Jubilee Hitchhiker (17 page)

Peter Webster and his sister Lorna, the two oldest children, were both born in the little house on Madison Street where their mother, Edna, had lived since the age of ten. She wasn't at home in the summer of 1954, when Dick Brautigan became an infrequent visitor. One time, he and B.J. went over to play cards with Pete and his younger sister Linda. A West Indian pop song played on the phonograph. Pete had given the forty-five to Linda, who favored calypso, rhythm and blues, and other esoteric black music. Dick Brautigan took no notice of Linda Webster on this occasion.

Continued family pressure at home to get a “real job” compelled the young writer to investigate new sources of part-time employment, so Dick and Pete went into the Christmas tree business. They made arrangements with a property owner on West Eleventh Street to sell trees on his unused lot. There was an old empty building, and the boys had the power turned on. Dick brought a small heater from home and they huddled around it for warmth while waiting for customers. Barbara recalled accompanying her brother on one of their harvesting expeditions: “Peter and Dick rented an old broken-down beater truck. It sounded like it was on its last legs. It had panels on the side, and they went up and cut down a whole bunch of Douglas fir.”

“During our search for trees, I was overcome by the beauty of the area,” Peter Webster remembered, “and fell down in amazement and looked up in the sky at the trees and the hills. Richard came running over to see what was the matter, and when he found out that I wasn't hurt, but rather that I was overwhelmed by the whole scene, he was profoundly touched. We didn't make any money selling Christmas trees, but our friendship from that moment was forever.”

On May 29, 1955, “So Many Twilights,” a new Brautigan poem describing an old woman rocking on her front porch, appeared in the “Oregonian Verse” column in the recently renamed
Northwest Roto Magazine
of
The Sunday Oregonian
. Around that time, Edna Webster returned home to Eugene from San Francisco with her newborn baby, Tim. There were now nine children in the brood. “Four pairs and a spare,” the family quipped. Linda was the spare. Over the past year, she had developed into a lovely young woman, but when Dick Brautigan started dropping by 41 Madison Street that summer, he was mainly interested in talking with her mother.

Mrs. Webster was a fascinating person. An independent, liberated female, she had proven herself adept at surviving in a male-dominated world. During World War II, Edna Webster transported the chassis of unfinished lend-lease trucks from their West Coast factories to ports on the
Eastern Seaboard for shipment to England, where final assembly took place. Later, she drove a bus and became the first female cabbie in Eugene. Along the way, she also worked as a taxi dispatcher and designed a modular home at a time when no one else had ever heard of such a thing.

All of this diverse activity was informed by an active and inquiring mind. “Edna liked to get into deep conversations with people,” her daughter Lorna recalled, “talk for hours, deep subjects, all kinds of things, fascinating discussions.”

Dick Brautigan thirsted for such conversation; there was no stimulating talk at home or among his friends. Barbara lived with the Guistina family at this time, taking care of their kids after school. She was free once they'd gone to sleep. Dick phoned her from his outside bedroom and discussed his poetry. “He would call me up every night and talk for about a half an hour or an hour at least. Read what he had written that day to me. I didn't appreciate it, because the most important thing to me was what happened at school.” A single line of her brother's poetry from this period stayed with her for more than forty years: “‘I saw Jesus Christ coming out of a pay toilet.' That one sentence really stuck in my mind.”

Before long, Dick Brautigan was riding the rattletrap bicycle he'd acquired after the demise of his paper route over to the little house on Madison Street every single day to talk with Edna Webster. She became his closest friend and confidant. Her daughter Linda listened in, having recently returned from visiting an aunt in Long Beach, California. Although Dick didn't remember her from the card game the previous year, she knew who he was. Linda thought he dressed strangely and had an odd, bowl-shaped haircut. She remembered seeing Dick on his junker bicycle with a fishing rod. “Nobody went around in Eugene riding a bike with a fishing pole.”

One summer morning in the Webster kitchen, not long after Linda had come back from California, the conversation turned to “some of the things down there.” The fourteen-year-old had brought along several books on the black music she adored. Fascinated by black culture, Linda talked about gangs. Dick started writing little improvisations, making her laugh. “I thought he was funny,” Linda recalled. “We became really good friends.” A typewriter in the kitchen led to a little game with Dick, typing up Linda's tales of life in Los Angeles as she drew funny pictures to illustrate them. “That was the first time, and then he started coming over all the time.”

The typewriter got moved to the open back porch, and soon Dick and Linda spent every day out there, laughing, joking, telling stories, writing poetry and short tales. Sometimes, Linda started a story and Dick picked up where she left off, typing the ending. They wrote reams and reams of copy together. Once, without Linda Webster's knowledge, Dick signed her name to a short story he had written (“The Day That My Aunt Millie Brought Back the Dead”) and entered it in a
Seventeen
magazine competition for teenage writers. The story was turned down.

Linda realized Dick “hated his mother” from reading his work. Brautigan bared his soul to her. At twenty, the shy young man who had never gone out on a date or danced with a girl was falling in love for the first time. Linda saw things differently. Just blossoming into a woman, she had no romantic inclinations for Dick Brautigan. “He seemed like a man to me. Too old. Too old.”

Even so, Linda Webster enjoyed the young man's attentions. She regarded Dick Brautigan as an older brother. Someone fun with whom to pal around. Peter, engaged in his religious studies, didn't fit the bill. Dick liked to kid and tell jokes. Linda remembered him as “very innocent,” but knew “he had to have had knowledge of the world.”

Once, drawing pictures out on the back porch, Dick sketched a “self-portrait” in the manner of a “droodle,” the popular comic cartoon riddle invented by bow-tied TV comedian Roger Price. Prophetic and self-revelatory, Brautigan's sketch showed only the back of a wide-brimmed hat poking up from behind the slope of a conical mountain. Like the public persona Richard later adopted, the simple iconic drawing concealed the author's true identity while creating an instantly identifiable image.

Dick brought his childhood friend Gary Stewart over to the Webster house and introduced him to Linda. He'd confessed his loved for the girl, enthusing over her beauty. Gary was amazed. A college man now, a sophomore fraternity member, he knew only girls who were grown women. “This can't be,” Gary thought. He tried to reason with his friend. “She's too young,” he told Brautigan. His advice fell on deaf ears. “He was really in love with her.”

Sometime that same summer, the Folstons had their fill of the unemployed poet who wandered the city streets at night and slept in until noon. They suggested Dick get his own place. A room was found on the second floor of 467 West Seventeenth Avenue, a family home between Charnelton and Lincoln converted into apartments. Dick's room was to the right of the stairs and faced the street. From his lone window, he could look across to his old high school, a block away.

“Just a place to crash,” a friend recalled. Furnished with a single bed, a two-burner hot plate, and a table and chair, the communal bathroom located down the hall, it possessed the Spartan austerity of a monk's chambers. At home with the monastic, Brautigan had few material needs beyond his portable Royal typewriter and a couple changes of clothing. To facilitate the move, Bill Folston paid his stepson's first month's rent and gave him a little money for food.

Dick Brautigan contemplated adopting a pen name. He thought “Duvall” had a distinguished sound, though nothing ever came of it. He also began using the Webster home as his return address for the manuscripts he submitted with dogged regularity to magazines ranging from
Playboy
to the
New Yorker
. In the rooming house, the tenants' mail accumulated in the downstairs hall. Linda Webster remembered all the rejection slips coming to 41 Madison Street.

While sending his fiction out to commercial magazines, Dick sought a more sophisticated venue for his poetry than the back pages of the
Sunday Oregonian.
The university bookstore sold a variety of poetry journals and literary quarterlies. Brautigan studied these, submitting poems to those that appealed to him. Sometime that summer, a surprise arrived in the mail from Alpine, Texas.
Flame
, a year-old quarterly, had accepted “Someplace in the World a Man Is Screaming in Pain,” an eight-line poem about a woman shelling peas. Along with a note from the editor, Lilith Lorraine, was a check for $2. It was the first time Richard Brautigan had ever been paid for his writing. He immediately mailed new poetry off to
Flame
.

Once Peter Webster began his sophomore year at NCC, Dick Brautigan found himself without a steady ride up the McKenzie. He renewed a friendship with Bill Brown, a high school classmate who had been in Dick's homeroom back when he was still known as Porterfield. They'd played a little intramural ball but had been in only one course together. Bill began working as a post office sub at the start of May. As a PTM, he had a flexible schedule providing a fair amount of free time. Best of all, he owned a car. “Every day off, every Sunday, every afternoon that we had a chance, we hit the river,” Brown recalled. “We must have gone fishing a hundred times that summer. We fished Gate Creek. We fished the Blue River. We fished Indian Creek, and he calls that ‘The Great
American Tragedy.' And we fished Rebel Creek that runs into the South Fork, and French Pete.” Bill enjoyed Dick's company, delighting in his “dry sense of humor.”

Once, Dick brought along his iron skillet, salt and pepper, and a lemon. Bill had the grill from a propane stove. After fishing all morning on the South Fork of the McKenzie, they found a little island in the middle of the stream. The water was low, and they waded over in their tennis shoes. “We got firewood and built a fire and fried the fish. Had it for lunch. And they were small, six, eight inches. I mean, they were legal.” Like Peter Webster, Bill Brown got a faraway look in his eyes remembering the magical meal. “That's the best fish I ever ate in my life.”

When he wasn't fishing, Dick Brautigan spent much of his free time at the Webster house. He talked about Scripture and philosophy with Edna. “We often discussed the Bible,” she recalled. “He wanted it to be a beautiful world. He believed that his writing could help people to see a different world, to see the truth. He wanted to know what truth is. Philosophically he grew away from what he had learned when he was younger. He didn't understand that it is an ongoing program.” Although young Dick held fast to many strong moral positions, he was no longer influenced by mere doctrine. “He committed himself to being his own man, and Pete committed himself to being God's man.”

With Peter off studying hard for the ministry, the conversation quite naturally turned at times to the subject of higher education and whether going to college was worth the time and effort. “He talked to me about going, and I said, ‘Do you want to go? What do you want to train for?' And he said he thought he knew what he wanted to do already, and I said, “You don't need college to do that.' He was going to be a writer.”

Dick discussed his admiration for Ernest Hemingway with Edna. “He thought if Hemingway made it as a writer so he would, too. He believed that he had something to say that people needed to hear, and the way he said it was different. People would want to hear it because it was based on truth and love.” Dick Brautigan's belief in his eventual success approached a level of religious faith. Even as the rejection slips piled up around him, he never lost hope. “Things are going to change,” he told Edna Webster. “People will see it differently.”

“He
knew
he was going to be a famous author someday.” Edna fervently echoed Brautigan's youthful conviction. At times, he showed new work to Juliette Gibson, his former creative writing teacher. One evening, Dick brought over a sheaf of recent poems. After reading through them, Miss Gibson expressed her considered opinion that just maybe young Brautigan might turn out to be a homosexual.

Furious, Dick stormed straight over to 41 Madison Street, telling Edna Webster all about this incredible insult. To an innocent virgin, Miss Gibson's comments on his potential sexuality seemed the most dire of prophesies. “Whenever he had any problems, he came and talked to me. And I was always willing to talk back.” On that troubled night, she advised him, “Ignore it. It's stupid. You don't pay attention to stupid people. Forget it. That's just ugly.”

Edna Webster sculpted ceramic busts as a hobby. Dick Brautigan felt her work deserved a wider audience. “He wanted to do something for me,” she explained. He took one of Edna's heads, hitchhiking up to the State Fair in Salem, and entered the piece in the fine art competition. Edna Webster won a second-place ribbon. “He was always doing neat things for people,” she said.

A new poem by Brautigan appeared in the
Oregonian
's
Northwest Roto Magazine
on August 14, 1955. “First Star on the Twilight River” described the poet telling his little brother, David, a story
about “A flower that fell / In love with a star.” It spoke of Brautigan's sensitivity that a man in his early twenties would take the time to sit on the steps with a five-year-old, improvising fairy tales in the twilight.