Jubilee Hitchhiker (32 page)

One day, Jack Spicer came by Dick and Ginny's place when Virginia was frantic at having misplaced some money she'd set aside for the rent. She'd already looked everywhere without success. Jack said, “Look in all the places you think you've put it.”

“I did. I did. I did. I did,” Ginny replied.

Spicer's uncanny ability to incorporate elements of magic into the simple details of everyday life fascinated Brautigan. “No. Look in the places where you've already looked,” Jack said. He was adamant and kept repeating this instruction. Ginny pulled out her leather wallet. She'd thoroughly searched it before, going through the many compartments and coming up empty-handed. This time, she dug her finger into a “secret” area and there was the folded money. Richard was flabbergasted. He talked about the episode for years. Ginny thought it not so much “magic,” but more in keeping with Spicer's views on poetics. Magic for Spicer “was a matter of disturbance, entrance, and passion, rather than abracadabra.” Jack once remarked to Robin Blaser “that there was no good source from which to learn magic; it was something we did among ourselves.”

Richard Brautigan celebrated his first San Francisco Christmas in a flophouse. The second yule was decidedly more festive. After all his miserable childhood holidays, it was a true joy to have a happy home and a wife he loved. Not even Virginia's illness that season (she had bronchitis) spoiled their happiness. When she felt well enough to go out, Ginny and Dick ran into Ron Loewinsohn on Filbert Street in front of the Saints Peter and Paul Church. He said he had gotten them something for Christmas but had it locked in his car parked nearby. The Brautigans walked back with him, and Ron gave them a parchment leaf from an illuminated medieval manuscript. Dick marveled at the gilded Latin uncials. It was a rare treasure for someone not accustomed to receiving gifts. Richard Brautigan proudly hung it on the wall of his Washington Street apartment.

fifteen: the general

P
RICE DUNN WAS born in Alabama in 1934 and “grew up in the buckle of the Bible Belt.” His father worked construction for the Tennessee Valley Authority, a job requiring him to move so often that Price attended forty-two different schools before dropping out of high school at eighteen. A two-year period of drifting followed, during which he hitchhiked up and down the East Coast with a sleeping bag and a duffle. Price found his way to Chicago and out through the Dakotas to Seattle and L.A. It was easy back then for a sober man to find work, “cleaning brick or pearl diving [washing dishes].”

In December 1955, Price Dunn headed north for San Francisco. He got as far as Big Sur. When he became stranded along the highway near Monterey, a long fascination with the writing of Henry Miller compelled Price to backtrack down the coastal route. He soon found the Anderson Creek studio of Emil White and went to work for him, doing odd jobs in return for room and board, not realizing White was a longtime friend of Miller's.

Heavy rains saturated Big Sur that winter. Mud slides after one big storm slammed over the hot springs owned by the Murphy family. Home today of the Esalen Institute, in 1956 the hot springs comprised little more than three rows of motel cabins, open tubs with wooden platforms covered by cedar shake roofs, and a handsome lodge fronted by a broad green lawn running right to the cliff edge. Closed to the public when mud filled most of the tubs, the hot springs looked like it might never open again for another season. The new manager stopped by Emil's one morning soon after the slide and, needing help with the clean-up, hired Price on the spot.

There was more work than a bulldozer could handle and no electricity to boot. The hot springs manager handed Price a shovel. The job paid no wages. Dunn dug out just one of the tubs, discovered the wine cellar, and invaded a pantry rich with fancy hams and smoked oysters. Price had “a wonderful winter,” soaking his weary bones while sipping bottle after bottle of excellent cabernet. One fine spring day, a carload of poets drove in for the weekend. When Larry Ferlinghetti, Mike McClure (and his wife, Joanna), Ronnie Bladen, and Jim and Beverly Harmon asked about renting rooms, Price told them the place was closed but they were free to camp. He moved them into an empty cabin. The poets arrived well provisioned with good food and wine. The hot springs remained without electricity, so Price lit some candles and built a fire. He also opened up the main lodge.

Later, down at the baths, Price uncorked the last of the cellar's vintage treasures. When the manager discovered the nonpaying guests, he fired Dunn. “You can't fire me,” Price taunted. “I quit last week.” The gathered poets were much amused by the heated exchange. “Relax,” they told the enraged manager. “Just relax. We'll take him out of here. He can have a ride with us.” The poets asked Price if he wanted to head up to San Francisco. “Hell, yeah, sure,” he replied. “Why not?”

They bundled into the dilapidated car, keeping the spirit of the weekend joyously alive by driving straight to Berkeley and a scheduled re-creation of the previous fall's Six Gallery reading. Michael McClure was one of the evening's participants. Like most sequels, this repeat performance opted for a grander setting and more-elaborate trappings. Staged in a Berkeley theater where the auditorium was decorated with large Robert LaVigne pen drawings of Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky making love, the reading featured all six of the original poets. Kenneth Rexroth again served as master of ceremonies.

Price Dunn had the time of his life. He'd never heard of Allen Ginsberg or the others but was immediately swept up into the emotional atmosphere. “It was like a prayer meeting,” Price recalled. The stage was set with six wooden throne-sized chairs (one for each poet) left over from a previous theatrical production. Having hitchhiked from North Carolina, Jack Kerouac passed the hat for wine, kept the jug circulating, and led the chanting response when Ginsberg intoned “Howl.”

Price went to live in a large house on Scott Street in San Francisco, a block away from Rexroth's place. It was an enclave of poets, shared by Michael and Joanna McClure, Jim and Beverly Harmon, filmmaker Larry Jordan, and Ronald Bladen. Jordan and Bladen had moved a printing press into the basement. “It was a center for things to happen,” Joanna McClure recalled. “What you'd call a commune, except they didn't have communes then.” Bladen, Harmon, and McClure edited and published
Ark II–Moby I
in the Scott Street house. Price slept in the basement with the press.

Joanna remembered Price as always cheerful and “good-spirited,” talking to himself and the cats. She thought of him as the “ultimate primitive.” Joanna also recalled the evening Price Dunn headed for the Golden Gate Bridge with suicide on his mind and his weary return the following morning. “Said he spent the whole night sitting out on one of the girders and it was really cold.” Less than a month later, after Shig Murao broke his leg in a motorcycle accident, Lawrence Ferlinghetti hired Price to work as a clerk in City Lights.

In August of 1956, when Richard Brautigan first showed up in the bookstore, perusing poetry titles and scanning the bulletin board, Price manned the cash register behind the counter. He thought the taciturn blond stranger “was like a spider man, because he was so tall and stooped.” Price never spoke with Richard in the shop but remembered Ferlinghetti “making a remark about that weird poet.” On another occasion, after a Brautigan visit to City Lights, Ferlinghetti said, “There's a guy who really hates his mother.”

“How in the hell do you know that?” Price demanded. His boss changed the subject without ever answering his question. Before the tall blond poet returned and Price could investigate the matter further, he was astonished to see the hot springs' manager stroll into City Lights. After they exchanged a few good-natured insults, he asked Price if he'd like to return to Big Sur and go back to work for him.

For Price, it was business as usual. One morning a week after returning, he sat in the kitchen of the lodge enjoying a cup of coffee when Dennis Murphy wandered in. He and Price were about the same age and “liked each other immediately.” Dennis was writing a novel (
The Sergeant
, published in 1958 and made into a movie starring Rod Steiger, with a screenplay by Murphy), which received the first Joseph Henry Jackson Award while still a work in progress. Price was fascinated by hearing about the process, as he also had literary aspirations. “I need my place over there fixed up,” Murphy said. “I need a handyman. Why don't you come to work for me?”

Dennis lived on the other side of Hot Springs Creek on an adjacent plateau along the north rim where his grandfather, Dr. Murphy, had built a huge gabled house back when he bought the springs, hoping to turn the place into a health spa. To Price, it was “like a fantasy movie, a rich guy's castle.” Just opposite stood a little six-room cottage. Price moved in and dubbed it “the slave quarters.” He went to work for the Murphys, landscaping a new lawn for the big house while Dennis toiled inside on his novel.

The two young men soon became “great friends.” Dennis was a “holy terror,” a federated boxer who “could fight like bloody hell.” Price was also a fighter. He had lost his front teeth long before and now got a new plate (hors de combat) about two or three times a year. Price and Dennis “terrorized the coast,” brawling in bars, taking no shit from anyone, eventually getting eighty-sixed from Nepenthy, a restaurant and bar on Highway 1, for being too handy with their dukes. All along, an eventual showdown between them felt inevitable. As Price recalled, “it was going to be who's the fastest gun in the West.”

Their OK Corral moment occurred one night in the main lodge. Dennis Murphy came over for dinner, the primary attraction being the bar. At the time, a group of construction workers, hired to rebuild the cabins, had moved in, and Dennis began gambling with them after eating. Price was in the kitchen enjoying a postdinner drink when,
bam
, the door crashed open and Dennis's girlfriend, her face bloody from a solid punch, staggered in. Dennis, drunk and raging, charged after her, sweeping a pile of dishes off a table, intent on mayhem.

Price, the Bible Belt Galahad, stepped up to intercede, and the fight was on. Punching and pummeling, they battled their way out the back door and around the building. Price was not as fast or as skilled but Dennis was drunk, “so that sort of equaled it.” The brawl turned into a pure slugfest lasting nearly an hour. Careening back into the main dining room, Price and Dennis hurtled together through the tall French windows and sprawled on the ground outside, bleeding profusely.

Price was badly cut. Dennis had shards stuck in his back. The manager came around with a hose and washed them down. Afterward, he drove them to Carmel Convalescent Hospital, where Price needed thirteen stitches in his arm. He also needed a new place to stay. He knew a beautiful young woman who had stopped on her way down to meet Pat Boyd, a painter friend who lived south of Gorda. Someone loaned Price a kayak, and he and the girl set off by sea from the hot springs.

It was twenty-five miles down the coast to Willow Creek and Gorda. Pat Boyd and his mother, Madge, lived in a big house surrounded by pine trees on about 225 acres of prime Big Sur real estate. They welcomed the young seafaring couple with open arms. Pat Boyd, “a wiry little guy,” had plans to start an artistic community. He and Price went to work together making it real. They dug out an area in the arroyo where a stream flowed, creating a water storage pool. Above this, Price and Pat carved a room-sized space into the sloping hillside. Using telephone poles and plywood, they built a small cabin with a deck overhanging the pond.

The dugout building stood high above the ocean, with a northern earth wall. The other three were largely glass, providing incredible views. Sliding shoji screens divided the cabin into a kitchen, a bedroom, and a living room. Price built a huge fireplace into the back wall, carrying sea-rounded rocks up from the beach. The cabin was without electricity and boasted only rudimentary gravity-flow plumbing, but its beautiful setting eclipsed any minor discomforts.

Sometime that spring, Price Dunn found himself at a Telegraph Hill party in hot pursuit of a lovely Jewish girl named Ydra. His long ardent chase lasted until the break of dawn. Everyone else
had left the apartment, and the young couple sat together watching the sun come up when they met Ginny Alder, their hostess. She was with the tall blond poet Price had seen the previous summer in City Lights. He introduced himself as Dick. There had been no opportunity to get acquainted during the party, so Price invited everyone to come out for breakfast.

They went to the Star Café on Kearny Street in North Beach, down by the Hall of Justice. Early in the morning, the place was full of cops catching a bite before starting their shifts. Both Price and Richard “collected” great cheap places to eat, and the Star, where a big breakfast cost fifty-five cents, was high on both their lists. The open grill kitchen stood right behind a counter presided over by a Japanese counterman whose adroit movements put Dunn in mind of a ballet.

Price took Ydra back down to Big Sur, a place he had already started calling “Boydland,” and they got to know each other a whole lot better for a couple of weeks before she vanished from his life forever. Price returned to the city and “started seeing Richard pretty regularly.” They became drinking buddies, hanging out in North Beach, drawn together by a love of tall tales and preposterous wordplay. By then, Richard and Virginia had married and moved to the apartment on Washington Street. Richard and Price often shared a bottle of cheap wine up on Telegraph Hill. When the talk turned to women, Brautigan always said, “The thing to do is find a woman that will support you.”

“That's a great dream,” Price replied, “if you can do it.”