Jubilee Hitchhiker (8 page)

Richard Gary Brautigan was baptized a Catholic on March 17, 1935, at Holy Rosary Church with Michael Connelly serving as godfather. Connelly spent a lot of time with his godson during that first year. Mary Lou didn't have a stroller (the Depression foreclosed such luxuries) and Michael carried the baby around the neighborhood. When Richard learned to walk (taking his first steps on his first birthday) the old man strolled with him along the sidewalk, holding his tiny hand.

“Richie never liked hardly any solid food.” Mary Lou remembered a time when “modern” mothers were instructed to feed their babies pabulum twice a day. Once in a while, she'd slip some mashed potatoes and gravy into his mouth. His favorite snack was apples. He didn't want the fruit peeled, cut up, or mashed but tore into apples whole with his perfect little teeth. Other than a few simple “baby-talk” words, Richard didn't speak until he was four or five. He said “Mama” and called his milk bottle “nummy-nose.” Later, he had a code word for his potty so that no one but his mother knew what he meant. “People sometimes asked me, ‘Is that kid dumb? He never says anything.'” Mary Lou laughed at the memory. “Well, I knew he wasn't dumb.”

Richard was a keenly observant child. His aunt Eveline took him out into the backyard at night to stargaze. She held him in her arms, and he looked fixedly up at the stars and the moon, studying them with an intense curiosity unusual in someone so young. He also stared at people, never saying a word, just watching and listening. It was unnerving. Folks didn't know what to make of this little white-haired kid, staring at them with his big unblinking blue eyes. Was he from another planet?

When Richard was two, Aunt Eveline gave him a beautiful yellow Taylor tricycle. He loved his new velocipede, pedaling around and around the house, refusing to get off, not even for meals. Mary Lou had to feed him on the trike. His little red wagon was another favorite vehicle. Richard pulled it out the back door and across the yard to the alley. A half block further, he cut across a vacant lot, dragging his wagon over to the Bill & Mid Market, a grocery store on McKinley Avenue.

In later years, Brautigan often told of learning to read from looking at canned goods, associating the fruit and vegetables pictured on the colorful paper labels with the printed words. Corn. Peas. Green Beans. Tomatoes. Beets. The corner market became his kindergarten, and time after time, Richard loaded up his little red wagon with cans and jars, piling them like alphabet blocks and hauling the load home down the alley.

“He saw me go in the store and do it, so he was going to do mother's shopping for her,” Mary Lou Folston recalled. The store owners watched without comment, enjoying the comedy inherent in this tiny criminal's pilfering. They let Richard haul off his loot, knowing that as soon as he got home, his mother would either send him back or come and pay for what he had taken.

Boats fascinated Richard when he was two years old. He liked floating sticks of stove wood in the sink, launching homemade armadas. One night, sleeping upstairs, Mary Lou was awakened by the sound of running water. She pulled on a robe and went down to the kitchen. Richard had drawn a chair up to the sink, turned on the taps, and floated one of her new shoes in the basin.

Another terrible twos misadventure involved a German shepherd named Mark that Moonshine Bess brought to Tacoma when she came to visit. The animal watched over the toddler playing in the front yard. Once, Richard removed his diaper and pooped on the lawn. Overcome by scatological artistic inclinations, the little boy smeared handfuls of his shit all over the patient dog.

Mary Lou moved out of her family home that same year. She got a job in town and rented a place nine miles in the country. Her brother Edward continued living on Sixty-fifth Street, inviting his friend Ronald Bluett to share the house with him. Bluett, the man Bernard Brautigan accused of having an affair with his wife and Ben believed was Richard's actual father. Bluett was later crushed to death while working for a lumber outfit.

Eveline continued running the New Country Grocery with her husband, selling imported Italian foods. Mary Lou often stopped by to see her sister in the afternoons after work. She caught the bus home right in front of the store. The Pisannis had opened a bar in the same building. The Teamster's Union Hall stood only half a block away and the drivers gathered there, drinking beer while waiting for a call to make a run. A Norwegian trucker named “Big Jack” Fjetland took a shine to Eveline. One afternoon, Fjetland sat drinking and remarked to the proprietor, “You know, Pisanni, I'm in love with your wife.”

Not taking him seriously, John Pisanni said, “Who wants her? You can have her.”

Jack Fjetland meant business, and Eveline moved out. “She was married to Pisanni for ten years,” Mary Lou recalled, “and for ten years she kept her suitcase packed to leave him.”

Eveline lived in the country with Mary Lou for a year until her divorce was final and she married Fjetland. In 1937, the year Eveline met Big Jack, he and Arthur Martin Titland, another Norwegian truck driver, became beer-drinking buddies at the New Country Grocery. One afternoon, before catching the bus outside back to the country, Mary Lou met Titland. He was ten years older, a “dark Norwegian” with black hair and a swarthy complexion. “He wasn't any good. He was a drunk,” she said later. “He drank up the family house. He drank up everything.”

Mary Lou started living with Arthur and on May 1, 1939, at the Tacoma General Hospital, she gave birth to a daughter, Barbara Jo Titland. By then, the couple had already separated. It's doubtful they were ever legally married. No marriage certificate can be found, and Mary Lou's divorce from Bernard Brautigan was not final until January 17, 1940.

Richard Brautigan was four years old when his sister was born. His first memories eventually found their way into his fiction. His mother always said Richard had a “photostatic [
sic
] memory.” In “Revenge of the Lawn,” Brautigan wrote that his first memory “occurred in my grandmother's front yard. The year was either 1936 or 1937.” He remembered “[Frank Campana] cutting down the pear tree and soaking it with kerosene” at The Boy's Place in St. Helens. Like the character in the story, Campana had a morbid fear of bees.

Brautigan wrote of his adventures with the little red wagon in an unpublished short story called “Cracker Jacks.” He was four years old and loaded up his wagon with two hundred boxes of Cracker Jack from a store display. He wanted the prizes, not to keep, but to bury in a small animal cemetery in the backyard where he interred dead birds and insects. Brautigan described his tiny graveyard in part 9 (“My Insect Funeral”) of his early pamphlet-length poem,
The Galilee Hitch-hiker
.

Young Richard added the purloined prizes to his miniature necropolis, tamping damp earth onto the tiny toys. In the story, he gets caught red-handed with the ripped-open Cracker Jack boxes and spanked. His mother shelled out eight bucks (a substantial sum in the Depression) in recompense. The family ate Cracker Jacks for breakfast for weeks. Richard never told anyone what he had done with all the prizes.

Brautigan often claimed to have twice flunked the first grade. “I couldn't figure school out,” he said. “It didn't make sense to me. I wasn't able to learn the system.” Richard transposed this
yarn of early failure directly into his fiction. In truth, Mary Lou enrolled him in the first grade at Tacoma's Central Avenue grade school (September 1940) when he was five years old. Brautigan graduated from high school in June of 1953, a normal twelve-year course of study. Richard's sister, Barbara, thought that he'd actually skipped a year. (“He either skipped the fourth or the fifth grade because he was really smart.”) Brautigan later concurred, writing: “I was smart and a year ahead in school.”

Richard told many stories about learning to read. Along with the can label tale, two other conflicting versions survive. He once confided to his friend Keith Abbott that he kept a World War II Japanese machine gun in his Geary Street apartment because it “reminded him of how he learned to read at age six, when he understood a headline about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (“Japs Bomb Pearl Harbor”) and made the connection between letters and reality.” In 1980, Brautigan told a reporter from the Tacoma
News Tribune
that he realized he could read in April 1942. Wandering aimlessly around the city, he came across a newspaper spread over a storm sewer grate. “I could read the front page headline,” he noted. “It was ‘Doolittle Bombs Tokyo.'”

In the last novel published during his lifetime,
So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
, Brautigan wrote of moving into “an apartment that was annexed to a funeral parlor.” This happened when he was five, in the late spring of 1940. Mary Lou had been living an increasingly transient life. That year, she moved five times in two months. “Anytime I didn't like anything, I moved.”

One of these moves was to a street crowded with five mortuaries: Lyon's, Buckley-King, Melinger's, Lynn, Cassedy and Allen. Mary Lou occupied an apartment below Lynn. “I moved at night and didn't know that it was a mortuary.” They lived below the mortuary only “long enough to find another place.” She woke up in the morning with Richard staring out the front room window. “He says, ‘Look, Mama, there's a whole lot of people out in front of the house.' I took a look and they were having a funeral. All the mourners were there. I thought, oh my god, no wonder it was so quiet.”

Richard wrote of living near the funeral parlor “for a few months.” He described getting up early in the morning in his pajamas, while everyone else was still asleep, to watch the funerals through the window, so small he had to climb up on a chair to get a better view. It made a lasting impression. Thirty-nine years later, in his fiction, Brautigan recalled the mortician's blond-haired six-year-old daughter, whose ice-cold hands terrified him. Death remained a recurring image in his fiction and poetry. Like a funeral cortege haunting a sunny spring day, graves, shadows, cemeteries, and other glimpses of mortality add a pervasive melancholy to work so seemingly lighthearted on the surface.

A short while before Mary Lou occupied the apartment below the mortuary, either late 1939 or early in 1940, her brother Edward moved out of the family home. His friend Ron Bluett wanted them to head up to Seattle and find work in an aircraft factory. Instead, Edward Dixon took a job with Simms & Drake Construction Company in San Francisco. Ron Bluett ended up working in the timber industry, where he met his death. Within the year, Edward traveled to Midway Island in the Pacific. Simms & Drake was building an airstrip for the U.S. Navy. He had always written poetry. Many of these poems, composed during his off hours, were printed in the
Gooney Gazette
, the island's military newspaper, which Edward mailed home to his family.

In 1941, when Richard Brautigan was six, he and his mother lived in one of an ongoing sequence of low-rent buildings in Tacoma. A ninety-three-year-old woman occupied another
cheap apartment on the same floor. She had been a widow for seventy years and lived by herself. Twice each week, on Monday and Thursday evenings, Richard played Chinese checkers with her. She served him tea and cookies and told stories about a deceased husband who had drawn his last breath during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant. “I always liked old people,” Richard Brautigan wrote forty years later, “so I spent as much time with them as I could. They fascinated me like spiders.”

America's sudden entry into World War II had a profound effect on Richard Brautigan. On December 7, 1941, units of the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Midway as well as the U.S. Naval Base near Honolulu. Uncle Edward heard the incoming planes and hurried outside to help set up a machine gun. He managed to fire off a few rounds before a bomb exploded and everything went black.

Edward Dixon woke up on a hospital ship bound for Hawaii, head swathed in bandages. The doctor studying his chart by the foot of the bed said, “I know you. I used to go to school with you in Tacoma. How's your mother and your two sisters?”

Edward thought he was dying. “I'm not going to make it,” he told his old friend. “I want you to tell my mother and sisters goodbye for me.”

“You're going to make it, all right,” the doctor said. “I won't leave you.” He stayed by Edward's side for the remainder of the voyage.

Dixon spent five months recovering in a hospital in Honolulu. He wrote poetry “in the vein of Rudyard Kipling, Robert W. Service, and Omar Khayyam,” filling several spiral-bound notebooks. In May 1942, another construction job waited for him in Alaska. After a stopover in San Francisco and a passionate two-week love affair with a divorcee, he went home for a quick visit, arriving in St. Helens in time for Mother's Day. Bessie thought he wasn't well enough to go to work. Edward insisted the doctors gave him a clean bill of health. For a studio photograph taken at the time, the photographer posed Dixon so the patch bandage on the back of his head didn't show.

Mary Lou had just moved again when Edward arrived in Tacoma. He had only a couple days and stayed with his sister Eveline and her husband. No one knew where to find Mary Lou. Jack Fjetland took Edward looking for her, but they mostly made the rounds of local taverns and ended up falling asleep at a movie show. Edward shipped out for Sitka, Alaska, a few days later to work on another airfield. Mary Lou never saw her brother again.

1942 was a disastrous year for Mary Lou and her growing brood. Her daughter, Barbara, had eye surgery. Richard came down with chicken pox, whooping cough, and the mumps in quick succession. All three, mother and both children, had tonsillectomies in 1942. Richard had an allergic reaction to the tonsillitis medication. His head grew monstrously swollen. He raged with fever.