Jubilee Hitchhiker (20 page)

The young writer's health was not good. The chill rainy weather caused him to be frequently sick that fall. Once, on a visit to Gary Stewart's parents, he found himself down on his knees, praying with the family. Dick thought it was “a lovely experience,” one he would never forget. Afterward, alone in his room, he prayed on his knees twice every day.

Through poverty and illness and newfound religious fervor, Dick Brautigan continued to write, his work seemingly all that held him together. He started a new book of poetry, “Behold This Place,” considering it half-done by the second week of December. He changed the title of the book of short stories in progress from “These Few Precious Days” to “What a Strange Place This Is”
and felt it was “coming along well.” By mid-December, he had completed thirty stories, many extremely brief, half a page or less in length. He thought them “awfully good.”

A letter to Gary Stewart postmarked 4:30 PM, December 12, 1955, exposed the raw nerves of his emotions. Writing on another rainy evening, Dick declared, “I am sad a mountain. Why? Ohhhh, because. I think. That I will die before I am 23-years-old. That I will never enchant Linda. (Soon my huger than spring love for her will start to destroy me.) If I am not accepted as an American genius this coming year, I will be destroyed.” Dick wrote that he needed fame to gain the confidence “to enchant Linda, whom I cannot live without.”

Dick told Gary about his recent writing. “All for the beautiful Linda. All for mankind. I crawl around in my puke and tears. Will it be in vain[?]” In an attempt to lighten things up, he expressed his amazement about recently discovering that women found him attractive. It had taken him an hour to reach the middle of the second page, erasing his words over and over. Levity just wasn't in him on this particular night. “I have a strong feeling,” he wrote, “that I will never see you again in this life time. [As it turned out, he never did.] I am obsessed with death. I have been ever since I was 11-years-old [. . .] I am afraid of everything in this world except death.”

Acknowledging that his letters were “intense experiences,” Brautigan summed up his present condition succinctly: “I am out of work and broke and need money like crazy [. . .] Gary, you've never really lived until you're flat broke and starving to death.” Dick knew poverty was often an artist's lot in life. In fact, he believed it to be beneficial for the artist. “It increases his capacity for pity.” Although his own poverty was fast “reaching the harmful stage,” his propensity for optimistic self-delusion remained undiminished, and he included a fair copy of a short story “that will help me become famous.” “First Cat in the Rain,” was only eight sentences long.

“All for the beautiful Linda,” Dick wrote for the second time. “All for mankind. Without Linda I am nothing. I have nothing. I will be nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.” Then, stepping back to honestly assess his situation, he added a succinct single line: “Love will kill me.” As the hours passed, his mood swung back and forth, a pendulum ticking between gentle irony and deep despair. “Following my mind is like following an enchanted rabbit though a strange forest,” Dick observed.

It was now past midnight. The rain pattered down outside. Dick had been working on his letter for hours. The premonition that he would not see his friend Gary ever again steeped him in melancholy. “Remember duck hunting?” he wrote in conclusion. “Oh, those were the days! Gone forever. So many things gone forever. So many things gone forever. So many things gone forever. A boy with yellow hair. A boy with red hair. Hunting ducks. Gone forever.”

nine: the rub of a strange cat

O
N WEDNESDAY EVENING, December 14, 1955, the fragile texture of Dick Brautigan's little world (poverty, newfound religious fervor, heartbreak, artistic endeavor) unraveled completely. Feeling panicked because his folks tried convincing him to seek psychiatric help, he walked over to the Northwest Christian College campus. Desperately short of cash, he dropped in on Peter Webster's dorm room and asked for a loan of $5. Pete said only after Dick repaid the twenty bucks he already owed him. Brautigan flew into a rage and stormed out.

Dick wandered the wet streets of Eugene, his emotions boiling over in a frenzy. He was so mad he wanted to kill somebody. A long walk led him to 41 Madison Street. He went in to talk with Edna. Dick spilled out his feelings in a passionate, uncontrollable torrent. The way Linda utterly ignored him drove him almost crazy. Mrs. Webster listened patiently, trying to offer advice, yet nothing she said was of any comfort. She followed Dick outside and prevented him from punching his fist into the garage door. “He was so angry when he left here that he just felt like doing something irrational.”

Lost in fury, wanting to destroy somebody, anybody, even himself, Dick Brautigan wandered downtown to the public library, one of his favorite haunts. Across the street, on the corner of Willamette and Eleventh, stood city hall. Originally built as the Eugene High School in 1903, the vine-covered building had been used for municipal purposes since 1915. Above the portico enclosing the front steps, an oblong sign glowed like a beacon of salvation in the night: POLICE. He logically assumed the police would offer him protection from himself.

Officer William Smith manned the desk when Dick Brautigan lurched into the station, distraught and wild-eyed. “I want to go to jail,” he demanded. Dick told the policeman he was afraid of what he might do to himself and others, asking to be locked up. Officer Smith attempted to humor the disturbed youth. He said only criminals went to jail.

Dick walked back out onto the street and found a rock. Returning to the police station in city hall, he again faced Officer Smith. “I am a criminal,” Brautigan announced. “I am going to break the law.” Rearing back, he hurled the rock through a gilt-lettered, pebble-glass panel in the department's front door. This did the trick. Smith arrested Brautigan and booked him on a charge of disorderly conduct. Locked up in the city jail, agitated and distraught, Dick blurted out that he was insane.

Next morning in municipal court, Brautigan pleaded guilty to the charge and his case was continued until Saturday. The judge said he would give him some time to think about it. All anger drained, Dick felt chagrined as he was led back to the crowded communal cell. A little later, a pair of city detectives came by to talk to him. After hearing Dick's story, they told the young man he needed a mistress much more than a psychiatrist.

Thursday's
Register-Guard
contained a small article at the bottom of the front page (“Eugenean's Wish Granted”) recapping the story in a few succinct lines. “A Eugene man who said he wanted to go to jail got his wish Wednesday night.” Linda Webster read the article later in the day and knew immediately Dick's troubles happened because of her. She clipped the piece and saved it, feeling guilty for years.

As soon as Pete Webster learned his friend was in jail, he drove straight over to visit him. Dick appeared very embarrassed, staring out through the bars of the drunk tank. “Why did you come here?” he demanded. Pete said he was a concerned friend. Dick expressed surprise at seeing him. Glancing around a cell crowded with common prisoners, he asked Pete not to come back again “under those conditions.” Peter agreed. He left the jail thinking his friend would soon be a free man.

After Edna Webster found out about Dick's predicament, she telephoned her friend Lois Barton. Lois and her husband, Hal, were Quakers, involved in causes dear to Edna's heart. Hal Barton's social work dealt with mental health issues. Edna hoped he would follow up on Dick's case and see if there was any way he might help. “Dick was facing an appearance before a local magistrate,” Hal recalled, “and she was concerned about the approach of that magistrate to cases like his. He had a tendency to want to crack them down.”

Hal Barton went straight over to the city jail for a visit with Dick Brautigan. “He wasn't too much of one to talk,” Barton remembered. “There was no question of the circumstances. I mean, he just revealed them as they were and that was about it.” Mr. Barton left the jail that night with the impression that Dick had been “feeling suicidal and wanted to be put away where he wouldn't be able to do that.” When the police refused to arrest him because he hadn't committed a crime, he immediately obliged them “in order to get protection for the night.”

On Saturday, December 17, 1955, Richard Gary Brautigan made a second appearance in the municipal courtroom. Just as Edna suspected, the presiding judge, John L. Barber Jr., had a reputation among the young people of Eugene as a hardnose, handing out stiff fines whenever teenagers were caught with alcohol. Police officer William Smith observed “Judge Barber thought a dose of strong medicine was what was needed for anyone who got slightly out of line.” The judge accepted Brautigan's guilty plea and continued the case until the following Monday for sentencing.

The young writer spent a long weekend in the slammer. Paranoia and claustrophobia grow palpable in a cell, charting the bleak boundaries of an unfamiliar new reality. He was already steeped in inconsolable misery, and Dick Brautigan's incarceration exaggerated the smallest discomforts. Dick didn't smoke. Cigarettes take on an almost mystical importance in the joint. As jailhouse currency, cigarettes become synonymous with doing time, and tobacco smoke obscured the air in the crowded common cell of the Eugene city jail. For Brautigan, every breath was torture.

The extreme stress of the situation took an immediate toll. Brautigan's fine blond hair started falling out. He lost it in such quantities he feared he would become completely bald and “quite ugly” before he was twenty-two years old. Paper and a pencil provided magic tools to transport him out of despair. He found solace in his work. New poetry flowed freely from his imagination. Even in jail, every poem he wrote was about Linda Webster.

On Monday the nineteenth, Richard Gary Brautigan was back in court as case number 11563. Municipal Judge Barber ruled on a total of nineteen cases that day. Brautigan's ornate vocabulary struck him as particularly annoying. Barber sentenced Dick to ten days and a $25
fine. Court records indicate the fine was never paid. Brautigan paid a much more severe penalty. With credit for time already served, he should have been out of jail by Saturday, in time for Christmas Eve.

Events didn't work out that way. The young man's behavior in the police station struck the stern judge as somewhat peculiar. This episode seemed to be more than just another disorderly conduct prank. The whole business sounded wacky, and Judge Barber ordered a medical evaluation of Dick Brautigan prior to his scheduled release on December 24.

Hal Barton attended Dick Brautigan's Saturday hearing in the Lane County Courthouse with Judge Barber presiding. Two psychiatrists and a medical doctor were in attendance. “It didn't last very long,” Hal recalled. “Seemed like we were out of there as soon as we were in almost.” The medical men reported their findings to the judge, and he rendered a decision, committing Richard Gary Brautigan to the Oregon State Hospital for a thirty-day observation period. When Barton spoke with the judge about it afterward, he was told the boy “needed a little picture of reality, and the only way he was going to get it was to be given a rather sharp sentencing.”

Crying outside the hearing room, Mary Lou approached her son, her lips soundlessly forming his name as if in a dream. His stepfather tried reassuring him that things would work out fine. “Everything is going to be OK.” Dick was not so optimistic. He didn't see much hope in being shipped had to the madhouse on Christmas Eve. The bleakness building inside over the past several months had now become manifest, a demon wrapping its black, cold tentacles about his soul.

After the hearing, the officials loaded Dick into a government car for the trip up to Salem. He sat in the front seat between the driver and a guard. Another prisoner, wearing handcuffs, sat in back beside a second guard. A gentle rain fell from the pewter-colored winter sky. Dick stared out the window as the guards made small talk. Above the windshield wipers' steady
swish
, he heard the jingle of handcuffs behind him. He thought about Linda Webster, picturing her face, remembering the sound of her voice. He imagined what she would think of him when she learned he'd been sent to the insane asylum and “tried very hard not to cry.”

Ten years before, Dick Brautigan had had his appendix removed at Salem General and had left a rose blossom on the front steps every night after his mother gave birth to his sister Sandra. Feelings of dread erased these memories when the government car transporting him arrived at the state mental hospital. Public health facilities are never designed with aesthetics as a primary concern, and the first grim appearance of the asylum through the drizzle looked as welcoming as a glimpse of Count Dracula's Transylvanian castle in a flash of midnight lightning.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
, Milos Forman's motion picture version of Ken Kesey's novel, was filmed at the Oregon State Hospital, an institution as much a prison as a medical facility.

Dick Brautigan walked into the hospital accompanied by a guard who brought along the police report. Dick offered no resistance, cooperative throughout the bureaucratic admissions procedure. “Do I have to spend thirty days here?” he asked. “I'll be driven crazy, or else I'll be bored to death.” Referring to the report, Dick told the officials, “You have it all in there, haven't you? There were two psychiatrists and a doctor at the hearing, and they took notes. You'll get them in time.” He was not deemed dangerous, posing no threat to himself or the other patients, and was allowed the run of Ward J. The holiday season had never been a big deal for Brautigan, but spending his twentieth Christmas in a mental hospital, provisionally diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic (“chronic, severe”) expanded the boundaries of the bleak.