Robert Creeley used to stop by the Geary Street apartment to visit Brautigan and hang out at the Museum either before or after teaching his class at San Francisco State. “Those were really terrific times,” he recalled. Creeley remembered one occasion when he and Brautigan were “together in some classic gathering in drunken company.” They started sneaking out of the room. Brautigan “looks back at all these people variously plopped about and says, ‘Let's leave them with a “Gentle on the Mind” number.' Most happy times.”

Brautigan started seeing Jayne Walker again from time to time, cooking her occasional meals at Geary Street or going out for late-night ribs at soul food joints in the Fillmore. Other times, he took her to restaurants in Japantown, a dozen or so blocks down Geary from his apartment and to his favorite sushi bar in the Japan Center. Brautigan made it “perfectly clear” that he had been previously married and felt “that sort of exclusivity was a terrible mistake.” He told Jayne he would always have many partners, and at the time, she thought, “Maybe that's a good idea.” True to his word, Richard maintained his relationship with Sherry Vetter and continued prowling Bay Area bars in search of a random piece of strange.

One afternoon, Brautigan wandered into the Trident in Sausalito. Located at the end of a pier out in the Bay, the Trident was an upscale restaurant by day and a classy jazz club at night. Richard spotted some friends having a late lunch and joined them at their table. The journalist Mark Dowie (later an editor at
Mother Jones
who wrote the award-winning exposé of the Ford Pinto) sat with his fiancée, his sister, Ann, and her boyfriend, a married artist named Dugald Stermer. Brautigan knew the Dowies and Stermer. He pulled up a chair, sitting between Dugald and Mark's girlfriend, Mary Ann Gilderbloom, a tall, willowy young woman who, at five eight, weighed only 103 pounds.

Mary Ann, a fan of Richard's work, was fascinated by the way the staff (“beautiful women in diaphanous blouses”) fawned over him as he entered. Brautigan ordered a drink, and she noticed he was staring at her. “He has this way of looking at women when he's in his cups,” she recalled. “And he was looking at me.” Mary Ann was “kind of like oblivious” during this period of her life, a naive trait she felt was part of her charm. Richard was certainly charmed. He leaned in closer and asked, “Can I ask you out on a date?”

“Thank you very much,” Mary Ann replied, “but I am engaged.”

“Well, should you break up with the gentleman, then can I date you?”

“That's lovely,” she said. “Certainly. You'll be the first to hear.” Nothing more was said of it.

Early in April, feeling a need to get out of town for a while, Brautigan caught a Continental flight to New Mexico and traveled up to Santa Fe for two weeks. This time around, Richard stayed at La Fonda, at $21 per night a much classier establishment than his previous lodging in that city. As always, he got together with the Gordons, Jorge Fick, and other friends in the area. Partied out after a week, ensconced in room 422, Richard began his first work in months, writing a sequence of eight poems.

Throughout the spring, as the term on their lease for the house in Bolinas was about to expire, the Meltzers maintained an amiable correspondence with Richard. David wrote regarding the regular bills, garbage pickup, propane, etc. Brautigan stayed away but arranged to have the roof mended. David, Tina, and the kids left at the end of June, and Brautigan drove out to Bolinas with Sherry Vetter in her little blue VW bug to take possession of 6 Terrace Avenue. On the way, they stopped at a hardware store, stocking up on brooms, mops, and about a dozen kerosene lamps, shoving them into a little car already stuffed with sheets, towels, and pillows. As Sherry busied herself cleaning the house, sweeping away cobwebs and removing squirrel nests from the outdoor cooler in the kitchen, she heard Alfred Parsons drive up in his white Mercedes.

Richard went out to greet him. Sherry watched from the deck balcony as Richard counted out money from his pocket into the old white-haired man's hand. Brautigan later told her that he was paying for the house in cash, $30,000 in hundred-dollar bills. As the purchase had been made by check back in January, this clearly wasn't true. What Richard actually paid for and just how much money he really gave to Mr. Parsons remains a mystery, his illusionary transaction another curious practical joke.

Richard and Nancy Hodge were among Richard's first Bolinas visitors, spending a weekend there shortly after he took possession of the place. Brautigan had a strange woman with him on that occasion. She wasn't familiar to Brautigan's attorney and his wife, who both knew Sherry Vetter. Richard had gone out to the house with Sherry a few days before, cleaning, moving furniture, and preparing a guest bedroom for the Hodges “with fresh flowers and fresh sheets on the bed.”

At a Page Street dinner, Brautigan had asked Nancy Hodge to make curtains for the Bolinas house. Prior to their visit, Nancy bought the material (“he told me what he wanted”) at a fabric store on Geary Street. Nancy brought her little portable sewing machine and spent “about ten hours” stitching up the curtains.

Tina Meltzer had gotten in touch with Richard before the end of May, sending news of their upcoming June rummage sale. At Brautigan's request, she sent him a list of the larger household items (braided rugs, bookcases, and antique dressers) they had for sale. Among the offerings was an “autoharp with case $20.” Richard wasn't interested. Having gone through an unsuccessful guitar phase, he had no further aspirations for an alternate career singing folk songs in coffeehouses. He left the autoharp strumming to his buddy Michael McClure.

Richard and Michael were not friends much longer. “It was Richard buying the house that David and Tina lived in right out from under them and their two children that was the straw that broke my camel's back,” McClure wrote in 1985 about why he quit speaking to Brautigan. David
Meltzer emphatically denied any such assertion. “There are all kinds of stories that like Richard threw us out and all that,” he said, “That's absolutely not so. These stories I think were generated by friends in Bolinas.”

Erik Weber had a different take on why Richard and Michael's friendship ended. From his perspective, it was all about money. “That's what Richard told me,” Erik recounted. “He said, ‘Michael asked me for a lot of money, and I turned him down.'” An earlier loan to McClure had gone unpaid. When Erik Weber's truck needed major repairs, he borrowed $2,000 from Brautigan to get the job done. Erik promised to repay the amount in monthly installments, and after he did just that, Richard told him on the phone, “You're the only person who has ever paid me back. Unlike Michael.”

Siew-Hwa Beh, Richard's girlfriend in the mid-1970s, heard much the same story years later. “When Brautigan made money, McClure wanted to borrow money from Richard for a down payment on a house,” she said. “Richard refused to loan the money because he felt that if he did that it might break up their friendship. He felt that once he loaned friends money things become different. But their friendship ended anyway because he wouldn't give him the money.”

Brautigan had strong feelings about such transactions. In a fatherly way, he once gave his daughter some advice. “Never loan your friends any money,” he told Ianthe, “or you will always be disappointed.” It was best, he counseled, always to consider any “loan” to be a “gift.” That way, when there were no expectations, there could be no regrets. In 1978, Ron and Kitty Loewinsohn needed to come up with a large sum for the down payment on a house they wanted to buy in Berkeley. Richard gave them the money, but the Loewinsohns considered it a loan. Influenced by Brautigan's own plaque-making proclivities, which Ron observed on a trip to Montana in the summer of 1974, he nailed an engraved bronze plaque to a post in the basement of his new house. It read: the richard brautigan memorial house.

“Ron paid him back every cent,” Kitty said. Loewinsohn earned the money teaching summer school. Kitty thought “this was one reason why Richard really trusted Ron, although it was in the context of a whole life they had shared. He just felt that this was a man who kept his word, and if he said he was going to pay him back, he would do it.” She sensed that Brautigan “had had unfortunate experiences with other people.”