Jubilee Hitchhiker (79 page)

In mid-May, Brautigan took part in a San Francisco State Writer's Conference, a three-day event at Camp Loma Mar in Pescadero, a small seaside town twenty miles north of Santa Cruz. Over fifty local writers had been invited to participate. Stephen Schneck and Herbert Gold were on the list. So were Don Carpenter, James Broughton, Thomas Sanchez, George Hitchcock, Lester Cole, Lawrence Fixel, Lenore Kandel, Janine Pommy Vega, Bill Fritsch, and Mr. and Mrs. Stan Rice. (In 1967, Anne Rice was an unknown poet while her husband commanded a reputation sufficient to gain him a spot as a workshop leader and featured reader.) “Don't forget your bedrolls,” the participants were instructed.

Richard caught a ride south with Andrew Hoyem. He was scheduled to read at eight that night in company with fellow Diggers Lenore Kandel and Bill Fritsch. “Also bring a bathing suit and, of course, some of your work to read,” S.F. State advised. Brautigan did not own a bathing suit. His daughter can't recall ever seeing him wear one. What Richard enjoyed was witty conversation and hanging out with writers. The weekend at Camp Loma Mar offered ample amounts of both.

After three days of sunshine, readings, workshops, and literary chit-chat, the conference ended with a “Festival of Feeling” for which the Grateful Dead provided music. Standing among a gathering of talented poets, watching the sun set over the Pacific as Jerry Garcia's blues guitar solos soared into the crisp sea air, Richard Brautigan must have felt like one of the anointed few. His time was surely soon to come.

twenty-nine: willard

R
ICHARD BRAUTIGAN PROVIDED an accurate description in
Willard and His Bowling Trophies
: “Willard was a papier-mâché bird about three feet tall with long black legs and a partially black body covered with a strange red, white and blue design like nothing you've ever seen before, and Willard had an exotic beak like a stork.” He was not making this up. As with all Brautigan's work, flights of imaginative fancy were grounded in the reality of his everyday life. Even the bowling trophies.

Willard was the creation of Stanley Fullerton, one of a flock he made with wire frames stuffed with the Sunday
New York Times
, covered with canvas strips dipped in gesso and painted with whatever was on hand. “I tend to make art objects in great floods or piles,” Fullerton later declared, “until I run out of gas or have finished that conversation.”

By the middle sixties, the artist lived in Pacific Grove, California, and had acquired a bit of girth. Always a large man, Stan now favored suspenders and a Greek sea captain's cap. This was no mere nautical affectation: Fullerton put out to sea in his gill netter at 3:00 am, “every morning the bar could be crossed,” looking for “a fog bank to fish in and hide under.” He didn't care much for other people and made no secret of it. “Stan never had a nice word to say about anyone or anything,” one old acquaintance recalled. He detested all other artists, with painters topping the list of the despised. That's why he got along with Price Dunn, another irascible iconoclast. Fullerton lived with a large menagerie of cats and exotic birds (mynahs and toucans). “I never met an animal of any sort that I didn't prefer to human kind,” he later wrote. “Animals and birds of all sorts come to me. We speak each other's hopes, and we live in harmony till their end comes.”

After returning to Pacific Grove from Mexico (“the obligatory hermitage”), Stan got involved “with a sweet young airhead” and planned to leave again soon in a “barely able” pea green 1937 municipal water department tool truck. Price stopped by one day for a visit, hoping to take over Fullerton's Pacific Grove house after the artist moved north to the little town of Marshall on Tomales Bay. About to abandon everything he owned, Stan gave him some of his big colorful cartoonish paintings along with a batch of drawings and etchings. Price spotted the gaudy three-foot papier-mâché bird perched in a corner. “Hey, I like that,” he said. “That's nice.” Fullerton told him he might as well take the damn thing along with him.

Price Dunn had no idea that Stan made the bird as a “satire” of Richard Brautigan. “A portrait in caricature,” was how the artist put it years later, “for in his walk and carriage in early days [Richard] resembled nothing closer than a white stork.” Many of these bird portraits had bull's-eye targets painted, in Fullerton's words, “on some portion of their anatomy, something to denote the behavior of the person thus parodied and not dissimilar to the basic behavior of birds.” Stan found
it “skookum tee hee (a joke of the spirits)” that Brautigan ended up with the bird he had intended as a burlesque on the writer's essential nature.

Price hauled the unlikely looking creature home and parked it on a bookshelf, christening him “Willard,” for no particular reason. “I just started a spontaneous fantasy,” Dunn remembered. “Poor old Willard, he's an orphan, you know. He's got a speech defect.” It began in a bar, Price regaling his drinking companion with tall tales. “I used to have this bird,” he told the stranger, “and I loved this bird. So, I made this sculpture of Willard just to remember him by, because I loved him so much.” Bit by bit, the fantasy grew, and the legend of Willard was born.

The bowling trophies came soon afterward. Price and his brother, Bruce, had an old truck they used for their moving business, and after a job they found a bunch of discarded bowling trophies left behind by a client. For no obvious reason other than a love for the absurd, Price stacked them around Willard. Bruce Dunn immediately joined in on the joke. “God,” he told Price, “I've got some bowling trophies that belong to Willard, too.” He brought them over, and soon a shrine was born, the absurd papier-mâché bird surrounded by dozens of gleaming statuettes.

In spite of his strained finances in 1967, when Richard Brautigan came to visit Price in Pacific Grove, they'd go down to Nepenthe, the restaurant located on property once owned by Orson Welles, or up to Monterey and “put on the feed bag. Live high, drink high.” One night after dinner at the Sardine Factory, they returned to Price's place and Richard encountered Willard for the first time. “What the hell is this?” he laughed.

“
Shhhh
!” Price fell into his joking mode. “Please don't offend Willard, Richard. You realize this is probably, next to you, my best friend. Willard thinks you're weird.” Price went on in this vein, telling Brautigan the history of Willard and making a formal introduction to the artificial bird. “And he says, ‘Oh, hi, Willard.' He just buys it hook, line, and sinker. He loves it. It's just the sort of weird fantasy he would like.”

The subject of Willard became the theme of the weekend. The painted bird was the only thing Richard could talk about. The next day, he met a girl and went off with her, telling her all about his new friend “Willard,” certainly one of the more bizarre pickup lines in the history of romance. When Richard returned and it was time for him to go back to the city he told Price, “I don't know if I can part with Willard.”

“You've formed that kind of a bond with Willard,” Price replied, enjoying the joke more and more. “Maybe he'll go home with you. Just ask him and see.”

Richard went along with the gag, going through the motions of asking Willard to come away with him. “Yeah,” he said at last, “he wants to. He wants to go to San Francisco.”

“Well, goodbye, Willard,” Price replied, a touch of feigned sadness in his voice.

And so the multicolored bird came to live in Richard's Geary Street apartment. On a later trip, Brautigan returned to Pacific Grove and collected all the bowling trophies, bringing them back to re-create the Willard shrine in San Francisco. He treated this sort of nonsense with utmost seriousness. Richard believed Stanley Fullerton had painted Willard's face in such a way that his expression changed from time to time, shifting from serious to apprehensive like “a kind of bird
Mona Lisa
.”

Whenever Price came to visit the city, he inquired about Willard, wanting to know all about the bird's recent adventures. When they were drinking, the Willard stories grew ever more convoluted
and absurd. “Just a goofy game,” to keep the fantasy alive. Over time, the game evolved into an elaborate ritual, the objective being to leave the other guy stuck with Willard. Richard might sneak the peculiar bird under the tarp in the bed of Price Dunn's pickup when he wasn't looking. Price retaliated by smuggling Willard back into town and hiding him in Brautigan's closet. Keith Abbott wrote of Price adopting “his best Southern idiot voice” for the game. “Willard's been getting lonesome for you. It's time for you to take care of Willard again, Richard.”

The game went on even after Richard Brautigan was forced by circumstance to move out of the Geary Street apartment. When the rest of his odd collection was “packed up,” the painted bird went along with him to live in a two-bedroom apartment on Telegraph Hill opposite Coit Tower. Willard provided a link to the days of impoverished Bohemia. Several years later, Richard started work on a new book. One day, he brought Price Dunn the just-completed manuscript. “I've got something for you to read,” Richard said, suppressing a sly smile. Price glanced at the title page:
Willard and His Bowling Trophies
. Now, it was his turn to grin. Once again, his best friend had turned a private fantasy into literature. The book's subtitle,
A Perverse Mystery
, seemed right on the mark.

As Richard saw Price less frequently, he continued the Willard game with other friends. When Brautigan began traveling to Japan in the 1970s, he left the bird with Curt Gentry. “He would say that I would have to soak his beak once a week in bourbon,” Curt reported. “And a couple of times he came back and said I hadn't done it, and he would take Willard away.” For a while, Gentry kept a framed photograph of Willard on his bureau.

“Even a bird needs to get out once in a while,” Richard told Ianthe, explaining why they had to haul the absurd creature along with them on evening excursions. In her memoir, Ianthe Brautigan described a dinner party at Curt Gentry's house when she was seventeen. Richard brought Willard and insisted that he sit at the table with his own place setting and a drink of whiskey. Ianthe didn't mention her father had spent the day drinking with his buddy Tony Dingman, who was leaving the next morning for the Philippines to work as a production assistant on Francis Ford Coppola's
Apocalypse Now
. When Richard called the Gentrys to ask if he might bring Tony along for a final aloha, Gail Stevens (not yet Mrs. Gentry) said no. Her sit-down dinner was planned for twelve, and she didn't want to set a thirteenth place at the table. Brautigan showed up with Willard instead. Gail was not amused. This was the last time Ianthe ever remembered seeing Willard. She thought somehow the painted bird had slipped through her father's fingers, vanishing forever into the vast limbo of detritus littering the soul of our republic.

Willard lives on. One evening in the late seventies, Richard sat at his favorite table in Enrico's enjoying a drink with his actor friend Terry McGovern, who played the part of the high school teacher Mr. Wolfe in
American Graffiti
. Terry lived in Hollywood, but an account for work in commercials kept him commuting back and forth to San Francisco every week. Brautigan had Willard with him, the colorful long-billed bird perched awkwardly on his lap. Every so often when the mood struck him, he dipped Willard's beak into his glass of Calvados. “You have to dip his beak,” Richard explained.

“Willard's great,” Terry said, just passing the time, and Richard Brautigan handed him the big bird. “No, Richard,” the actor protested, “I'm going back to Los Angeles tonight. What the hell am I going to do with this bird?”

Richard smiled. “Just take it,” he said. “Make sure to dip his beak.”

Later that night, McGovern rode in a cab with Willard down the Bayshore Freeway to the airport. On the flight to Los Angeles, Terry preferred sitting in the rear of the plane, where the seats faced one another and there was more leg room. It was also closer to the drink cart. The stewardesses were entranced with Willard. “They just thought it was the cutest thing in the world, and oh, isn't this adorable and so on and so forth.”

After a bit, who should wander back to get his drink refreshed but State Assemblyman Willie Brown. “And he made a big fuss over Willard,” McGovern remembered. “And I explained to him that Willard has to dip his beak if you want to be a friend of [his].” The actor dipped the bird's beak into the politician's brandy, and the Willard brotherhood expanded its circle.

Today, Terry McGovern lives with his wife, Molly, in the comfortable Marin County town of San Anselmo, and Willard resides with them. By giving away Stanley Fullerton's curious sculpture (just as the artist had donated the bird to Price Dunn, who passed it on in turn), Richard continued a process of liberation that had become an inherent function of the work itself.

thirty: brief encounter

B
Y THE SECOND half of the 1960s none of Linda Webster's dreams seemed to be coming true. Her marriage to her boyfriend from high school had not turned out happily. For years, the relationship had been physically abusive. He started beating her when they first began going steady, but she stuck with him. Brutality and fear became the glue binding them together. One savage cut from a can opener left her leg scarred for life. The unseen wounds etched on her heart recorded more permanent damage.

The dysfunctional couple had moved with their daughter to Santa Rosa, California, where Linda, like so many other young women busy with the counterculture cottage-crafts of the era (macramé, decoupage, weaving, throwing pots, winding gaudy woolen god's eyes), took up stringing beads. This eventually led to a successful career as a jewelry importer, but at the time it was simply a distraction from the misery plaguing her life. Over the years, her memories of Dick Brautigan's chaste poetic courtship had evolved into an intense romantic fantasy. “It meant a lot to her to think someone cared that much about her at one time,” Linda's sister recalled.