Jubilee Hitchhiker (40 page)

After their return to San Francisco, on the evening of Richard's twenty-fifth birthday, Joanne Kyger sailed for Japan aboard the
Nachiharu-maru
, planning to marry Gary Snyder and study Zen. Brautigan had not had much contact with her since their aborted “date” in North Beach three years before and did not attend Kyger's boisterous farewell party at the East-West House. Fed up with other raucous late-night drunken misbehavior, Ginny took off, heading south again to her parents' place. Richard was desperate to get her back. Flat broke as usual, he lacked the funds to go after her and plead his case in person.

Stan Fullerton came to the rescue. At the time he lived on lower Columbus Avenue above a pizza and beer joint, a place Brautigan called “the green shelf.” Although Stan was sympathetic to his friend, he believed him to be at fault. “Richard's selfishness always drove people away from him,” Fullerton said. The painter understood Virginia's plight. He saw her as “mother earth caring for her dippy genius. Ginny carried the whole ball with dismal office jobs. Richard was her first child. He was not financially responsible, or emotionally able, to handle a whole family.” Nevertheless, Stan agreed to help. Always a frugal man (he stored a large canister of Japanese rice along with canned fish and Asian vegetables under his bed), Fullerton saved all his pennies in a large jar. It came to $57 worth of copper. He gave this money to Richard, who used it to travel down to Reseda and bring his wife home.

Sometime early in March (“feeling the spring about me”), Richard Brautigan began a journal. Impending fatherhood enhanced his introspection. Springtime brought him down. Richard called it “the half-assed San Francisco spring” and felt the season went “against the development of myself.” It had been over a month since he'd had sex with his wife. This also depressed him. “I felt my body growing away from me like an old man taking out his teeth in the middle of the night.”

Try as he might, Richard could not envision the fast-approaching birth of his child. “Skim milk” and a “dirty sock” seemed more real to him.

Ginny went into labor on the morning of March 25, 1960. Richard brought her to the University of California Medical Center at 505 Parnassus Avenue in San Francisco. He stayed by her side until she was taken into the delivery room. Around 7:00 PM, Ginny gave birth to a seven-pound, eleven-ounce baby girl. A photograph of Richard holding his newborn child cradled in his arms with his red beard and bangs cut unevenly across his forehead shows him unsmiling and oddly haunted.

Twenty-five days earlier, Tom and Shirley, their friends at the top of Potrero Hill, also had a daughter. The Lipsetts named their little girl Cadence. Ginny remembered “lots and lots” of discussion on what to call their own new baby. The Brautigans' second choice was Selena, but in the end they settled on Ianthe, the name Percy Bysshe Shelley picked in 1813 for his daughter by his first wife, Harriet. In Greek mythology, Ianthe married Iphis, who lived an intriguing transsexual life. Born a Cretan maiden, Iphis was disguised as a boy by her mother because her father had commanded that all of his daughters be slain. When Iphis fell in love with beautiful Ianthe, the goddess Io (who had herself once been changed into a white heifer by Zeus) transformed her into the man she pretended to be. Taking the edge off the mythological, Richard and Ginny gave their new daughter a middle name: Ianthe Elizabeth Brautigan.

Stanley Fullerton thought Ianthe's nursery room on Mississippi Street “small and ugly,” so he bought a few gallons of white acrylic paint and primed the walls, sticking canvas to the still-wet paint. After work the next day, Stan drew life-sized animals on the canvas, colorful long-necked giraffes, droll fat frogs, and various other gaudy amphibians, cavorting about the walls like illustrations from a giant children's book. Fullerton worked “in about four colors.” He remembered the paint costing a lot but remained philosophical about the expense. Stan obviously cared for Richard, “who when the mood was upon him could have made the Mona Lisa giggle and beg to be screwed then and there. He had a carnival, perhaps a whole circus, of faces that seemed to turn on and off like the tides controlled by a remote planet none of us had ever heard of.”

Richard Brautigan, who had never known his own father, instinctively became a devoted parent. When Ginny returned to work at a new job, Richard stayed home with the baby. Being a modern dad didn't foreclose on Brautigan's freewheeling lifestyle. On the Saturday night before Easter, 1960, ten days after his daughter's birth, Richard decided to take off and see three bad movies on Market Street. “A Western, a film about alligator people, and a crime flick.”

Ginny couldn't understand why he wanted “to go downtown and see those shitty films.” She wondered why he didn't just stay home and write.

“To hell with it,” Richard replied. He was in the mood for B movies. Ginny relented. As long as he was going all the way downtown, why not stop off at a drugstore and buy Ianthe her first Easter bunny?

Richard said he'd “think about it,” and caught a bus to Market Street. Once downtown, he made a beeline for Merrill's Drugstore. His destination was not the toy aisle. He headed straight for “the cheap booze section,” to pick up a pint of something to take with him into the movies. As he scanned the labels, trying to decide between cheap gin, whiskey, or brandy, his attention was drawn to something odd. Brautigan recorded the moment in a rough-draft typescript he called “Poet's Easter.” It was an example of found art, a creative element he came to use with increasing frequency in his writing. “The dishonety [
sic
] of the lables [
sic
] on one of the bottles of brandy catches my eye IDeath supreamd [
sic
] California Brandy.”

April 1960 saw the publication of Donald Allen's influential anthology,
The New American Poetry, 1945–1960
, which placed the Beat poets firmly on the critical landscape for the first time. Because of this book, Don Carpenter referred to Allen as “the man who invented the Beat generation.” There was much consternation among the Frisco poetry world over who was “in” and who was “out.” Among the included were Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, Robert Creeley, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, James Broughton, Philip Lamantia, Edward Dorn, and Jack Spicer (along with the predictable in-crowd: Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Corso, Ginsberg, and Orlovsky).

The anointed younger poets were Lew Welch, Richard Duerden, Michael McClure, Ebbe Borregaard, John Wieners, Ron Loewinsohn, and David Meltzer. Richard Brautigan was left out in the cold, along with Joanne Kyger, George Stanley, Jory Sherman, and many others. Much jealousy and a sense of betrayal infected several of those omitted. Brautigan displayed no reaction at not being grouped with his contemporaries in this groundbreaking volume.

Life as a new father kept Richard Brautigan “very busy.” He mentioned this in a letter to Sam Broder, a new friend from L.A., who he'd met only briefly. Brautigan wrote that he was trying to find the time to write and that some of his poems were being “used by a dance group for a production at UCLA.” This also took up a lot of his time. “Telephone rings, a voice says, ‘Would you please come to such and such a place and watch us dance to your poems? And let us know what you think of it and we are all dying to meet you.'”

The telephone voice belonged to dancer Ann Halprin, an early Brautigan reader who later resumed her birth name, Anna. Originally from Winnetka, Illinois, and married to noted Bay Area landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, she founded the avant-garde San Francisco Dancers' Workshop in 1955. Anna Halprin always kept on the alert for experimental material that might translate into movement. She had been working with poet/filmmaker James Broughton and came across a copy of Brautigan's
The Galilee Hitch-Hiker
at City Lights several months after its publication. Intrigued by the fanciful imagery, she immediately saw the possibilities of using “The Flowerburgers” as a
dance. “In those days, all of us that were working to create new art were very interrelated,” Halprin recalled. “We all knew each other. There was a lot of cross-fertilization going on.”

Anna Halprin contacted Richard, suggesting her idea for a “Flowerburger” piece. “It never occurred to him that his poetry could be used in performance art.” Richard was delighted with the notion and gave immediate approval. John Graham, a member of Dancers' Workshop Company, had been an actor first, and Anna Halprin felt influenced by his “ability to be comfortable with words.” No one before had thought to combine voice and movement. “It was the first time dancers had ever used the spoken word,” Halprin said. “Now you can't get dancers to shut up.”

Watching his own work interpreted in another medium awakened new worlds for Brautigan. Although he never went to any of their rehearsals, Richard was in attendance at the first public performance of
The Flowerburger
by the San Francisco Dancers' Workshop at The Interplayers Theater. This small performance space was founded in 1946 by Kermit Sheets and Adrian Wilson, conscientious objectors who'd met during the war at camp 56 (the “Fine Art Camp”) at Waldport on the Oregon coast.

The Flowerburger
featured three dancers from the company, Anna Halprin, John Graham, and A. A. Leath. Their costumes came from a thrift shop on McAllister Street. Graham wore tails. Leath had on a black suit. By way of contrast, Anna Halprin was in white, “kind of a funny lacy dress.” They worked with three chairs in a line on a bare stage. There was no music. The three dancers took turns reciting
The Galilee Hitch-Hiker
. Instead of doing it straight, they juxtaposed the lines, intermixing words from one poem with those of another, creating an entirely new poem in the process. The dancers declaimed Brautigan's poetry, standing or sitting, sometimes falling to the floor, each performer's movement contrasting with the others. “We were doing a lot of experimenting,” Halprin said.

The San Francisco Dancers' Workshop performed
The Flowerburger
many times over the next few years. They took it to the Contemporary Dance Theater on Washington Street and the San Francisco Playhouse on Hyde Street. The performance traveled to UCLA and the International Avant Garde Arts Festival in Vancouver, British Columbia. Closer to home, they danced the piece at San Francisco State University. Ginny Brautigan remembered seeing that performance as well as one by invitation at a private studio seating only fifty at Anna and Lawrence Halprin's Kentfield home in Marin County. The Halprins frequently invited artists for performance evenings in their home. They featured poets Michael McClure and James Broughton in this way, as well as experimental musician Harry Partch. Six years after their first appearance in Los Angeles, Halprin, Leath, and Graham brought
The Flowerburger
back to UCLA. “It was performed on tour all over the country,” Halprin recalled.

Having made some money on
Lay the Marble Tea
, Carp Press decided to publish a second volume of Brautigan's work. Richard had written a group of new poems, most appearing in little magazines, and he began to sift through them, thinking about the possibilities of another book. Being at home with a new baby provided the two partners in Carp Press time to plan their next venture. Along with work published in
J
and
Foot
, Richard had written enough new poetry to assemble a fresh collection. He and Ginny discussed the project. Having gone through the process once before made it easier the second time around. One of the new poems, “The Octopus Frontier,” gave Brautigan the book's title as well as an idea for its cover.

Gui de Angulo, a noted North Beach musician and photographer, daughter of legendary folklorist and anthropologist Jaime de Angulo (who spoke seventeen different Native American languages), was among Richard and Ginny's group of friends. Ezra Pound called her father “the American Ovid.” Henry Miller, Angulo's Big Sur Partington Ridge neighbor, wrote that “he had a streak of the devil in him.” Gui's pictures of the Frisco poetry scene enjoyed a well-deserved reputation for honesty and skill. Her 1958 group portrait of Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, John Wieners, and David Meltzer has been frequently reproduced and often incorrectly attributed.

Ginny Brautigan described Gui de Angulo as “very shy [. . .] difficult to talk to,” but with “a great sense of humor.” Richard had known her since before his first visit to Price Dunn in Big Sur. “She was pretty much closeted down there,” Ginny remembered. “Isolated.” Life in the city provided a vital contrast. Gui kept busy with her work, interacting with a wide circle of artists and musicians. She visited the Brautigans often on Potrero Hill, taking photographs of Ianthe playing with her mother. When Richard suggested his notion for a book cover, she took to the idea immediately.

Brautigan knew just what he wanted and served as the “art director” on the project. He bought a huge octopus tentacle, nearly six feet long, from a fishmonger in Chinatown. He and Gui de Angulo carried the grotesque appendage up onto the roof of a building in North Beach, and she photographed Richard's bare foot in close-up, standing on the tentacle. “It is striking and just misses being sinister,” observed Michael McClure.

Richard gathered twenty-two recent poems for the new collection. Nearly half the poetry included in this latest chapbook had been previously published in Spicer and Duerden's little magazines. Brautigan reprinted the poems without any changes, except for reworking the line structure of “1942,” a personal favorite for the rest of his life. By the end of July, finished copies of
The Octopus Frontier
were ready for sale. The Brautigans raised their price to $1 for the twenty-four-page publication.

Earlier in the year, Richard Brautigan bought an inexpensive ring-bound three-hole notebook with brown covers. The first entries were several drafts of a new poem, “The Silver Stairs of Ketchikan,” which transformed 2:00 AM baby feeding into a mystical moment. On August 1, Brautigan began another journal in the notebook. After striking out his first two attempts, Richard made a new start: “The idea of this journal is I want to write something other than poems [. . .] I've tried to write short stories but I can't stick with them.”