Jubilee Hitchhiker (68 page)

October 20, one half hour after a prerecorded interview was broadcast over a local station, authorities spotted Ken Kesey in a bright red truck, heading south with the afternoon rush hour on the Bayshore Freeway. Apprehended after a chase (including “a brief run on foot”), Kesey soon got out on bail and announced his Halloween Acid Test Graduation would go on as scheduled. At the last minute, Bill Graham changed his mind, denying the Pranksters the use of Winterland for their festivities. Kesey scaled back his plans and held the graduation at the Calliope Warehouse, south of Market on Harriet Street. To Emmett Grogan, “after the hoopla died down” it didn't amount to much more than a “by-invitation-only, private party [. . .] with a lot of booze and plenty of group analysis.”

The Diggers threw a Halloween party of their own out on the streets, calling it Full Moon Public Celebration. They passed out fifteen hundred leaflets advertising the event and carried the wooden Frame of Reference over to the corner of Haight and Ashbury, where it leaned against a lamppost. The Digger women, Phyllis, Natural Suzanne, Nina, Sam, Judy, Mona, and Julie, made several dozen yellow three-inch wooden squares, passing them among a gathering crowd soon grown to six hundred. Look through the tiny aperture and change your reference point. Many wore the little frames on cords around their necks like medallions.

The Mime Troupers showed up with two eight-foot puppets made by Roberto La Morticella, the stocky bearded sculptor who called himself La Mortadella. It took two men to manipulate each puppet. Grogan and Peter Berg, Brooks Butcher and Kent Minault worked the controls. Using the Frame of Reference as a makeshift proscenium, they performed a playlet called “Any Fool on the Street.” When the police arrived to break up the crowd, a disturbance ensued and five Diggers were arrested.

The quintet (Grogan, Berg, Minault, Butcher, and La Mortadella) appeared before a judge on November 27, and the case was dismissed. On their way out, a newspaper photographer asked to take a picture on the Hall of Justice steps. The Mime Troopers all struck extravagant poses, hamming it up for the press. The next morning, the photo ran on the front page of the
Chronicle
. Emmett Grogan upstaged all the others, sauntering toward the lens, tweed cap at a rakish angle, cigarette dangling from his smirk, forefingers raised in the backward “V,” meaning “Up yours!”

Another actor, Ronald Reagan, the former movie star, had been elected governor of California on the eighth of November. A week later, the Psych Shop got busted for pornography (
Oracle
editor Allen Cohen manning the cash register), and copies of Lenore Kandel's book of poetry,
The Love Book
, were seized. While the case against Michael McClure's
The Beard
moved sluggishly through the court system, the poet made music with an outlaw biker. “Freewheelin' Frank” Reynolds, secretary of the Frisco Chapter of the Hells Angels, played harmonica. McClure whanged on his autoharp. He and Frank made the music scene with various groups around the Bay Area, while McClure wrote Reynolds's as-told-to “autobiography.”

Richard Brautigan sent a letter to Bob Sherrill at
Esquire
, telling him of McClure's project. “I think the results of this collaboration will be very important [. . .]” Always quick to plug a pal, Richard called his friend “one of the finest poets and playwrights in America.” Michael's autoharp playing challenged Brautigan to keep on writing songs of his own.

Late one night early in November, a friend came over to Geary Street with a tape recorder and Richard sat down in front of the mike with his guitar to cut a few tracks for posterity. He wasn't
much on technique, tunelessly strumming the same three chords for every song. Brautigan's lyrics possessed a blatant deadpan monotone banality. In a song about riding his horse “to the break in the road,” the third verse mournfully begins, “Only got half a horse now.” Another song consisted entirely of the word “Hello,” sung over and over.

Here are the complete lyrics of two brief Brautigan songs: “Don't touch what you can't see or you might cease to be, / Look around the corner twice; / Turn the light on three times,” and “I've been in Idaho. / Drove one afternoon from Rocky Bar to Atlanta, / Had a piece of pie and some coffee / In a café in Atlanta, Idaho.”

At times, Richard played for his friends. Joanne Kyger recalled a lengthy party over on Lyon Street at the home of painter Bill McNeill when Brautigan “strummed the guitar and made up very long and winding, aimless songs.”

Among the listeners was Helen Adam, the Scottish-born poet whose work in the ballad form impressed Robert Duncan. She had published three books of poetry before moving to the United States in 1939. With her sister, Pat, she wrote
The City Is Burning
, a play adapted into the successful musical
San Francisco's Burning.
“Oh, that one was lovely,” Helen Adam said as Richard came to the end of yet another monotone melody. “Can you play that one about grasses on the lawn again?” But the song was lost, an ephemeral bit of improvisation gone in the moment.

Another evening, Keith Abbott remembered Joanne Kyger asking Brautigan, “Richard, whatever happened to your guitar?” Brautigan seemed “extremely embarrassed,” Abbott said, “and tried to shut Joanne up,” saying he didn't want to talk about that phase of his life. Richard got rid of his guitar not long after the impromptu recording session. Ianthe has no memory of ever seeing the instrument in the apartment once she started spending weekends at Daddy's place.

On the cold November night Brautigan made his tape recording, he had plenty of reasons to sing the blues. Charlotte Mayerson had written asking for more time to reread Brautigan's manuscripts, but in the end Holt, Rinehart and Winston rejected all three novels. Mayerson praised his “writing ability” and “flashes of marvelous humor and style” but called
In Watermelon Sugar
“mannered and ‘writy'” and thought
The Abortion
“too derivative of the kind of atmosphere that we've seen so often in Saroyan-like books.”

Donald Allen had a friend, a successful attorney, who established the Four Seasons Foundation to publish contemporary writers, particularly the work of San Franciscans. In his new capacity as Four Seasons' editor and publisher, Allen had at last found a vehicle to validate his early enthusiasm for
Trout Fishing in America
. He got in touch with Richard, offering to publish the novel in the coming year.

Soon after that, Richard's friends Bill Brown and Jim Koller got into the act by suggesting they bring out an edition of
In Watermelon Sugar
under their Coyote Books imprint. They had published Philip Whalen, and books by Michael McClure were in the works. At first, Richard resisted the idea. He had a New York agent. Sooner or later, Bob Mills was bound to make a score. Koller and Brown upped the ante, proposing an additional volume of Brautigan's poetry.

Richard, always slow to make decisions, continued dragging his heels. Bill Brown sealed the deal by mailing Brautigan a card quoting a recent Philip Whalen letter: “Coyote would be performing a Great Service Etc. if they would publish THE COLLECTED POEMS OF RICHARD BRAUTIGAN. Dick is a better poet than anyone wants to allow. His books of poetry are all unobtainable—& all of them are very good.” Flattery did the trick. Richard agreed to the offer
from Coyote Books. Both publications were to be pilot editions with Brautigan retaining all subsidiary, reprint, and option rights. The arrangement called for the size of the editions to be limited to a few thousand copies. Richard would receive a straight 10 percent commission on all sales.

At the end of November, Brautigan mailed
The Abortion
to literary agent Robert P. Mills, saying that he thought it was the only one of his books “that stands a chance right now in New York.” Three days later, Richard heard back from
Esquire
. Bob Sherrill was “fed up with Angels long ago.” Even so, the magazine was running a piece on the motorcycle gang in January. No more room for Freewheelin' Frank. Sherrill was open to seeing more ideas from Richard and Michael McClure. Brautigan suggested he and McClure interview Governor-Elect Ronald Reagan. They did not get the assignment.

For Thanksgiving, the Diggers hustled up twenty donated turkeys (getting them all roasted in kitchen ovens located across the Haight-Ashbury). They threw a big free feed with all the trimmings (the “Meatfeast”) at the garage on Page Street. The next Monday, Grogan and his pals (identified neither as Diggers nor Mime Troupers) made the front page of the
Chronicle
.

On the last day of November, Ken Kesey went on trial for his January pot bust and for violating the terms of his probation. He faced an imposition of his full three-year sentence for the first charge and an automatic nickel with no parole added on for the second offense. It looked like the Captain would be spending his next several Thanksgivings in the slammer.

Rain canceled the Diggers' Death of Money and Rebirth of the Haight Parade on December 3 and again when it was rescheduled for a week later. When they finally got their show on the road the next Friday, it turned out to be a bright, clear day. Around five in the afternoon, the Diggers started handing out party favors along Haight Street: flowers, candles, penny whistles, two hundred car mirrors liberated from the junkyard, lollipops, incense, and a thousand posters the size of bumper stickers with the word “NOW!” printed in red letters six inches high.

Young women clad in bedsheet togas gave away hundreds of white lilies. A crowd of about a thousand gathered for the parade. Richard Brautigan stood tall among them, conspicuous in his high-crowned felt hat and peacoat. Michael McClure was in the crowd, wearing shades and strumming his autoharp, accompanied by his Hells Angel buddy, Freewheelin' Frank, on tambourine. The obscenity charges against
The Beard
had been dropped the previous week.

Three hooded figures carrying a silver-painted dollar sign led the unofficial procession, followed by a black-robed surrogate priest waving a glowing Coleman lantern. Behind them marched four Mime Trouper pallbearers draped in black and wearing huge helmet-like animal head masks designed by La Mortadella. They bore a coffin covered with black cloth and filled with large symbolic coins. The crowd, grown to almost four thousand, spilled off the sidewalk and into the street, blocking traffic. The driver of a stalled Muni bus stepped out and danced with a young girl to much applause. Avoiding the throng and the traffic jam, the masked coffin-bearers at times were compelled to parade along the sidewalk.

Emmett Grogan had invited the Frisco Hells Angels, and they rode their choppers down the white line dividing opposing lanes of gridlocked traffic. At the head of the pack, a “NOW!” placard attached to the handlebars of his Harley, Angel “Hairy Henry” Kot, recently paroled after a nine-year bit in San Quentin for armed robbery, grinned beneath his sweeping mustache like a hirsute kid on Christmas morning. Phyllis Willner, a sixteen-year-old runaway who arrived in the Haight a few months before with nothing but the clothes on her back, adopting the Diggers as her
new family the same day, stood on Kot's buddy seat wearing a homemade Supergirl costume and holding a “NOW!” sign high above her head. “
Freeeee!
” she wailed.

Right about this time the cops arrived. No permit had been applied for by the Diggers, and their demonstration was technically against the law. Those on the street were in no mood to end the celebration. “We will continue until the Diggers feel it beautiful to stop,” one of the manifestos pledged. Six members of the tactical police force arrived in two black-and-whites and a paddy wagon. Two more motorcycle officers cruised down Haight Street on their three-wheelers, admonishing the crowd to break it up and go home. In response, the crowd chanted: “The streets belong to the people! The streets belong to the people!”

The police turned their attentions on Hairy Henry, citing him for a traffic violation for allowing Phyllis to stand on his machine while it was in motion. A routine check of his driver's license revealed Kot's parolee status, and he was immediately arrested. An argument ensued. As the officers attempted to force Kot into their paddy wagon, another gang member, “Chocolate George” Hendricks, came to the assistance of his beleaguered Angel brother. Soon, both men were locked behind the Black Maria's wire-mesh doors, charged with resisting arrest.

Ever since Kesey invited the Angels to his La Honda blast, an unspoken alliance had existed between the acidheads and the outlaw motorcycle riders. George, who gained his nickname from a fondness for chocolate milk, was particularly popular with the local street people. Peter Coyote recalled him as “a big, easygoing guy who liked to hold court in front of Tracy's Donut Shop.” When word of Chocolate George's detention spread among the crowd, the Diggers redirected their march toward the Park Station, several blocks away. Chanting, “Free the Angels! We want Hairy Henry! We want Chocolate George!” a thousand people paraded down Stanyan Street and into Golden Gate Park.

Michael McClure marched at the head of the procession, clawing at his autoharp in the company of a young woman blowing a bugle and some guy in a clear plastic raincoat making noise on his harmonica. Richard Brautigan, a head taller than most of the crowd, trooped along with all the rest, several ranks back from his pal McClure. At the police station, the demonstrators encountered “scores of patrolmen” surrounding the building. The crowd lit candles and continued their enthusiastic chanting. Brautigan moved closer, behind Freewheelin' Frank, who sternly confronted a uniformed police officer.

When word came from the station house that bail had been set at $2,500, with 10 percent required to secure the men's release, a new chant went up among the hippie congregation: “Angels in jail, money for bail!” The masked pallbearers passed around the black-draped Death of Money coffin, and everyone gave what he or she could, tossing bills and coins inside. Even the cops chipped in, and bail was quickly raised.