Jubilee Hitchhiker

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

books by william hjortsberg

Alp

 

Gray Matters

 

Symbiography

 

Toro! Toro! Toro!

 

Falling Angel

 

Tales & Fables

 

Nevermore

 

Legend of Darkness
(A Screenplay)

 

this book is
for the board
of directors

“Talent does whatever it wants to do: genius only what it can do.”

—EUGENE DELACROIX
(QUOTED BY KENNETH TYNAN IN A LETTER TO JOHNNY CARSON, APRIL 22, 1979)

 

 

“With talent, you do what you like. With genius, you do what you can.”

—JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES
(QUOTED BY JULIEN GREEN IN HIS
DIARY 1928–1957
)

 

 

“Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can.”

—OWEN MEREDITH
(QUOTED BY JOHN POWERS IN
VOGUE
, JANUARY 1999)

 

 

“GENIUS DOES WHAT IT MUST, AND TALENT DOES WHAT IT CAN.”

—ANONYMOUS
(FOUND IN A FORTUNE COOKIE, AUGUST 1993)

part one:

flowerburger

one: john doe number 9

R
ICHARD BRAUTIGAN NEVER heard his final gunshot. Traveling three times the speed of sound, the Winchester Western Super X .44 Magnum hollow point exploded up through the poet's head, destroying his face, dislodging his wire-rimmed eyeglasses, blasting off the back of his skull. Continuing on, the bullet tore a hole in the molding above a corner window, struck a one-by-four nailed inside, and fell back into the space within the wall. At the same instant, all his dreams, fears, hopes, and ambition were erased forever, his brain disintegrated, the nerves of his spinal cord were disconnected, and Brautigan's knees buckled, his body dropping straight down, as the weapon, a nickel-plated Smith & Wesson Model 28 revolver, flew from his lifeless hand. He was dead before he hit the floor.

It was a beautiful bright Sunday afternoon: September 16, 1984. Clad in tan corduroy trousers, a T-shirt, and socks, Richard Brautigan's body lay on its back in the main living area on the second floor of his house at 6 Terrace Avenue in Bolinas, California, a small seacoast village he referred to as “the freeze-dried sixties.” His left front pocket held a crumpled $5 bill and a couple singles. A radio in the kitchen at the back of the house blared at full volume. Richard Brautigan was forty-nine years old when he died.

Next door, in a smaller house sharing the same unpaved semicircular driveway with Brautigan's place, his neighbor, Jim Zeno, watched football (Raiders/Chiefs) on TV with a friend. In the middle of a noisy touchdown, they heard an explosive boom outside. It seemed to come from Richard Brautigan's house. The two men exchanged a glance but said nothing, continuing to watch the game. Zeno's wife, Karly, came upstairs. “Did you hear that noise?” she asked. They discussed the strange sound, “definitely a loud bang,” but there was no thought of going over to check on it. Part of being what Brautigan described as “impeccable neighbors” involved not entering his space except when invited, so the Zenos remained at home to watch Los Angeles come from behind and defeat Kansas City, 22–20, with a nineteen-yard field goal in the final minute of play.

Across the way, the acrid smell of cordite hung in the still, hot air. All the windows and doors at 6 Terrace Avenue were tightly shut, the blinds drawn. The shadowy house resonated with a radio's insistent discordant jabber. Four small bedrooms on the third floor were rarely used because Brautigan believed the ghost of a young Chinese woman dwelled in that part of the house. Various stories circulated about her. Some claimed she had drowned in the Bolinas Lagoon during World War I. Others said she'd been a servant, employed by the original owners, who had committed suicide in the house. Richard hung a looking glass on the wall over the stairway, telling his friend Dr. John Doss, “The reason I have a mirror here is because ghosts can't see themselves in mirrors.” Brautigan's daughter, Ianthe, believed the mirror kept the ghost from coming downstairs.

Several visitors reported walking through mysterious cold spots, and an Eastern woman journalist claimed to have seen a young female sitting next to Brautigan on the torn black Naugahyde sofa while she interviewed him. When the writer Keith Abbott volunteered his pickup truck in 1973 to move boxes of books out to Bolinas, he was startled to see a momentary apparition in the tiny junk-filled upstairs east bedroom, “almost like a slide being placed in a projector of a girl wearing a white nightgown.” He dismissed the unearthly vision as “a mild hallucination.” Richard told him three other people had seen an identical specter.

The novelist Don Carpenter believed the ghost was a “twelve-year-old Japanese girl who lives in the house and determines what goes on.” He based this assumption on testimony from two people who didn't know each other but had both seen the ghost on separate occasions. After Don's apartment in the city burned to the ground, he was living in his ex-wife's place in Mill Valley. Richard offered him the use of the Bolinas house for $100 a month, “a joke because the heating bill alone was $100 a month.”

Keith Abbott and a buddy came over with his truck. They packed up Don's furniture and drove it to 6 Terrace Avenue. Because of a ruptured disc, Carpenter was unable to lift anything heavy, so he went inside to have a look around while Keith and his friend unloaded. “I've never had a more awful, dreadful, terrible, foreboding feeling,” Don Carpenter recalled. “Except when I thought I was dying of cancer.”

Don went back out to the driveway. All his furniture stood waiting to be moved inside. “Keith,” he said, “I can't live here.”

Because he had done none of the physical labor, Don felt uncomfortable about this. “These guys who were doing this for free. I didn't want to say, ‘We've got to pack up this truck and go back to Mill Valley.' But I did and Keith said, ‘I understand perfectly.' We packed up the truck and off we went.”

The spacious second level served Brautigan as a combination living quarters and office. A large California state flag hung from the ceiling, functioning as a room divider between the barren fireplace and the kitchen door. The back roof leaked, and the floor boards in the rear had warped and buckled. The flag concealed the damage. Beneath it, the haunted sofa added solidity to the makeshift partition.

Richard Brautigan's six-foot four-inch body stretched full length in the southwest corner of the room. What remained of his head faced an unmade double bed, the tangled blankets suggesting a bachelor's inattentive housekeeping. His feet pointed toward the corner windows, where the .44 Magnum landed, barrel forward, on the seat of a blood-splattered white school desk, the kind with a single wide writing arm. A bloodied eyeglass lens rested upon it.

Brautigan's writing area, a large round table littered with various works in progress, stood to the right of his body, the hard blue chair he favored on the far side. A coffee cup sat among the scattered manuscripts and notebooks. Like some macabre action painting, blood and brains splashed vividly across the table's surface and sprayed the adjacent window. Richard's tan IBM typewriter sat nearby, the plastic cover gray with dust. When writer and performer Bobbie Louise Hawkins saw the shrouded machine she assumed he wasn't working. The ex-wife of poet Robert Creeley thought her friend had been fibbing when he came an hour late for a breakfast invitation, claiming to have written fifteen pages that morning.

Perhaps she didn't know Richard Brautigan did most of his preliminary work in longhand, scribbling away in spiral-bound notebooks and on stray scraps of paper, worrying poems and
stories through multiple drafts in his pinched, childlike scrawl. His last efforts bore an ultimate validation: the writer's blood staining nearly every page. Brautigan left no final note rationalizing his suicide. This gory pile of manuscripts said it all.

Altogether, eight notebooks dating from earlier in the year lay, along with many assorted manuscripts, on the blood-soaked work table. For more than thirty years, Richard Brautigan had used his notebooks as a testing ground, beginning certain pieces over and over again. The material on the table contained many such false starts. There were more than two dozen handwritten drafts of poems and stories on the tissue-thin stationery of the Keio Plaza Inter-Continental Hotel, where Brautigan stayed when he was in Tokyo. Some were typewritten. Richard Brautigan had been a very fast typist. Machine-gun speed, blasting out a first draft with little thought for the niceties of spelling or punctuation, two skills he never mastered. “Determination,” rendered quickly, became “dtertination.” Richard paused only when something felt wrong. He used a repeated virgule (/////) to cross out unwanted material.