Jubilee Hitchhiker (82 page)

The bad vibes continued. Chester Anderson feuded with the Diggers and split from com/ co. The Gestetners were moved to the basement of the Trip Without a Ticket. Anderson split for Florida, permanently denied access to the machines. After his return, he moved to the East Bay. Claude Hayward went over to see him, thinking Chester still had the Gestetners. Anderson, crazed on speed, pulled a gun. They never spoke or saw each other again. On August 23, Chocolate George, the affable Hells Angel, was struck by a motorist while driving his chopper on Haight Street. He died of a skull fracture the next day in General Hospital. The whole summer was turning out to be an epic bummer.

A peek into Richard Brautigan's pocket notebook revealed the broad extent of his social contacts in 1967. A page scrawled with telephone numbers compiled a Who's Who of the current scene. Among the names were Lew Welch, Lenore Kandel, The Flying Circus, Marty Balan [
sic
], Chet Helms, Bill Fritsch, and Sopwith Camel. Another small notebook from 1967 contained addresses and phone numbers for “Emmett,” Margot St. James, actor Rip Torn, and Harvey Kornspan (Brautigan misspelled his name with a “C”). The most illustrious contact was John Lennon. Richard had his phone number. Brautigan wrote the address down as “Waybridge [
sic
], England.” Lennon owned Weybridge, an elegant Tudor-style home in Kenwood, a “stockbroker belt” suburb of London.

Rip Torn found his place in Richard's notebook courtesy of Michael McClure, whose play
The Beard
appeared in Barney Rosset's
Evergreen Review.
Having published Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, and William Burroughs in his long one-man struggle against the U.S. censorship laws, Rosset wanted
The Beard
(and the controversy attending it) as the first production for his new Evergreen Theater in New York. He suggested Rip Torn as the director for the project (still starring Richard Bright and Billie Dixon), and the actor flew out to Frisco to meet with McClure.

They got together at Enrico's for a lunch of linguini and white clam sauce. Michael brought along Don Carpenter and Emmett Grogan. Both wanted to check the actor out. Also present was Jim Walsh, a New York producer in charge of
The Beard
, who favored Torn to direct the play. Former child star and current UN ambassador Shirley Temple Black sat at a nearby table. When Rip greeted her with a nod, “she coolly nodded back.”

At the end of the meal, Enrico Banducci joined them, treating the table to a round of espresso and Courvoisier. The expensive cognac Brautigan adored but could seldom afford brought Richard into the conversation. At the mention of his friend's name, Michael McClure “started to giggle.” Rip Torn would have happily spent the rest of the day at Enrico's, but McClure had made other plans. “We won't wait up for you tonight. You and Richard are going fishing.” Shaking his head and laughing, McClure added, “Try to get back before the week ends.”

After getting directions, Rip Torn drove his rental car out to Geary Street and parked in the Sears lot across from Brautigan's place. When he rang the bell, the door was opened by “a woman friend,” who said, “I'm on my way out. Richard's in the back brewing some tea.” Rip found Brautigan presiding over the kettle. He'd met Richard at a sushi bar the previous fall, but Richard had “hidden” from him. This time around, Brautigan was more affable. Over cups of tea their
conversation ranged from
The Beard
and the San Francisco poetry scene to
Beowulf
and “fishing for half-pounders in Oregon.” Taking note of his “falcon's gaze,” Torn thought Brautigan had an anachronistic resemblance to Custer and Mark Twain.

Brautigan organized his fishing tackle, outlining his plans for the day. Numbers of nine-inch fish were “bottled up” in a freshwater pond behind the sandbar at Muir Beach where Muir Creek ran to the sea off Mt. Tamalpais. “Everybody thinks I'm crazy,” Richard said as he bent down the barbs on his dry flies with a pair of needle-nose pliers. “That these fish are just rainbows planted by the parks department, but I think they're little steelhead waiting for a rain so the creek will cut the sandbar and they can go to sea.” After buying fly dope at Sears, with Rip behind the wheel, they were on their way across the Golden Gate Bridge and up Route 1 to Muir Beach.

Brautigan dismissed Rip Torn's gear. “Bass fisherman,” he drily observed, tying up a new nine-foot leader with a 7X tippet for Rip. The actor knew almost nothing about fly-fishing, having previously caught only bluegills on dry flies. Although he didn't cast badly, Torn felt his ability was “nothing compared with Richard's effortless form.” Brautigan “caught and released three small fish.” Rip caught one.

After that, Richard revealed the ulterior motive for his fishing trip. “We're all friends of McClure's,” he said. “We hear you're right to direct his play, but I'm leery of New York and, well, I figured if you checked out as a real fisherman, were telling the truth about that, that you were probably straight in the art department, too.” Brautigan suggested they leave the little trout “for the Rain God” and repair for a “sundowner” to the No Name Bar in Sausalito. Here they plotted getting together for “some real trout fishing” at a future date.

Erik and Loie Weber left San Francisco on August 20, planning an extended stay in India.

Two weeks before their departure, Erik took Richard out to the garden behind his Geary Street apartment for a final photo session. It was the only time Weber ever photographed his friend in color. The day was damp and chilly. Richard wore his familiar navy peacoat fully buttoned. (“The coldest winter I ever spent,” Mark Twain once quipped, “was summer in San Francisco.”) For fun at Brautigan's suggestion, Erik took a picture of him seated in the grass, his right hand cupped around a stray yellow jonquil. This image (used on the cover of
The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings
) provides the only example of Brautigan adopting the “flower power” iconography of the 1960s.

The Webers hosted a dinner party for family and friends at their apartment as a way of saying goodbye to Geary Street. Erik's mother was among the guests. Richard brought Marcia Pacaud. They spent the evening making out passionately on the couch, oblivious to the party going on around them. “He was in love with her,” Erik remembered. “He seemed like a little kid.”

Soon after the Webers left for India, Ernest Lowe, a producer at KQED, the local public access television station, wrote Brautigan, asking if he might be interested in working on a film. No real money was involved. A lifelong love for the movies impelled Richard to say yes. The end result,
Ellen, Age 3, versus American Television
, a six-minute short, starred Ianthe Brautigan's little half sister, Ellen Aste, who now goes by the name Ellen Valentine Spring. Brautigan's shooting script may well be the shortest in film history, consisting of five numbered questions, all variations on the same theme.

The film was made in the kitchen of a Lombard Street apartment belonging to a friend of Brautigan's former wife, Ginny. Ianthe watched the shoot from the sidelines. Richard asked the
cameraman, “Are you ready?” and reappeared with three-year-old Ellen. While Ellen ate an orange at the table, Brautigan asked her his questions. “What kind of animal would you like to see on television?”

“Purple,” she answered. It was her favorite color.

The other questions remained the same, only the subject changed: “What kind of dinner?” Richard inquired, “ toy? . . . bird? . . . person?” Every time, the little girl said, “Purple.” At the end, Brautigan asked Ellen if she'd like to see herself on television. When she answered in the affirmative, Richard replied, “Well, I think you will.” Cut. The film ended almost as soon as it started. In postproduction, close-ups of the various items were inserted. Because the film was shot in black and white, none of these (ham TV dinner, wind-up pecking bird toy, picture of a Native American, etc.) appeared in purple. There is no record that
Ellen, Age 3, versus American Television
was ever shown on KQED.

Ernest Lowe wasn't ready to give up on the idea of a Brautigan project, and he urged Richard to give it another try. What Brautigan had in mind was an experimental project as vapid as the work of Andy Warhol. Unlike the pop artist's interminably long films, Richard sought the soul of brevity. Not long after, a film team from KQED arrived at Geary Street. Producer Lowe brought cameraman Loren Sears, who worked in sixteen millimeter. Richard had a simple four-page typed script. They filmed in Brautigan's trash-filled backyard, taking numerous close-ups of discarded junk and long tracking shots past broken bottles, headless rubber dolls, and abandoned automobile tires. For the script, Richard compiled a handwritten list of three dozen place names from Yosemite National Park. He called the project
Ghetto Yosemite
.

Most of the work was done in the editing room at the beginning of September. Brautigan wrote Bill Jersey that he was working on his movie, “learning how to edit.” He called the process “beautiful magic!” They reduced their footage to a total length of three minutes. Even with this short running time, the film was divided into four “chapters.” Each showed the title and credits superimposed over black-and-white photographs of scenic locations in Yosemite. With traffic sounds (sirens and honking horns) in the background, the camera examined various pieces of trash as Richard read a voice-over narration: “This is Ghetto Yosemite located in the Western Addition of San Francisco. A lot of poor people live here. This is their Vernal Fall, their Castle Cliffs, their Inspiration Point [. . .]”

Inspired by the adventure serials he enjoyed as a kid, Brautigan ended each forty-five-second episode with a fey cliff-hanger. The first “chapter” stopped on the word “Half,” while the second began with the word “Dome.” The second concluded “Merced.” The third started “River.” Each chapter finished with the phrase “Don't Miss Chapter 2 (3 [. . .] 4) of Ghetto Yosemite” spiraling into focus over a scenic photo of the national park. The next chapter repeated the opening credits.
Ghetto Yosemite
aired on KQED “Channel 9” the next year, and the station sent Brautigan a check for $30.

With Erik Weber off in India, Brautigan looked for another court photographer to take his place. Richard had known Edmund Shea since the days when he worked at the chem lab. They bumped into each other one night at Vesuvio in North Beach and discovered they had friends like Michael McClure and Bruce Conner in common. “We must have talked about art and stuff like that, writing, poetry,” Shea speculated. “I drank a lot of wine with Richard over the years.” Edmund had produced definitive images of Lenny Bruce, Bill Graham, and various rock-and-roll
notables. Brautigan knew he did professional work. It was important to have a photographer he could call at a moment's notice. Richard wanted more pictures of Marcia Pacaud, but she returned for a visit home to Canada in the middle of September. After she left, Brautigan felt at loose ends, making his way down to Big Sur to hang out with Price Dunn.

Partying with the General didn't take his mind off longing for his woman. Richard wrote her a poem (“Marcia in Montreal”) and mailed it off in a letter. In all, he wrote her four times between September 17 and October 3, his only correspondence during that period. Perhaps trouble had been brewing before her departure and Richard was trying to smooth things over. A few months after her return they were no longer a couple, although they remained friends and correspondents for years afterward.

Brautigan distracted himself during Marcia's absence with a teenage artist he met in Monterey. Dottie Hochberg was a flower child nearly half his age. She wrote him ornate, elaborately illustrated letters for years following their first meeting, even after she married Gene Godare and had a baby. Richard saved every one.

On Labor Day weekend, Kendrick Rand, whom everyone called “Kend” at that time, opened a coffeehouse called The Minimum Daily Requirement at 348 Columbus Avenue, the triangular corner at the intersection with Grant. The plant-filled MDR provided a cool leafy-green retreat in the heart of North Beach. Rand had been part of the scene in the late fifties but had run a restaurant out on Union Street for the past few years.

At first, business was slow. Richard Brautigan became one of Kendrick's first customers that fall. The Hashbury circus began losing its appeal, and Richard gravitated back toward North Beach. Three years earlier, Rand had seen Brautigan's picture on the back of
Confederate General
and recognized the author as a guy he remembered from Miss Smith's Tea Room or the Bagel Shop a decade before. “Richard came in [to the MDR] a couple of times,” Rand recalled. “He would always sit back there all by himself, come in about one o'clock in the afternoon and have his coffee and just take in the scene.”

Rand had gotten the notion that Brautigan was “a difficult person.” One of the waitresses working at the MDR knew Richard slightly and introduced him to Kendrick. “I used to nod and say ‘Hi, Richard,' and ‘How are you doing?' and then he started calling me Kendrick, which very few people called me, and I have been Kendrick ever since.” The two men started talking more and more on each of Brautigan's subsequent visits. They ended up going out to dinner one night at Woey Loy Goey's, one of Richard's favorite places in Chinatown, where he had dined with Joanne Kyger during his first spring in Frisco. “Sort of like the men's room at Grand Central Station,” Kendrick remembered. “All tiled floor, walls, and ceiling and the noise factor is incredible. Very bright lights, mediocre Chinese food, but Richard loved it.” Brautigan was intrigued by Rand's patrician East Coast background. “Middle-class suburban yacht club, country club, kind of fascinated him, because [it] was like a foreign world.”