Jubilee Hitchhiker (111 page)

“Instead of getting rid of Micheline,” Don said, “Richard would have him to dinner and feed him and just be the sweetest guy in the world. Pay for it, be kind to him. Richard was recognizing
something that I wasn't. Jack Micheline needed him. Needed to be seen with him, sit with him, have dinner with him. Didn't have any money for dinner. You don't ask poets to order their priorities.”

Curt Gentry recalled Brautigan's kindness and generosity to Bob Kaufman. Drink and drugs had taken a toll on the black bard of North Beach. It was difficult to ascertain if Kaufman's ten-year vow of silence, embarked upon after John F. Kennedy's assassination, was the result of moral indignation or psychosis from years of substance abuse. Rumored to have first used the term “beatnik” before Herb Caen popularized it in his newspaper column, Kaufman had fallen on hard times since his glory days as one of the founders of
Beatitude
.

Gentry remembered how Kaufman “was always hitting on [Richard] for money, you know, a dollar here and a dollar there,” at a time when the culture-shocked poet had been eighty-sixed from every bar on the Beach. Brautigan never turned him down. Even if Kaufman had already put the bite on him earlier in the evening, “Richard would give him a dollar.”

Cow Hollow remained far from Bob Kaufman's regular haunts, and the old beatnik poet never put the bite on Brautigan outside Perry's. Michael McClure occasionally accompanied Richard on his forays to the pickup palace after he introduced Michael's work to Helen Brann. She agreed to represent him and placed McClure's first novel,
The Adept
, a phantasmagorical murder mystery involving a hippie coke dealer, with Sam Lawrence at Delacorte. Brautigan joined Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley in providing enthusiastic blurbs for the book, calling it “a beautifully written psychological thriller.” Michael repaid these small favors by finally completing the “sketch” he had agreed to exchange with Richard five years earlier.

“The Richard Brautigan Story” by “Miking Malecho” was a bizarre sixty-one-page quasi–science fiction fable, divided into two sections. McClure wrote the first part in the late sixties, mentioning Richard's “new blond girlfriend.” The fictional narrator is “Captain Paranoia,” a Halvmart, half-Martian, half-human, whose “face is a mask of rage!” He and his androids engage in relentless struggle against the Martians who have taken over the world and “secretly kidnapped” Richard Brautigan, replacing him with an android replicant. The meandering eighteen-page narrative is accompanied by thirteen cartoonish portraits of Brautigan. McClure deftly captured his friend's ironic bemusement.

The second part, called “The Brautigan Mystery: Volume Two,” runs for forty-three typewritten pages, a series of “Letters to a Young Poet, by Guru Maximus (Compiled by the Editors of the College of Philandery)” purportedly published by the “Institute of Erethric Priapism, second edition, 153rd printing.” The letters were “addressed to Mr. Richard Brautigan who is still struggling in the Philandery Program,” trying “to achieve the degree of Doctor of Philandery.” No illustrations this time. The allusions to Perry's date the manuscript to sometime after 1970.

McClure wrote of

Guru Maximus instructed Brautigan in the subtle arts of Philandery, urging him to use “The Pocket Watch Technique.” Set a large pocket watch in front of the twenty-three-year-old secretary he is attempting to seduce and say, “You've got nineteen minutes until screwing time, Toots.”

Richard saved the manuscript until his death. Michael McClure didn't keep a copy and thought the piece had vanished.

Most of Richard's encounters at Perry's were one-night stands, while Sherry Vetter remained his “main old lady.” A lone wolf like Brautigan spent much time by himself or in the company of male friends. In late September, when Richard was sitting on the terrace of Enrico's drinking wine with Erik Weber, a waiter told him he was wanted on the phone. A minute or so later, Richard informed Erik the call was for him. It was bad news. Weber's sister, Avril, had committed suicide, hanging herself from a tree behind Margot Patterson Doss's house in Bolinas. She was three months shy of her thirtieth birthday.

Stunned, Erik wandered out of the restaurant onto Broadway. Richard followed. He knew Avril and was familiar with her mental problems but still disapproved of her final decision. They walked together up a side street to Weber's truck, and Brautigan told him that suicide “was a chickenshit thing to do.” Taking your own life was cowardly. Loie Weber had a different view of the situation. She regarded her sister-in-law's death as an example of Brautigan's gift for “foreknowledge.”

Richard began writing
In Watermelon Sugar
in Bolinas in 1964. The novel in part was an allegory of the Bolinas lifestyle. Margaret, one of the main characters, commits suicide by hanging herself with her scarf from an apple tree. The narrator sees this tragic event reflected in the Statue of Mirrors. “Everything is reflected in the Statue of Mirrors, if you stand there long enough and empty your mind of everything but the mirrors, and you must be careful not to want anything from the mirrors. They just have to happen.”

For Loie, the mirrors and their prophetic reflections were a symbol of foreknowledge. “Richard was a very intentional person,” she said, “So, Margaret hangs herself, and the narrator is with Margaret's brother at the time, and Richard was with Erik at the time when Erik's sister killed herself.”

By the fall of 1971, Brautigan had $105,835. 57 deposited in his Wells Fargo savings account. He needed to invest some of this money but was instinctively suspicious of large financial institutions. “He didn't like banks,” his accountant, Esmond Coleman, observed. “He didn't like the stock market. He didn't trust that. He was a sort of Henry George sort of tax man. He thought the only thing worthwhile was real estate. That's all he felt was of lasting value.”

Richard and Sherry spent frequent weekends in Bolinas, staying at the Dosses' house downtown on Brighton Avenue or at the home the Creeleys bought halfway up Terrace Avenue. “Oh, a normal one!” Margot Doss said when she met Sherry for the first time. “One who talks. A normal one who dresses normal.” The Creeleys moved to Bolinas with their family, and Bob commuted to the City to teach at San Francisco State. Crouching under stands of dripping eucalyptus, the Creeleys' place stood on an acre of land granted as payment to the town's original surveyor. Bob thought it “looked like an old New England farmhouse.”

Richard loved staying with Bob and Bobbie, where he was apt to encounter lively conversation and interesting strangers. This was the time Bob came to know Richard best. “For me [he] was an excellent friend,” Creeley said. Sherry remembered many evenings when the poets gathered. She thought the writers' talk was “not dialogue, all monologue.”

Richard and Sherry started driving around with a Bolinas real estate salesman from the Sharon Agency downtown. “Looking at all these fancy houses,” Sherry said, “the straight people houses.” When the Realtor showed Richard number 6 Terrace Avenue and told him the story of the Chinese
girl's ghost, Sherry tried talking him out of buying the place. “He wanted to get it because it was relatively cheap compared to the other places and it was huge.”

When Richard and Sherry first visited the house she found it eerie and dark, but she thought all the old furnishings original to the place were “cool.” Sherry noted many bouquets of ancient dried flowers displayed everywhere. “Hibiscus, old and fragile like pale crinkled crepe paper in white jugs,” she wrote in her journal, “hydrangea, flower heads, perfectly preserved like mummy flowers in blue Ball jars.” They evoked the spirit of Mary Elizabeth Parsons, who lived there at the turn of the century. Alfred B. Parsons, current owner of the house, was her direct descendant. Parsons, a hay merchant, lived south of Sacramento, in the tiny town of Clarksburg. Earlier that July, he leased his “summer bungalow” out for a year. Another improbable six-degrees-of-separation coincidence: David and Tina Meltzer became his tenants.

Richard began seriously considering purchasing 6 Terrace Avenue in late October of 1971. The sale of the house included furnishings, and Mr. Parsons had the Sharon Agency prepare a partial inventory in November, listing kitchen appliances, numerous beds, dressers, tables, lamps, and several antiques: a piano, a pair of rocking chairs, two marble-top dressers. The Meltzers, who had been in the house for only three months, hadn't expected to have their home sold out from under them quite so soon. When the actual sale appeared imminent, David and Tina made an effort to convince Richard to let them continue living in the house.

They invited Richard and Sherry over for a dinner party. Brautigan and his girlfriend drove out from the City and took a room in Tarantino's tiny motel, tucked behind Smiley's. The Meltzers were vegetarians. Tina slaved all afternoon to make a tomato and tofu quiche, the sort of meal they considered a feast. Everybody sat around a big round table in the main room, the two couples and the Meltzers' two children. “Cute little leany-beany scrawny kids,” Sherry recalled.

Once the food had been served and Richard well plied with wine, David broached his plan, how they might stay on as caretakers, making sure the pipes didn't freeze, keeping the house aired out and stocked with provisions. If Brautigan wanted to come for the weekend, all he had to do was call ahead, and “they would just split and stay somewhere else.”

Richard paid close attention to David's proposal. The food wasn't to his liking, and he wasn't preoccupied with eating. Sherry found the vegetarian tomato-tofu quiche almost inedible. “I ate my piece, but Richard didn't touch his. I mean, he touched it, but like one bite.” Later, when they were lying in bed in the little motel room with the kitchenette, Sherry asked him, “Well, are you gonna do it? You know, let them stay?”

“No,” Richard replied. “I'm not going to let them stay. That food was horrible.”

“It was the food that killed her,” Sherry later observed. Tina Meltzer's culinary efforts spoiled any chance of remaining in the house on Terrace Avenue. The Meltzers quickly modified their plans, deciding to leave the country once their lease was up. “We were going to emigrate to Europe,” David Meltzer said. “We were exiling ourselves.”

Early in December, Alfred Parsons came by the Sharon Building in Bolinas and modified the inventory before signing it. He had decided to keep the studio couch, the two rocking chairs, an oval mirror, one of the marble-top dressers, and the andirons in the fireplace. The Realtor wrote to Brautigan about these changes, suggesting the items were “easily replaceable” and “not worth ruffling [Parsons's] feathers over.” He sent along the inventory, together with a copy of the original 1890 deed.

In mid-December, Richard put down $1,000 in earnest money, and Parsons and his wife signed a Bill of Sale, a Grant Deed, and an Assignment of Lease transferring the remaining portion of the Meltzers' lease over to Brautigan. Richard deposited the money he'd need to close into his checking account and flew down alone to Monterey for New Year's Eve with Price, staying at Borg's Motel in Pacific Grove. He returned to Frisco on the second, writing a personal check for $31,799.55 to the Western Title Guaranty Company two days later. Payment in full.

When Bruce Conner heard Richard bought a house in Bolinas, he was “dismayed.” Conner thought Brautigan's motivation grew out of his “competitive tendency with other writers, you know, drinking at bars and hanging out at bars where writers hung out.” Bruce considered Bolinas a literary hotbed crammed with “poets and writers and editors.” It seemed Richard “was going to one-up them and have a bigger house than anybody.” Knowing Brautigan couldn't drive and didn't own a car, Conner asked his friend why he planned on living “way out there in Bolinas.”

“I bought it. I'm gonna go there when I retire.”

Conner felt even more dismayed. “Richard, writers don't retire,” he said. “There's no way you are going to retire.”

“Yeah. I'm going to retire there in my old age.”

Bruce Conner saw this in a different light. Artists don't retire. Conner thought Brautigan picked this remote house as somewhere to go when it was time to die.

Home ownership did not mean immediate occupancy. The Meltzers' lease still had six months to run. David made sure his $150 rent check arrived on time each month. Richard recorded the sums in his income notebook, adding them to a running tally of royalty payments and foreign rights advances. He took out a $50,000 insurance policy on the Bolinas house in January.

Jayne Palladino wrote to Brautigan in early February. She went by the name of Walker now. Her last love affair had ended painfully. She had passed her PhD exams. Freed from academic pressure, she felt life to be good once again. Jayne hoped to get together with Richard sometime soon.

Sherry often came by Geary Street in the afternoons after school with stacks of fifth-grade papers to correct. Richard assisted with the homework, marking errors in the young girls' writing assignments. Once the phone rang and Brautigan wandered from the room, dragging the long cord behind, engaged in an intimate conversation. A few minutes later, “a really pretty woman” arrived. She was beautifully dressed and sat on the bed opposite Sherry, who was correcting papers. The woman took off her boots and slipped off a pair of “silky knee-high stockings,” cuddling back onto the bed. “What is going on?” Sherry thought. She was twenty-one and considered herself a straight girl. “The idea of ménage à trois was something I had seen in the movies,” she said. Sherry started “getting a little picture here of something.” She excused herself, grabbed up her coat, papers, and car keys, and bolted out the door.