Jubilee Hitchhiker (83 page)

Kendrick was separated from his first wife. Richard, between girlfriends after Marcia's departure for Montreal, “started hanging out in my joint.” This involved finding inexpensive places to eat. “He knew the cheap restaurants in Chinatown like the back of his hand,” Rand recalled. “There was one place he referred to as ‘the Pork Chop Palace' where he got three pork chops and a huge mound of either rice or mashed potatoes with pork gravy on it for $1.98. He thought that was fabulous.”

Having left his car with his estranged wife, Kendrick was without wheels. His friend Alvin Duskin, the wealthy garment manufacturer and political activist, came to Rand's rescue and gave him a “cherry” black Cadillac Coup de Ville and “a whole new life.” Brautigan, antennae finely tuned for anyone who might provide transportation, soon was riding in style with Kendrick. Once, they tooled out to Muir Woods on a fishing foray, winding the big car down through the tight curves on Route 1. They fished Muir Creek where Richard had taken Rip Torn, a ribbon of silver purling between the redwoods toward the beach. Richard spent days planning this trip. “All the preparation that went into this little late afternoon fishing expedition,” Rand reminisced. “I mean, many trips to Figoni Hardware to get the right size hooks and some kind of roe. I didn't catch one fish. He caught about half a dozen.”

Shortly after its com/co publication, Richard mailed copies of
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
to a number of important literary editors and critics. Malcolm Cowley wrote a card thanking him for the “
pensees
, like grasshoppers in flight, not my sort of poems, but lively & personal.” The title poem was Cowley's favorite. A letter from
TriQuarterly
editor Charles Newman went one better. Newman “particularly” liked the title poem and asked if he could use it in a future issue of the magazine. Brautigan wrote back the next day to give his approval.

When Mad River's six-month lease was up on their Berkeley apartment in September, the band moved across the Bay to a new pad on Oak Street overlooking the Panhandle. “Once we got to the city, Richard became a regular visitor,” Greg Dewey recalled, “almost daily.” Usually, Brautigan arrived toting a gallon jug of cheap white wine, “Gallo chablis or the like.” Richard also brought Emmett Grogan, Bill Fritsch, and Lenore Kandel over to Mad River's flat. Sweet William often came accompanied by outlaw bikers. Lawrence Hammond remembered once “walking into the living room and there were two Hells Angels there. I was kind of intimidated. Richard and Bill were just sitting there grinning. And these Angels were riffing about guns and shooting themselves in the feet. I was watching Richard, and I had the feeling that he was taking it all in and getting ready to write it down. I think he liked to do that, put people together and then sit back and watch.”

“Richard was a great guy,” Tom Manning said, commenting on the writer's powers of observation. “He was a spacey guy, in the sense that you think he is looking at you and he's seeing you, but he's seeing right through you and behind you and above you at the same time. He was always like that. He was one of the sweetest guys I've ever met in my life.” When not sitting back and watching, Brautigan often became quite animated. Hammond recalled how the poet regaled them at times. “When he was really wound up, he would pace back and forth with that funny floppy hat, and his hands behind his back, and just deliver all these lines.”

One of the attractions for Brautigan at Mad River's pad was the number of lovely hippie chicks hanging out there. “I always think that he wound up at our place 'cause we generally had these beautiful women around,” Dave Robinson recalled. “God bless him, Richard would go after anything that wasn't nailed down. We didn't see much of the women he was with; he was kind of guarded. He was guarding his and eager to meet
ours
!” Tom Manning doesn't remember ever seeing Brautigan with a woman. “I don't know if he kept them away from us on purpose,” Rick Bockner said. “I suspect that he wasn't an entirely happy man.”

Through Brautigan, the Mad River musicians got to know the Diggers, who took a liking to them. “We were very young, and we didn't know what the hell we were doing,” Greg Dewey reflected, “and they were guys who were out there and had been around. They were very kind to
us and took care of us. It was a major gift that we had them in our corner. Without a doubt, it was Brautigan who put us in that corner.”

In addition to providing gigs where the hat might be passed, the Diggers also supplied free food, and often as not, Richard served as the delivery boy. “When we'd come back and open the refrigerator,” Lawrence Hammond remembered, “there'd be all this food in it, and we were
starving
. That was the Digger thing, free food.” Knowing firsthand what it was like to go hungry, Richard Brautigan delighted in his Robin Hood role.

Brautigan liked all the guys in Mad River but grew especially fond of Lawrence Hammond, the group's twenty-year-old chief lyricist. For a young man, Hammond “took his craft seriously,” which naturally appealed to Richard. Greg Dewey recalled that Brautigan “was fascinated with Lawrence's writing,” and they dug rapping with each other. Hammond noted, “We didn't talk about art too much. I don't think he liked to talk about it. If you talked about what you were working on before it was finished, it became very difficult to finish it, for some reason. I seem to remember him commenting on that.” Brautigan had a way of talking indirectly about art in his most casual offhand remarks. Greg Dewey remembered one hot summer afternoon in San Francisco when they both felt a moment's relief from a gentle passing wind. “You know that little breeze, Dewey?” Richard said. “That little breeze was just like a poem.”

In September 1967, Richard Brautigan focused on the imminent publication of
Trout Fishing in America
. When Don Allen sent the cover material to Zoe Brown early in August, he suggested that the author's name and book title appear “across the top above the photo on the front.” Richard quickly squelched that idea. The book's front cover would consist of Erik Weber's photograph and nothing else, no title, no author name, no words of any sort, nothing but this bold iconographic statement. Later, it was rumored that Richard Brautigan first gained a national reputation when all the summer dropouts returned to college with copies of
Trout Fishing
in their knapsacks. A nice story, but the book wasn't published until a month later. The returning wayfarers carried com/co broadsides or
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
.

Luther Nichols, an early and enthusiastic supporter of Richard's work, maintained a connection throughout the years. When Ishmael Reed, a young African American writer whose first novel,
The Free-Lance Pallbearers
, had just been published by Doubleday, came up from Los Angeles that fall, Nichols asked him if there was anyone in Frisco he'd like to meet. Reed had read Brautigan and said, “This guy's an exciting writer.”

Nichols arranged for lunch at Enrico's. Ishmael had been urging Nichols to get Brautigan published by Doubleday, unaware of the editor's initial efforts on behalf of
Trout Fishing
and that his publishing house had recently rejected
The Abortion
. At their luncheon, Reed found Brautigan to be “a private person. He didn't say very much.” Ishmael thought Richard looked “very much like the hippie stereotype or the beatnik stereotype,” but remembered him saying “he didn't even know those people. He didn't seem to be part of any kind of scene.” The lunch at Enrico's launched a friendship lasting through the years until Brautigan's death.

The autumnal solstice marked the temporal end of the Summer of Love. Spiritually, the psychedelic frolic faded out a few weeks earlier when the last of the seasonal runaways packed up their gear and hitched out of town, heading back to school. With the tourists, spare-change artists, and most of the barefoot waifs departed, Haight Street took on a deserted tawdry appearance, like a carnival midway after the bright colored lights switch off and all the rubes have gone home
for the night. Unlike the festive zeal greeting the equinox, the fall solstice arrived with little worth celebrating. A planned powwow at Speedway Meadow attracted only about six hundred participants. That night, the Straight Theater hosted an “Invocation of My Demon Brother,” a Satanist ritual honoring the birthday of Aleister Crowley. The moon was in the sign of Scorpio. Filmmaker Kenneth Anger and a group calling itself the Brotherhood of Lucifer hosted the event with a Ben Van Meter light show and music by the Orkustra (renamed the Wizard for the occasion). Despite that old black magic, not many people showed. The Hashbury party was over.

In the fall of 1967, Mad River released a three-song EP recording with Wee Records, a local independent label. The record came in a handmade cardboard sleeve the band assembled themselves. Rick Bockner recalled Brautigan joining in on the impromptu assembly line: “That was a fun project. Five guys, a chunk of hash, and some mucilage, gluing the covers together.” Wee released a thousand copies. The disc sold well in the Bay Area and got a lot of airplay on KMPX, thanks to “Big Daddy” Tom Donahue, who dug Mad River's sound. This led to the band's signing a contract with Capitol soon after. Because of Richard's prior kindness, Mad River gave him part of their advance and claimed on the liner notes of a 1995 CD compilation that this money “paid for the printing of Brautigan's new novel [
sic
]
Please Plant This Book
.”

Mad River may well have given Richard a sum of money (Rick Bockner thinks it came to around $500), but not all might have gone toward
Please Plant This Book
. Jack Shoemaker stated that he and Vicki provided the funds that paid for the seeds and the seed packets, while Graham Mackintosh donated his time and press to design and print the folded cardboard cover. Brautigan had first approached Claude Hayward at com/co about printing the book. For technical reasons, Claude could not do it for him. “There was a problem with getting the little envelopes through the machine.”

“Richard was a great networker, and he played everything very close to the vest,” Shoemaker recalled. “It's perfectly conceivable that he would have gotten several hundred dollars from Mad River and several hundred dollars from me and God knows where all. Richard was doing this grand dance, and he would collect from here and give off there. It was the Digger style.”

The planning and financing of
Please Plant This Book
became a moveable feast. After its inception at the Shoemakers', the idea got kicked around at several different venues. Brautigan always liked hearing a variety of opinions before drawing his own conclusions. Art Boericke remained certain that the idea for the book “took shape” at Peter Berg's house. Richard appreciated Berg's intelligence and street-theater philosophy and would have sought out his opinion. As a professional gardener, Boericke was able to get the seeds wholesale.

Brautigan made a folded poster paper mock-up of the book he had in mind, drawing the cover in crayon. His childlike sketch showed a black horse surrounded by carrots and flowers, happy bursts of red, yellow, and green. Richard crayoned his name and the title on the cover and typed the eight poems on slips of three-by-five paper. He typed planting instructions on eight similar-sized slips and created dummy seed packets by taping them together. On the back cover, using a thin-tipped Magic Marker, Brautigan wrote, “This Book is FREE.”

Richard kept busy raising funds for his giveaway seed-packet poetry project with the actual production still months in the future. Bruce Conner's campaign for San Francisco city supervisor existed in a similar state of flux. While supporting himself as a janitor and a salesman in a knickknack shop, Conner made time for politics, giving speeches that consisted entirely of long lists of
deserts, his run for office partly an art project. A serious side to his electioneering included intense opposition to the war in Vietnam.

Edmund Shea had originally filed for the position but had to drop out of politics after he was busted. Bruce took over in his place. Edmund assisted the campaign by handling the photography for two political posters. One depicted Conner as a baby. The other showed the artist painting an elephant. Bruce Conner also enlisted Richard Brautigan and the Diggers to help. Conner and Peter Berg had been talking about peace and how to achieve that impossible goal. “We were discussing this about the end of the war,” Conner recalled, “and the thing to do to end the war was to
end
it and tell everybody it's ended and to celebrate its end and put into people's minds the concept of the war is over.”

Peter Berg “and some of the other people who liked to organize such things” focused on “interior theater” and enlisted the Straight Theater for the event. Brautigan wrote a speech for the occasion. The text no longer survives, but Conner remembered it to be, “like many of Richard's things,” no more than twenty-five words in length. Brautigan had another publicity idea for Conner's campaign. In 1964, the artist exhibited a group of thirteen canvases, the
Touch/Do Not Touch
series, at the Batman Gallery. Twelve of the uniform black-framed artworks (which Conner was careful never to touch) contained the information do not touch in “museum-sized lettering.” On the thirteenth, the same size as the others, Conner applied transfer letters spelling out touch and covered the work with a sheet of glass. Three years later, Richard Brautigan's brainstorm was to photograph the words “Do Not Touch” and reproduce them on sheets of paper.

Bruce Conner took a picture of the center of his work. “We printed them on hundreds of little file cards.” At the Straight Theater before Conner spoke, Richard handed out the “Do Not Touch” cards like political flyers. “I'm going up to the balcony,” he told the artist, “and after your speech I'm going to disperse them to everyone. It's a grand gesture.” True to his word, Brautigan stood at the balcony rail and, when Bruce Conner finished speaking, tossed the remaining cards into the air, and they showered down, fluttering onto the crowd like a pasteboard snowstorm. “They were all over the floor, and virtually nobody picked them up,” Conner recalled. “It was sort of a mystery to me why he had chosen to do that.” Bruce Conner did not win a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, but his artist's antiwar campaign possessed a certain oddball appeal, enough to garner him over five thousand votes.