Jubilee Hitchhiker (24 page)

Barney Mergen lived with his mother and grandmother in what by his own account was “the only honest-to-goodness rickety tenement building between Chicago and Sacramento.” Formerly a hospital, the old wooden apartment house stood a few blocks from the Riverside Hotel.
Nineteen-year-old Barney, having completed his freshman year at the university, worked a summer construction job. He had just gotten off and was taking a bath when Richard Brautigan knocked unannounced on the front door. Mergen's grandmother, “scared half to death” by the unexpected appearance of this unorthodox stranger, rushed to tell Barney that he had a visitor.

“There's a strange boy asking for you,” she said. He climbed out of the bathtub and toweled off. Dressing quickly, Barney went to investigate. He immediately recognized the accuracy of his grandmother's assessment. Richard towered in the doorway, “thin as a reed,” his long wheat-blond hair worn in Dutch-boy bangs cut straight across his forehead just above the eyes. Barney had never seen anyone like him. In those days, men in Reno and everywhere else in America favored crew cuts.

“Hello,” the peculiar stranger said, looking straight at Barney. “I'm Richard Brautigan, and I'm a poet.” The younger man was very impressed by Brautigan's attitude and the way he had said, in effect, “this is not what I do, but this is what I am.”

“He had a sense of destiny about him,” Mergen recollected many years later. “That was easy to see.”

Brautigan explained he was on his way to San Francisco and needed a safe place to leave his belongings while he looked for work. Glancing about the small cramped apartment, Richard immediately deduced that there was no room here for him. Barney agreed to watch over his two cardboard boxes. “One contained manuscripts, and one held some socks, shirts, and underwear.” This composed the sum total of Richard Brautigan's worldly goods.

The two young poets set out together that evening to take in the town. Barney was astonished when Richard told him he had always wanted to see Reno. Mergen was desperate to get out of Nevada and head east, certain all the action was located on some distant shore. Barney couldn't understand why anyone would go even a single inch out of his way just to see Reno.

Nonetheless, he found Brautigan's endless curiosity about everything fascinating. “I loved the way he was sort of opening himself up to the rest of the world,” Mergen recalled.

Barney remembered how he and Richard wandered around the main drag together that night, “getting bounced from the gambling clubs because I was underage.” In Mergen's recollection “the hostility of the security force was directed more toward him than toward me, because he looked different with those blond bangs and this intense, slightly insane look on his face.” They ended up in the coffee shop of the Mapes Hotel, at that time one of the newest and grandest establishments in the city. (Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the fifty-three-year-old Mapes building was demolished by implosion on January 30, 2000.) When the waitress came to take their order, Brautigan asked for “a watermelon milkshake.”

“You some kind of wise guy?” she sneered, sore feet and long shifts not putting her in any mood for whimsy.

Richard smiled up at her “beatifically” and settled for coffee. Barney Mergen felt certain he had just caught a glimpse of the future.

Over the next few days, Richard and Barney spent many hours together, both poor working-class kids setting out on the uncertain path of literature. They bonded further when Brautigan discovered Barney's actual first name was “Bernard,” same as the father he had never seen. Quite naturally, they talked about writers, sharing a mutual admiration for the work of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. “Williams for his style. We agreed on the greatness of Whitman.”

Barney told his new friend of his chance dinner with Saul Bellow the previous spring while the novelist was at Pyramid Lake waiting for a divorce to become final. For Brautigan, such conversation provided a welcome change from the sort of provincial book talk he had engaged in with friends and family back in Eugene, where Hemingway remained the only author most of them knew anything about. The two young poets discussed F. Scott Fitzgerald. By his midtwenties, Brautigan had read
The Great Gatsby
seven or eight times.

Barney and Richard also talked about Hemingway. “He liked the spareness of the prose,” Mergen recalled. “That impressed him. He didn't like anybody who was too ornate or baroque.” They discussed Truman Capote, hardly a household name two years before the publication of
Breakfast at Tiffany's.
An autodidact, Brautigan expressed strong opinions about Barney Mergen's scholastic view of literature. “He had a certain amount of scorn for my classroom approach,” Mergen said. “That I had done most of my reading of poetry on assignment, rather than because I loved it.” Richard mentioned Capote as someone who had eschewed the university, going to work as an office boy at
The New Yorker
straight out of high school. “He idolized Truman Capote for his audacity.”

At some point, Brautigan opened his cardboard box and dug out his collected works. “He had these things he would show me that he called novels that were only three or four pages long,” Barney Mergen remembered. Richard had packed copies of his recent minimalist notebook experiments. Among them was the manuscript for “i love You.” Even after forty years, Barney clearly remembered one of the poems: “for easter / i will give You / a white kitten.” In his own work, Mergen was into Richard Eberhart and just discovering Wallace Stevens. “My poetry was totally unlike his. I was trying to write like Dylan Thomas.” Brautigan didn't care for Dylan Thomas.

What struck Barney Mergen most forcefully at the time was Brautigan's fully developed “sense of himself.” Even in his seminal writing, Richard had articulated a distinctive individual voice. “A lot of his themes were already there. It came out in conversations with me,” Mergen said. “When I read those early books, too,
Confederate General
and
Trout Fishing
, it was like hearing him again. They were very evocative. They just sort of picked up where we'd left off in conversation.”

Not all of their talk was about books and writing. Richard told Barney enough about his hard-scrabble existence to convince the younger man that “his life had been remarkably like mine, only rougher.” Brautigan made mention of growing up in “extreme poverty,” and living in the “slums,” and said that he had been “abandoned by his father.” A certain truth informed all his exaggerated claims. The process of personal myth-making had begun.

In an essay written after Brautigan's death, Barney Mergen recalled:

Mergen proved to be on the money concerning the sources of Richard's humor, but the story Brautigan told him was mostly fiction. He never drank before leaving Eugene and remained a virgin
at age twenty-one. However well-endowed Brautigan might have been, the only brothels he had ever visited were in his imagination. A poem he titled “Love,” from the unpublished collection “The Smallest Book of Poetry in the Whole God-Damn World,” currently “cooling its alabaster heels” at New Directions even as Richard boasted of fantasy exploits in Reno, ended with the lines “What this / kid needs / is a / meal ticket / at a / whore house.”

Richard Brautigan hung around Reno, spending time with Barney Mergen every afternoon and evening for four or five days, until he got word of a construction job in Fallon and hitchhiked sixty miles east into the desert to seek it out. Located on Route 50 in the Carson Sink, Fallon is the county seat of Churchill County and even before Mike Fallon (the town's namesake and first postmaster) built a crossroads store on his ranch in 1896, the place had been a stopover along the emigrant trail to California.

In his memoir,
Downstream from Trout Fishing in America
, Keith Abbott recounted a story Brautigan told him about being so broke one spring in the late fifties that he traveled to Reno for a promised laboring job. Abbott related Brautigan was informed upon arriving that the job wouldn't start for three days. “He had no money for a room and very little for food. On his first night he had a series of comic encounters with a Reno [
sic
] cop who kept finding him curled up on park benches. Threatened with jail, Richard hiked to the outskirts of town and found an old easy chair abandoned in the corner of someone's suburban yard.” According to Brautigan, he waited each evening for the lights in the house to go out and then slept in the chair, wearing all the clothes he had brought as protection against the chill nighttime desert air.

This experience stayed with Brautigan for the rest of his life. Two years before his death, he wrote of his “romantic” fondness for neon lights. He liked them because “they remind me of Nevada.” Reminiscing about his time there in the middle fifties, he recalled the little towns with their neon lights, “and at night there was the cool crisp smell of sagebrush [. . .] mingling with the neon.” In his borrowed backyard easy chair, the flashing casino lights of Fallon glowed like the aurora borealis, a magical Technicolor omen of the future.

After shivering through three cold nights, Brautigan finally started his construction job, and after his first day he received an advance on his pay. With jack in his jeans at last, Richard rented a cheap motel room. In the euphoria of having a warm bed to sleep in, he pulled his pockets inside out, scattering change and crumpled bills all across the floor in ecstatic celebration of his newfound solvency. This began a ritual Richard Brautigan continued for the rest of his life.

The job in Fallon lasted a month or more. Solitary by nature, Brautigan found ample time to write in his off hours. From its earliest days, Fallon boasted two weekly newspapers, the
Eagle
and the
Standard
. One hot summer afternoon, Richard brought his poetry over to a single-story red brick building at 8 Center Street, climbing the pyramidal steps leading to a corner-alcove entrance. The
Fallon Standard
began as a six-column hand-set paper in 1907, the year the town was born. Claude E. Smith had been the editor since 1926, following a four-year stint at the
Eagle
.

A native of Kansas, Smith settled in Fallon with his new bride in 1922. Four decades of Smith's editorials encouraged the area's economic growth. He served two terms in the legislature and was instrumental in getting a naval air station located outside Fallon. Smith published two of Richard Brautigan's poems on Wednesday, July 25, 1956, in a column called “Gab & Gossip.” Signing himself C. H. S., the editor wrote: “When it comes to poetry, or any other type of literature, we leave to others the appraisal of what's good. Of poetry we are quite shy. This page, however,
carries two short pieces of blank verse by a newcomer to Fallon, Richard Brautigan. They are local. We like them both. Do you?”

“Storm Over Fallon” and “The Breeze” dealt with the weather, a topic always of interest. Even without pay, acceptance provides an author a certain validation, and Richard savored the pleasure of seeing his work in print once again. A little more than a year after publishing the two little poems, Claude Smith and his wife stopped to aid a stranded motorist on Route 50. They were killed together instantly by a speeding car.

Richard Brautigan left Nevada once the job in Fallon ended. He saved enough of a bankroll to make moving to San Francisco even a poor boy's possibility. Less than a year later, he told his new friend, the poet Ron Loewinsohn, a mythic tall tale about being run out of Fallon by the county sheriff because of some unspecified peccadillo with the lawman's daughter. “I found it a little hard to believe,” Loewinsohn reflected, years later.

Richard stopped off in Reno only long enough to pick up his possessions at Barney Mergen's place on his way through to San Francisco. “When he came back, it was just one day and he was gone,” Mergen remembered. That final night, alone in the casino at Harrah's Club, Richard had a chance encounter with Grace Robinson, the nurse from Eugene High School, down from Oregon for a bit of gambling.

The last person on earth Brautigan wanted to see was someone who knew him from back home. He immediately tried to hide. The nurse caught hold of his arm. “Don't you high-tone me, Richard Brautigan,” she scolded. Cornered, Brautigan acted embarrassed. He didn't want to talk and made a quick getaway, heading straight for the westbound side of U.S. 40. Grace Robinson never saw Brautigan again. Nor did Barney Mergen, although he carried a clipping of Richard's poetry from the
Fallon Standard
with him for nearly half a century.

twelve: frisco

“I
N 1955, FRISCO looked like Cow Town, USA,” Michael McClure observed in his book
Lighting the Corners
. It was a time when the Hearst Building, a twelve-story terra-cotta-clad tower at Third and Market, reigned as one of the tallest structures in the city. The
Examiner
was published there, competing with two other dailies, the
Chronicle
and the
Call-Bulletin
, all provincial newspapers voicing the Main Street views of small-town rags everywhere across America. The San Francisco Seals ruled the local sports pages. In the midfifties, the Giants had not yet moved west from the Polo Grounds to the frigid windy confines of Candlestick Park.