Jubilee Hitchhiker (15 page)

“Do you have them?” the twins whispered.

“Yeah.” Dick Porterfield held up the keys. “Should I put them in the car?”

“No,” they told him, “just unlock the door and roll down the window so we can steer it.” Dick helped the brothers push the car toward the street. “There was quite a long driveway,” Art recalled. “It was not a paved driveway. There were two tire-recessed areas, where they would drive in.” It was sixty or seventy feet to the street and they had a difficult time maneuvering the old junker over an indentation in the drive.

Once they got the car on the street, they pushed it for another block and a half. This was standard operating procedure for the Wical brothers. “We didn't want to take it out where the lights were.” At this point, Dick Porterfield climbed in, turned on the ignition, and put it in gear. “It was a stick shift, and we pushed it and had a heck of a time getting it started.” As it happened, the battery was low, although they weren't aware of it at the time. When the engine turned over, they all piled in, driving slowly away down Hayes and turning left onto West Eleventh, heading out into the open countryside. None of them really knew how to drive.

After a mile or so, the headlights grew dimmer and dimmer. Worried, the Wicals instructed Dick to slow down and turn around. Dick swung the wheel but it was too late. The engine died, and they couldn't get the car going again. “We tried to push it, and still it wouldn't start,” Art
remembered. In the end, they had to push the old Chevy back down Eleventh, grunting and sweating for more than a mile as they rolled the heavy car every foot of the way to Dick's house.

This misadventure was not Dick Porterfield's first automotive mishap. Walking home from a recent midnight ramble, he encountered a stranger lugging a five-gallon gas can up by the Moose Lodge. “Can I help you with that?” Dick inquired politely. He assisted the fellow with his heavy load, carrying the can all the way to where his car was parked on Chambers Street. The next morning when Bill Folston got up to drive to work, there wasn't any gas in his tank. The mysterious stranger had stolen every drop.

Their epic endeavor with the Folston car cured the Wical twins of their illicit midnight driving lessons. For Dick Porterfield, the experience led to a lifelong abhorrence of the automobile. Richard Brautigan never really learned how to drive. “I just don't have a love affair with the car,” he wrote in
People
magazine in 1981. “I started to learn how to drive when I was a teenager, but I lost interest quickly.”

seven: pounding at the gates of american literature

I
N THE SHORT story “⅓, ⅓, ⅓,”, Richard Brautigan's narrator “lived in a cardboard-lined shack of my own building.” In 1952, Dick Porterfield was seventeen, and the “shack” was his makeshift bedroom in the lean-to garage. Brautigan's description of the neighborhood fits Thirteenth and Hayes. “We lived in a poor part of town where the streets weren't paved. The street was nothing more than a big mud puddle that you had to walk around.” Dick Porterfield pounded on his typewriter late into the night, chasing his dreams in the tar paper shack. His fictional counterpart also typed the night away. “I was made a ⅓ partner because I had the typewriter.”

Richard Brautigan's portrait of the artist as Dick Porterfield rings true. The teenager began his writing career in the tar paper bedroom on Hayes Street. Crazy comic-book-inspired fantasies and ghost stories improvised to amuse his sisters were warm-up exercises for the all-nighters at the typewriter. “I started writing poetry when I was 17-years old,” Brautigan scrawled in a notebook dating from 1955. “At the age of twenty, I'm through writing poetry. Why does a poet stop writing poetry? I guess for the same reason the wind goes down in the evening.”

Brautigan never stopped writing poetry. Everything he wrote remained essentially poetic, even when labeled short stories or novels. Dick Porterfield's first written composition achieving any sort of recognition came at the end of his sophomore year, in 1951. He and Gary Stewart were in the same Social Living class “and [Dick] wrote a piece that a stand-up comedian would do.” Gary suggested that he read Dick's monologue aloud to the other students on the last day of school. Dick was too shy to face the class on his own.

Gary Stewart received permission from their teacher, Caroline Wood, to read Dick Porterfield's satiric piece on the dubious educational benefits of forcing kids to study such boring literary “classics” as
Silas Marner
. “It got laughs all the way through,” Gary remembered, “and applause afterwards.” The author, he recalled, “was very pleased.” At sixteen, Dick Porterfield had already determined to make writing his life's work.

Like many other teenage boys who dreamed of becoming writers in the early 1950s, Dick's idol was Ernest Hemingway. Papa's rough-and-tumble enthusiasms (his irresistible grin serene amid the carnage of bullrings, African safaris, and Gulf Stream blue-water fishing) had erased any lingering public notion that writers were sissies. Twain, London, and Crane had earlier blazed their own adventurous trails for boys of Hemingway's generation to follow. Peter Webster recalled, “Richard talked about [Hemingway] all the time.”

One of the earliest surviving Brautigan typescripts (original title, “A Refugee”) dates from 1955 or before. “Somebody from Hemingway Land” is a two-hundred-word short story. It concerned the
breakup of an interracial couple, an unusual theme for a young man living in the Pacific Northwest in the midfifties. The quirky humor of having a black woman interrupt hard-boiled dialogue with “Don't start talking like somebody from Hemingway Land,” sets this brief vignette apart from other high school Hemingway imitations. In “Argument,” an early poem from this same period, Brautigan wrote that he had met Hemingway in a dream and had a “terrible argument” with the older writer because he “thought that he was / a better writer / than I am.” His family and friends didn't remember the story or the poem but agreed Ernest Hemingway was Dick's favorite writer.

Young writers need mentors even as they search for heroic models. In the fall of his senior year at Eugene High, Dick Brautigan enrolled in a creative writing class taught by Juliette Claire Gibson, a native New Yorker who had originated the course years before. A remarkable, flamboyant woman, Miss Gibson began teaching at the school in 1926 and had been there long enough to have guided the parents of many of her current students through the mysteries of syntax. In 1930, she wrote “A Tribute,” the high school's alma mater. (“Stately she stands, our Alma Mater/Bright with the sunlight of youth . . .”) The young writer was drawn to his teacher. Like Brautigan, Miss Gibson was no ordinary individual. Many students considered her to be “weird,” the same pejorative they hung on her prize student.

Beneath Juliette Gibson's makeup and lingering perfume, her extravagant scarves and gaudy costume jewelry, beat a heart forged of steel. She had been tempered by the fires of adventure, wounded in action while serving with the Army Nursing Corps in the trenches of the First World War. Rumors abounded that her fiancé had been killed overseas, one of ten million fatalities in the bloody carnage of the European conflict. Juliette Gibson never married, living the rest of her life with Mildred Pearl Snow, another nurse, whom she met in France.

Dick Brautigan always sat by the window in Miss Gibson's classroom, slouching at his desk with his feet propped on the nearest empty chair. When reprimanded about his posture, he straightened up for a time, gradually sliding back into a lanky sprawl. The view out the window comprised an ivy-covered wall, the leaves a vivid scarlet in autumn. Brautigan never participated in class discussion, preferring to daydream. When Juliette Gibson held forth on poetry (she was fond of quoting from
Vagabond's House
, a book of sentimental Hawaiian-themed rhymes by Don Blanding, a friend she met during visits to the islands in the thirties and forties), young Dick appeared not to be listening, engrossed instead sketching outrageous cartoons: grotesque birds, dragons, caricatures. “Fiddle-faddle” was Miss Gibson's dismissive term for such flights of fancy.

Eileen Dawson, a junior enrolled in the creative writing class, remembered Miss Gibson chiding Brautigan for “wasting his time” with these drawings, encouraging him to concentrate on his writing. She recalled the teacher “praising him for his writing, whether it was short stories or poetry. She told him he could become a very good writer.” Juliette Gibson had her students stand in front of the class to read their work, but Dick Brautigan was too self-conscious. Eileen Dawson had no memory of him ever reading aloud. “He sat back and didn't comment one way or the other. He did the work. She commented often about the quality of it.”

A selection of student writing from Juliette Gibson's fall term was showcased in “Poet's Nook” (“Creative Writers Express Christmas Spirit”), a section of the December 19, 1952, edition of the
EHS News
. Compared with the clumsy rhymed doggerel of the other young writers, the short, sensitive poem signed “Richard Brautigan” deserved its premier position. It was his first published work.

The creative writing class worked on various forms of short fiction as well as poetry. “We wrote plays and skits and everything,” Eileen Dawson recalled, remembering many of Brautigan's early stories “tended toward science fiction.” E. William Laing, a fellow senior studying with Miss Gibson, had very few memories of his famous classmate (“a tall slender young man with blond hair and a very fair complexion”) outside the writing group. The budding writer remained so anonymous in high school that Laing didn't realize Dick Porterfield had changed his name until decades later, when he read
Trout Fishing in America
.

One of Brautigan's earliest tales stayed in Laing's memory throughout the years. “I remember a story Richard wrote about a fly-fishing trip to a remote stream,” Bill Laing recollected. “He was all alone several miles from the nearest community and was not having very good luck when he met an old fisherman.” Brautigan described the old man in detail, relating how he told him how to fish the stream and gave him several special flies. The old man's advice and flies did the trick. Richard caught lots of fish. On the way home, he stopped at the local community store for a soda. Richard described his encounter with the old fisherman. The owner knew the old man's name and recognized the flies as a special pattern only he had tied. “Then, he informed Richard the old man had died several years ago while fishing his favorite pool on his favorite trout stream, the one Richard had just described to him.”

Juliette Gibson's experience and sophistication set her apart from the 1950s provincialism of the Pacific Northwest, and she made it a goal to expose her students to a world larger than the one encompassed by the Willamette Valley. Literature provided the map charting a course to wider horizons. Miss Gibson submitted the best work produced in her class to a competition sponsored by the National High School Poetry Association. The winners were to be published nationally, an award more valuable than prize money for the aspiring young poets.

“Ten Creative Writers Rate in National Anthology Book” headed a brief story in the
EHS News
(1/30/53). All the writers were from Juliette Gibson's class. Richard Brautigan was not mentioned. A follow-up piece (“Poets' Prize Poems Published”) on April 10, 1953, listed “Dick Braudigan [
sic
]” as one of ten Eugene High students to be featured in the anthology. Bill Laing and Eileen Dawson also had poetry included.

Young America Sings: 1953 Anthology of Northwest States High School Poetry
(a cheaply produced volume in wraps bound with twine tied through twin punched holes), came out in the late spring with fifteen young writers from Eugene among the contributors. It was Richard Brautigan's first appearance in a book-length publication. His poem, “The Ochoco,” shines like a polished gemstone among a mountain of dross, its virtues magnified by proximity to lines like “Our kitchen lab in home ec / While we're cooking is a wreck.” Brautigan's poem celebrated the
mountain landscape of the Ochoco Range near the Folston family ranch in Eastern Oregon. Dick told Eileen Dawson that it was written after spending a summer vacation there. She remembered “it was a place he especially liked.”

Juliette Gibson retired from teaching in 1958. She stayed on in Eugene, remaining active in the American Legion and little theater productions. By the time she died at age eighty-one in 1971, Richard Brautigan had achieved international fame. Dick Brautigan never gave his mentor a second thought once he left Eugene. After the gates of American Literature swung open, he walked through and never looked back. Aside from a brief stopover on a reading tour, he avoided his home town, returning only in imagination to capture the Pacific Northwest within the pages of his enduring art.

eight: white wooden angel of love

D
URING HARVEST SEASON the summer after graduation, Dick Brautigan worked out at the packing plant for a buck forty an hour. He also continued his part-time odd jobs for Mrs. Manerude, living at home in his add-on writer's shack. Dick and Stan Oswald worked on the Eugene Fruit Growers Association beet line. Pete Webster's job was on the bean line. Although classmates and intramural basketball opponents, Dick and Peter had not been close friends in school.

Pete Webster played end on the varsity football team, earning the nickname “Moose.” The longest time he and Dick ever spent together was during the college entrance exams held over at the U of O. After the tests, Stan, Dick, and Pete headed for the student union building to shoot pool. “The two of them weren't concerned about the tests at all, although they passed them with flying colors. They had no intention of going on to college.”