Jubilee Hitchhiker (22 page)

Neither of the Bartons remembered him ever leaving the place, as he had no means of transportation, but Brautigan was an experienced hitchhiker, and he frequently slipped away and thumbed a ride down to town. He visited with Edna Webster when Linda was off in school, so there'd be no danger of a painful unexpected encounter. Dick helped Edna with the dishes, drying as she washed. A friend stopped by, and Edna quipped, “We've been standing here trying to figure out if Richard's a poetic dish-dryer or a dish-drying poet.”

A letter for Brautigan from Lilith Lorraine in Alpine, Texas, postmarked February 29, 1956, had just arrived. In it were four of his poems rejected by
Flame
. While this new work employed his “usual striking imagery,” they struck Lorraine as “a little light in thought content” compared with the poem she'd previously accepted, “which contained such exquisite satire and which elicited so many favorable comments.” She asked to see more “work of that type.”

It snowed that day in Eugene. Sometime after midnight, Dick was snug in the little woodstove-heated cabin on Harry Taylor Road, lying on his bed, starting a letter to Gary Stewart. Brautigan always enjoyed writing late at night. This was the first time he'd written his old friend since before the arrest in December. “So many things have happened upon me since last I wrote to you,” the letter began. “So many things covered with nightmare and tears.” Dick wrote of returning to Eugene. “Back to the place where all the horror started growing [. . .]” He was trying for a fresh start and told his friend he prayed to God every night, sometimes on his knees. Still searching for something to give the world, Dick was most emphatic in assessing his immediate future: “I do not want anymore trouble.”

Brautigan said he'd been thinking about his oldest friend that day and correctly prophesied that Gary would “succeed in life.” Dick concluded: “Gary, Maybe by the time you get back to Eugene, I'll be a known writer. Maybe I'll be busy enchanting somebody. Giving her bunches of flowers from the garden of my heart. Maybe by the time you get back to Eugene, I'll have a million dollars, too.” The letter ended abruptly here, trailing off like a forlorn shout into the wind. There was no closing, and Brautigan did not sign his name. It was the last time he ever wrote to Gary Stewart.

Dick had recently written two “books”:
I Watched the World Glide Effortlessly Bye
, and
The Horse That Had a Flat Tire
(both published only after Brautigan's death), either while in the Salem Hospital or soon after arriving at the Bartons'. Composed in one of the small twenty-five-cent spiral-bound notebooks he favored, the first was dedicated to Edna. In a study in minimalism, Brautigan divided it into “Book One,” with twenty-six “chapters,” and “Book Two,” with fifty-seven, each not longer than a single sentence. Several consisted of only one or two words.

The finished notebook was a fair copy (an earlier draft titled “Poet in a Cage” also survives in notebook form), the title page meticulously hand-printed, each of the tiny “chapters” laid out precisely, as if to guide a typesetter. In 315 words, Brautigan narrated an intense, poetic vision of his trip to the State Mental Hospital. He fictionalized himself as “Tommy.” The prisoner wearing handcuffs in the backseat became “Jesus Christ,” a favorite recurring character in Brautigan's later poetry.

“The Horse That Had a Flat Tire” also was the title of a poem in Brautigan's 1968 collection,
The Pill versus the Springhill Mining Disaster
, which referred to New Mexico, a state the poet had not yet visited in 1956. It remained one of the few fragments of his early writing he chose to preserve. Dick planned five more “books.” He hoped to get them all done. If he failed as a writer it would “be because I am no good.”

Part of Dick's arrangement with the Bartons included working for them around the farm. They paid him an hourly rate for these chores. A half day at a time, Brautigan cut thistles with a hoe on the edge of their field. Thistles were a noxious weed needing to be controlled. “He also cut the brush along the fence on the right-of-way from the mailbox,” Hal remembered. “For a few days, not long. I don't think he particularly liked to work. He had his mind on other things. He wanted to get out. He wanted to go to California.”

In his letter to Gary Stewart, Dick wrote: “I have made a plan for the future of my writing. I think it is a good plan.” Out in the little shack behind the Bartons' house during his two-or three-month stay, he finished the five “books” he envisioned. “Seven Rooms Each as Big as God,” a poetry collection containing an early version of “The Chinese Checker Players” (a poem based on an early childhood memory eventually published in
The Pill
) began with a mock
introductory dedication: “This undernourished volume is for Richard Brautigan without whose help and encouragement I never could have written it.” The four other notebooks were all dedicated to Edna.

The undated notebooks were carefully scripted fair copies. The order of composition cannot be determined. The author's penmanship was notoriously awkward, and these efforts demonstrated his careful labor to achieve legibility with an obvious eye focused on layout and design. “A Love Letter from State Insane Asylum” was veiled autobiography divided into ten brief numbered chapters, each a sentence occupying a single page describing episodes from the life of a three-year-old child named Calvin.

“ROCK around the CLOCK” was a collection of eight minuscule short stories. Three dealt with death. Two others involved ghosts and hauntings. The title story concerned a boy in a record shop, staring at a fifteen-year-old girl through the glass wall of a listening booth. These were standard features in record stores, allowing customers to sample the music before making a purchase. She selects a record (“Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” sung by the Four Aces) and steps into the adjoining booth. He listens to the number one song of the year, “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and His Comets.

Would You Like to Saddle Up a Couple of Goldfish and Swim to Alaska?
, inspired by Dick's gift of a pair of goldfish to Linda Webster, was a love fantasy in which the teenage boy and girl lived happily together, hugging and giggling. Divided into five sections, each page again containing only a single sentence or sentence fragment, the notebook provided an intriguing glimpse into Brautigan's psyche. Grace, the character representing Linda, also has brown hair and blue eyes. The narrator, who described himself as “being the world's greatest unknown writer,” likes to lie awake, watching Grace as she sleeps.

“There's Always Somebody Who Is Enchanted” was a collection of nine extremely short stories. “A Trite Story” contained only six sentences. It described the winter Brautigan spent in Montana when he was a child. The first line changed Great Falls to “Butte” but correctly described Tex Porterfield (who the author calls “my father”) as a cook. This tiny vignette owned an emotional power far in excess of its brevity. The second sentence remains haunting in its ambivalence: “That was after my mother had run off with a man named Frank, or Jack.”

Sometime early in Brautigan's stay at the Bartons', two copies of the poetry quarterly
Epos
arrived in the mail from Lake Como, Florida. The cover announced the names of fourteen of the contributors above the motto “The Work of Outstanding American and British Poets.” Lilith Lorraine got a mention. Richard Brautigan was one of those included in small print as “and others.” He was in good company. Among the others not listed on the cover were George Garrett, A. R. Ammons, and Clark Ashton Smith, the fantasist and pioneer science fiction writer, whose work influenced a diverse group of writers including Jack London, George Sterling, H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and Harlan Ellison. Largely forgotten today, Smith found literary fame in 1912 at age nineteen, when he published
The Star-Treader and Other Poems
.

Perhaps influenced by the brief nonsense plays written by Ring W. Lardner in the 1920s (
Clemo Uti—“The Water Lilies,” I. Gaspiri
, and
Taxidea Americana
), Dick turned his hand to drama, writing three short experimental pieces, each less than a single page and to be performed on a bare stage. “Please Let Me Walk” concerned a young woman who reads a poem about “a very beautiful god” breaking the world's neck, after which she is carried into the wings by four uniformed nurses.
In “Everybody and the Rose” an old woman attempts to sell roses to a large group of people standing immobilized on the stage. When no one reacts, she sits down and cries.

The final piece, “Linda,” exposed the young poet's emotions like an open wound. A youth pantomimes taking an “imaginary” pistol from a dresser drawer. He puts it to his head, mutters “Linda” softly, and pulls the trigger. A real gunshot is heard. The young man collapses. A laughing couple crosses the stage holding hands. They stop and kiss, oblivious of the body lying at their feet, and exit. Laughter is heard offstage as the curtain falls. Signing himself R. G. Brautigan, he mailed the three little plays (under the collective title
Experimental Dreams
) to the Drama Department at the University of Oregon.

Dick ate all his meals in the main house with the Barton family. “Just one of the bunch,” Hal Barton remembered, “which was the way he was.” Lois recalled how “persnickety” Dick acted about food. She baked all the family's bread, a half-dozen loaves at a time, and always used molasses instead of white sugar in the yeast starter because of its greater nutritional value. “And he could smell that molasses. Two tablespoons of molasses in six loaves of bread, and he could smell that when it came out of the oven. He didn't like to eat the bread. It didn't suit him.”

Lois Barton also did Dick's laundry. She remembered signs of masturbation, “because there was always that mess in the shorts to be washed when he brought them to me.” When Lois finished the wash, she'd pile Dick's clean clothes by the back door and tell him to take them down to the cabin. “He'd leave them there for a week or ten days and then they'd be dusty from all the traffic, and he wouldn't want to wear them until I washed them again.”

Dick often hung out at the Bartons', telling stories and reading his poetry aloud. “I remember him sitting right in the middle of this room while I was working,” Lois said, “and reading bits of this and turning the pages in his notebook.” Once, Dick read a poem he had written in Eugene High, which Juliette Gibson criticized as “pornographic material and not suitable for a high school kid to be reading in a classroom.” Lois Barton recalled “he was so disgusted that she couldn't see the validity of what he had written.”

“He told me stories,” Lois said. “He told me about his mother. About one of her earlier mates who took him down onto the street in Seattle in his birthday suit and turned him loose down there for people to tease. And he was petrified because he wasn't sure how to get home and pretty uncomfortable about being out there bare naked.” Brautigan told Mrs. Barton this story, transporting the actual event, which involved his younger sister Sandi, into the details of his own life story, an early stab at personal mythology.

Dick Brautigan's storytelling revealed how much he disliked his mother. He told the Bartons “she always had a bottle at her elbow and was drunk by 4:00 PM.” Lois had a clear impression “that he was aware of her drinking and not very happy about it and that having this succession of male role models had been a rough kind of thing for him.” Although by her own admission Mary Lou enjoyed drinking beer, neither Peter Webster nor Gary Stewart remembered ever seeing her drunk. Still, lines from Brautigan's ministory “a glass of beer,” (the final entry in “ROCK around the CLOCK”) echoed with an enduring sadness: “Mable was sitting in a chair. There was a stagnant dreamy expression on her face. She was holding a glass of beer in her hand.”

Toward the end of his stay with the Bartons, Dick began spending more time in Eugene. He wanted to prepare some of his poetry for submission to publishers, and the only available typewriter belonged to Edna Webster. Brautigan timed his visits to coincide with the hours when Linda
was away at school. From his many rough-draft notebooks and sheaves of completed work, he compiled four typed manuscripts. The first was “Tiger in a Telephone Booth.”

The second manuscript, “Why Unknown Poets Stay Unknown,” Brautigan dedicated “For Edna, / and anybody else / who happens / to be around.” He included a brief foreword introducing himself and stating his age (twenty-one). After describing his status as an “unknown poet,” Brautigan ended with a line so purely in the spirit of his unfettered imagination that he might have penned it at any point in his career: “Let us pretend that my mind is a taxi and suddenly (‘What the hell's coming off!') you are riding in it.” He mailed the collection to Random House in New York, using 41 Madison Street as his return address.

The manuscript consisted of fifty-three short poems, forty-three of which were published in a 1999 anthology of Brautigan's early work,
The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings
. Released by his official publisher, it was nevertheless a crude effort. In the original manuscript, each poem was allotted a single page and given room to breathe (a practice Brautigan scrupulously followed with all his later published books of poetry). To save space, this collection printed them one above the other like literary wallpaper.

Several of the notebooks Dick gave to Edna were also included in this collection and accorded even more savage editorial treatment. Instead of following the author's intentions, where a page often contained only a single word, the little stories were crammed together, a large dot indicating the page breaks. Brautigan, always a stickler for proper layout and design, would have been appalled. His minimalist tales achieved their emotional power by having the reader turn from page to page before finishing a sentence. Printing the individual lines in a single column separated by dots canceled the author's artistic aims as effectively as hanging a painting upside down.