Jubilee Hitchhiker (16 page)

Pete worked the night shift at the cannery, eleven and a half hours, from 6:30 PM to 6:30 AM, with a half hour off for “lunch.” Putting in a six-night week, he cleared $100 in his pay envelope. Dick and Stan worked days. Ten-and-a-half-hour shifts, carrying fresh produce in from the carts for cleaning and grading, or at the other end, toting loads of steaming cans as they came sealed from the cooker. Sometimes, the schedules overlapped. One hot afternoon, the line shut down and the three young men decided to go fishing. Pete owned a '37 Ford, so he provided transportation. “It was my first time fishing with Richard and my first time on the McKenzie River.”

The two became fast friends after that, fishing together “at every opportunity.” Absent stepfathers provided another bond. Having used the name “Webster” all his life, Pete also found out abruptly his senior year that his blood father bore a different last name. Just as school officials asked Dick Porterfield about “Brautigan,” they inquired if Peter Webster wanted “McGuire” on his diploma. The two boys made opposing decisions. Pete stuck with Webster.

Many of the Pacific Northwest streams mentioned in
Trout Fishing in America
(“Hayman Creek, Graveyard Creek”) were fictitious. Grider Creek and Tom Martin Creek (chapter titles in the novel) actually exist. Both are tributaries of the Klamath, bracketing the tiny streamside town of Seiad Valley in Siskiyou County, California, south of the Oregon line two hundred miles from Eugene. Much too far for a day trip. Brautigan camped several days there when he fished the area.

Richard Brautigan recalled the Long Tom River in two
Revenge of the Lawn
short stories. In “Forgiven,” he fished alone: “The Long Tom River was forty miles away. I usually hitch-hiked there late in the afternoon and would leave in the twilight to hitch-hike the forty miles back home.” The Long Tom flowed out of Fern Ridge Reservoir. Peter Webster cherished a memory of fishing
a quarter-mile stretch with Dick. “It was called a river, but the part we fished was about twelve feet wide and eighteen inches deep.” Pete and Dick caught eight little six- to ten-inch cutthroat trout that morning. Dick brought along a frying pan and some spuds, and they fried the fish over a wood fire. Brautigan wrote that the flesh of the humpbacked trout “tasted sweet as the kisses of Esmeralda.”

Peter recalled another fishing trip east toward Bend. “If you blinked you would miss Indian Creek.” This beautiful little stream boasted numbers of small trout. They fished wet in their Levi's and sneakers, casting Royal Coachmen with eight-and-a-half-foot fiberglass fly rods. Dick wore a fishing vest with a sheepskin pad on which he hooked his extra flies. “We hiked and waded upstream for about two miles and discovered some gorgeous waterfalls. One was fifty feet high. We climbed around it and fished the upper stream. We caught no fish that day but had the time of our lives.”

All summer long, Dick Brautigan maintained a cavalier attitude toward his Eugene Fruit Growers Association paychecks. Mrs. Manerude provided his spending money, and he did not foresee a long career in the canning industry. “He'd throw his paycheck,” Mary Lou remembered, “wrap it up in a ball and throw it up there.” She gestured toward the top of the fridge. “Never cash them. And one day I was sick, and this woman come in to clean the house, and she got up there, and she found a whole sack full of those checks.” When the sack was brought to Dick's attention, he took it downtown and opened a bank account.

That summer after graduation, the young writer started sending his stories and poems out to magazines and newspapers. Rejection slips began appearing in the Folston mailbox. “He was trying to sell some of his writings, and they all came back,” Barbara remembered. “And how bad he felt when they came back.” From time to time, good news arrived. On Monday, August 24, 1953, “A Cigarette Butt,” a poem by Richard Brautigan, appeared below the political cartoon on the editorial page of the Eugene
Register-Guard
. No paycheck was involved.

Acceptance by the
Oregonian
, a statewide daily published in Portland, meant climbing a higher rung up the ladder. The newspaper's poetry editor, Ethel Romig Fuller, was a tiny woman weighing under one hundred pounds. Her 1927 poem “Proof” was included in
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
and read by Arthur Godfrey on his national radio program. Godfrey said the author was unknown. In fact, Mrs. Fuller had published three books of verse and was one of only three Oregonians belonging to the Poetry Society of America.

Governor Paul Paterson declared October 15, 1953, to be Oregon Poetry Day. As part of the program, the
Sunday Oregonian Magazine
(10/11) devoted an entire page to local poetry: (“State Recognizes Oregon Poets.”) Nineteen poets appeared, including Richard Brautigan of Eugene. His six-line poem, “Moonlight on a Cemetery,” contained images and themes he would return to again and again throughout his long career. The familiar elements (brevity, sentiment, melancholy, mordant wit) of a typical “Brautigan” poem were already in place. It was his first publication to reach an audience wider than the boundaries of his hometown.

A month and a half later, his “Winter Sunset” appeared in the
Sunday Oregonian Magazine
, (11/29/53) in “Oregonian Verse,” Ethel Romig Fuller's regular column of “1st Publication Poetry.” Brautigan's three-line haiku remained spiritually true to its model and revealed the poet understood the seasonal nuances of this antique Japanese form. “I was seventeen and then eighteen and began to read Japanese haiku poetry from the Seventeenth century,” Brautigan wrote two decades later.
“I read Bashō and Issa. I liked the way they used language concentrating emotion, detail and image until they arrived at a form of dew-like steel.”

In the fall of 1953, Peter Webster, a deeply religious young man, enrolled as a freshman at Northwest Christian College, whose campus stands adjacent to the University of Oregon. As part of Pete's financial arrangement, NCC assigned him to maintain their grounds during the summer. He mowed the grass and ran the college sprinkler system. Between jobs, he'd head over to the Folston place and hang out. “I remember Pete used to stay until we about run out of groceries,” Mary Lou Folston said. “Three weeks at a stretch, you know. It wasn't just potatoes and a piece of meat. I would spend hours and hours cooking, making cakes, pastry, fancy salads, and everything.”

Peter Webster remembered things differently. Once, when he was staying with Dick over on Hayes Street, his friend offered him something to eat. “He went to the refrigerator, and the only thing that was there was a half a loaf of bread. So, we each took a piece of bread, no butter, and then he had a little packet of Kool-Aid, and no sugar, and he mixed up the Kool-Aid and served the bread on a plate. And it was like having communion. Here was bread and Kool-Aid representing the wine. And there couldn't have been any more sacred moment than when he offered me everything he had. That was the only thing there was. The refrigerator was bare.”

Dick Brautigan didn't regard this simple meal in the same religious light. “He was in love with nature and with all the out of doors,” Peter admitted, “but as far as knowing a Christian faith, he claimed to be an atheist.”

When he stayed over, Pete camped out in Dick's lean-to bedroom. He had his old jalopy and he and Dick and Barbara drove around together a lot that summer, looking for fun. B.J. never mentioned having a secret crush on Pete. The wet lawns over on campus suggested night crawler hunting. Dick Brautigan was back in the worm business, this time with Pete Webster. All summer long and well into the fall, the two young men gathered night crawlers on the vast combined grounds of NCC and the U of O. They carried one- or two-quart glass jars, dropping in the worms after they pounced on them. One night, working until dawn, Dick and Pete caught over fifteen hundred worms.

They sold the night crawlers for a penny apiece to the Cedar Flats Grocery Store, a little crossroads place about twelve miles up the McKenzie out of Eugene. Brautigan wrote of selling night crawlers in
So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
, at “the Crossroads Filling Station . . . small, tired, run by an old man who wasn't much interested in selling gas. He sold worms to passing fishermen and pop to thirsty kids during the summer.”

Once the school year started, Pete's days were taken up with class work. In the evenings, often long after midnight, he'd drive over to Dick's place with his portable typewriter. Knowing his friend to be a night owl, he counted on finding him awake at any hour. The outside entrance to Dick's add-on bedroom gave his pals easy anonymous access. Pete typed term papers there, while Dick worked on poetry or short stories. Peter Webster remembered often leaving at six in the morning after these all-night sessions.

Other nights, Dick Brautigan wandered the streets of Eugene alone. During the summer, he went to the movies every day off from the packing plant when he wasn't fishing or out catching worms with Pete. Afterward, he might roam about until dawn. Two early stories written during this period deal with voyeurism. A year or so later, Brautigan's nocturnal wanderings caused him to be suspected as a Peeping Tom. “He loved going downtown at night,” his sister recalled,
“because he was a loner, I guess. The darkness didn't bother him. I was always afraid to go with him when it was that dark.”

Recovering from a spinal virus infection all that year, Barbara spent less and less time with her brother, and he roamed the nighttime streets alone. Dick was still a virgin at twenty, yet a Brautigan story from this period (“in god's arms”) describes making love in a graveyard. The Peeping Tom stories might also have sprung from fantasy. Some thought otherwise. Donald Hiebert claimed Brautigan used to “spy” on his mother and stepfather while they engaged in sex.

“The Egg Hunter,” a first-person narrative written in a faux-naive colloquial style, a dimwit's account of snooping on a young couple making love. “He did somethin I couldnt hardly believe at all I mean they was just like sheep and dogs and cows and things. I watched them do it. It sure made me feel pretty funny all over.” Adding a professional touch, Brautigan typed a thirty-dash—journalism's symbol marking the end of a piece of copy—at the conclusion of his seven-hundred-word story.

The other early tale, “The Flower Burner,” was submitted to (and rejected by) Margarita G. Smith at
Mademoiselle
. It is an odd faux-Western featuring an eccentric cast of characters who might seamlessly step into any of Brautigan's later fictions. The story begins, “I sure like to hide in the bushes and watch Penny swim naked, because she's just about the prettiest Indian in the whole county.” The narrator prefers reading Mickey Spillane to the Bible, throws stones at a rattlesnake, talks to a man who thinks he's a bird, and watches Mrs. Dragoo burn irises in her backyard. At twenty, young Dick Brautigan had found his métier.

A new poem, “The Ageless Ones,” appeared in Ethel Romig Fuller's poetry column on February 7, 1954, in what
The Sunday Oregonian
now called the
Northwest Magazine
. He would not publish again until June 22, when another poem ran on the editorial page of the
Register-Guard
. All through that winter and spring, Dick devoted his nights to writing and peregrination. Daylight hours were for sleeping. The add-on bedroom provided a certain measure of illusory independence. Dick had his own typewriter and telephone but was still living at home under his parents' supervision, and his bohemian habits soon began to irritate the Folstons.

In this period of nocturnal wandering, Brautigan began his lifelong habit of carrying a cheap pocket notebook wherever he went. When an idea sprang into his mind on the midnight streets of Eugene, he stopped and jotted it down under the pooled yellow light of a streetlamp. Sometimes in the wee hours, Pete and Dick met at Snappy Service, an all-night restaurant on Olive Street between Eighth and Broadway. Dick favored their hotcakes. Snappy Service served a stack of three and a cup of coffee for thirty-five cents. “They kept the coffee coming and coming,” Pete remembered. “We'd stay there for four or five hours.” Dick talked about his writing and the artistic economy he learned from reading Hemingway. “Some people like to peel life like an apple,” Brautigan said, “but I like to slice it to the core.”

Peter Webster recalled his friend's frustration with his early work. He often watched him tear up stories and poetry. “Richard destroyed a lot of his writings [in a] fit of fury. Either they had not been accepted or they weren't up to his standards.” In spite of these frequent acts of critical self-destruction, many of Brautigan's first tentative efforts survive today. The young writer was already a dedicated artist, completely focused on his projected life's work.

That fall, Dick Brautigan took Peter Webster pheasant hunting in the fields west of Eugene. It was the first time in his life Pete had ever hunted. He lacked a natural gift for the sport. “I emptied
a whole box of shells that day and never hit a thing. Richard was losing his patience with me.” The impatient instructor bagged a couple pheasants, but when the boys flushed a covey of quail they both missed every one.

It was bitterly cold (barely fifteen degrees) on a duck-hunting expedition out to Fern Hill Reservoir, and the boys built a crude lean-to, huddling together for warmth, trying to sleep. Eventually, they gave up and retreated to the car, where they kept the heater on and the windows cracked. At dawn, having barely slept, they crouched, shivering with their shotguns in the frozen cattails, waiting for the ducks that never came.

Pete was a frequent visitor at the Folston home, but Dick Brautigan rarely ventured over to the Webster place at 41 Madison Street, a household as dysfunctional as his own. At the time, there were eight Webster children, almost all by different fathers. Their mother was away in California, working for the Shrine Circus in San Francisco. The kids were being raised by their grandmother, Lydia Smith (known as Alice), a short, resolute woman whom they all called “Mom.”