Jubilee Hitchhiker (35 page)

The winter weather remained wet and cold, rain pelting down against the makeshift dugout. They met Pat Boyd's companion, the granddaughter of Aimee Semple McPherson. Price claimed she had once worked as a part-time prostitute in L.A. Pregnant and recently returned from New Mexico, she called herself Alicia Tree. A couple months later, Price delivered her baby. They all spent a good deal of time gathered by the fireplace, drinking tea. Richard kept busy with his
notebook. Among the poems he wrote during the stay was “The Castle of the Cormorants,” a mournful, evocative piece in which Hamlet, carrying a cormorant, marries a wet drowned Ophelia.

March 1958 saw the publication of
Hearse
number 3 with two poems by Richard Brautigan, both from the Leslie Woolf Hedley collection
Four New Poets.
The spring issue of
Epos
(vol. 9, no. 3) appeared early in 1958, with Brautigan's poem “Kingdom Come.” It was never collected or reprinted elsewhere. The featured poet was Miller Williams, a professor at the University of Arkansas and the father of future singer/songwriter Lucinda Williams.

That same spring, Ron Loewinsohn published his first book of poetry,
Watermelons
. He and Richard Brautigan had fallen out (the first of many schisms between them) and were no longer speaking. When Richard saw a copy of Ron's book he leafed through the pages until he came to a poem once dedicated to him, “beautifully minus a dedication.” He smiled and said “Shit,” tossing the book aside. Years later, Brautigan eliminated previous dedications whenever former friends offended him.

In May, with Jack Spicer's encouragement, Joe Dunn and the White Rabbit Press published
The Galilee Hitch-Hiker
in an edition of two hundred copies. Richard asked Kenn Davis to design the cover art. “So I showed him some ideas that I had,” Kenn recalled, “and he thought this one would work. I did another little rough in pencil and said, let me expand this a little bit.” Davis went off for a day or so and came back with a preliminary ink drawing, “kind of semifinished,” thinking to do “a more polished version” once he had Brautigan's approval. “But he liked that one just fine. He says, ‘Don't touch it. That's great. We'll just go with that.'”

The wispy ink sketch portrays a nearly deserted carnival midway where hot dog vendors and balloon salesmen wander aimlessly beneath a deserted Ferris wheel. Looming ominously in the background, a dark cross towers above Calvary, the ghostly framework of a roller coaster swirling around it in the crosshatched sky. All in all, a handsome little book for a quarter.

Because White Rabbit Press lacked binding equipment, the printed pages and red cover wraps were delivered to Brautigan unbound. Richard, Ginny, and Kenn Davis sat around the Brautigans' kitchen table hand-stitching the little sixteen-page chapbook together with needles and thread, “drinking wine and yakking.” When all two hundred were finished, they tackled the problem of distribution. City Lights could be counted on to take a few, but the rest had to be placed in other bookstores through pounding the pavement and knocking on doors. By June, copies of
The Galilee Hitch-Hiker
had been distributed to all the local booksellers.

While making book delivery rounds in North Beach, Richard discovered an intriguing new hangout on the corner of Greenwich and Grant had opened earlier in the month. No sign outside nor any descriptive lettering on the show windows identified the place. Only an oil painting hanging in the window on the Grant Avenue side provided a clue. It portrayed a multiracial group standing around a table, which held a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine. The street people called the place “Bread and Wine.”

It appeared to be a coffeehouse. The high-ceilinged thirty-by-forty-foot storefront contained an odd assortment of tables and chairs, crowded bookshelves, and a long counter with a five-gallon coffee urn next to a tall pyramid of inverted mugs. The look was European, clean, functional, entirely secular. Nothing suggested any religious affiliation although the place had been sponsored by the Congregational Church. It wasn't long before poet Bob Kaufman, “the Black American
Rimbaud,” dubbed it the “Bread and Wine Mission.” His offhand quip stuck. Soon, everyone on the Beach called the corner spot “The Mission.”

The pastor of this unorthodox sanctuary was Pierre Delattre, a blond, blue-eyed, twenty-eight-year-old graduate of the University of Chicago Divinity School. Interested in “the history of religion as it applied to literature,” Delattre had never intended to become a minister. He wanted to be a writer. Always casually dressed in old tennis shoes, bleached blue jeans, and a hooded white sweatshirt with a large pectoral cross hanging around his neck on a black cord, Pierre Delattre held an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Pennsylvania. He'd also worked construction in Puerto Rico, unloaded a lacquering oven at a tin can factory, and “following in Kerouac's footsteps,” toiled as a switchman for the Southern Pacific.

Delattre had come to believe that the true center of spiritual life was not in churches but “out in the streets among musicians and poets.” He gave a speech at a large Congregational church in Oakland about how “the institutional church was the greatest impediment to religious life in America.” He was approached afterward by Reverend Robert W. Spike, head of the Congregational Board of Home Missions. Spike, murdered a few years later, had been the pastor of Judson Memorial Church in New York's Greenwich Village from 1949 to 1955. He asked Delattre, “What if we found you a place where you could just be present and encourage the spiritual dimension of what's going on in poetry and jazz and the arts in general?” Pierre thought this was a great idea, and the ecumenical coffeehouse was born. The Missions Board rented an empty storefront in North Beach. Delattre was ordained into the Congregational Church. The young minister told his benefactors, “Don't expect me to be trying to convert anybody to Christianity. I want to be equally responsive to Judaism and Buddhism and Hinduism and so forth.”

Delattre moved into an apartment above the store with his wife, Lois (an actress and psychologist), and their two children. He commissioned an artist named Del Lederle to paint the picture in the front window. Bread and Wine was open for business. “Almost immediately, we were jammed with people,” Delattre recalled. “We had about two poetry readings a week, right from the start, and a lot of stuff going on with drumming and dancing and music. And I had a street theater that was performing inside and outside. It was pretty quickly a center.”

Richard Brautigan wandered into Bread and Wine not long after it opened. He was hanging out with George Stanley, a member of the Spicer group known for his garrulous, argumentative nature. Delattre knew Stanley as part of a gang of unruly poets who called themselves “The Disruptionists.” Once, they smashed a piano to pieces with sledgehammers, “symbolically destroying bourgeois culture.” Another time, a couple of them peed on the floor of the Mission prior to a reading, the ultimate critical put-down.

Richard and Pierre quickly became friends, in part because Brautigan was so clearly his own man and not a part of any group. Delattre also admired Richard's poetry. “He was one of the first of the poets in that area to be really caught up in popular cultural mythology,” he recalled. “But rather than using Billy the Kid and other American icons, he was going European, and his big kick at that time was Baudelaire.”

A reading at Bread and Wine soon followed. Brautigan was featured on a bill with Ebbe Borregaard, Joanne Kyger, and Gary Snyder. After two years abroad in Kyoto, Snyder had returned to the Bay Area in April and moved back to his simple shack on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais. Joanne and Gary met recently at The Place, and their intricate mating dance began. Pierre Delattre
grouped Joanne with the Disruptionists. “I don't know what there was about her,” he recalled. “She would walk into a room, and chaos would break out.” Kyger confessed to being “totally stoned” with nervous exhilaration on the night of the reading.

Richard Brautigan was also very nervous that night. Delattre remembered how he had to get drunk before he could appear before an audience. “He was very shy, very skittish,” downing a bottle of wine prior to his reading. The poets all read by candlelight, sitting on stools beside another stool supporting a big candelabrum. Afterward, Delattre “passed the hat” among the crowd and divvied up the take. Each of the poets received $5. It was the first time any of them had ever been paid for a reading.

Brautigan certainly needed the money. He and Ginny saved every penny for a trip they were planning. For almost a year, ever since a friend loaned them a copy of
Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiche Maya
, they had yearned to travel to Mexico. They had friends living in Oaxaca, and having heard the exchange rate was good, they talked about maybe heading down there. Mexico seemed like an inexpensive and fascinating place to live, plus Ginny spoke some Spanish, so they decided to go south that summer.

The Brautigans gave away most of their few possessions and packed up the rest of their stuff in the Washington Street apartment. Cleaning out a closet, Richard came across Ron Loewinsohn's Christmas gift, the medieval manuscript page. He had tossed it in there after their friendship soured. “The last thing we need around is something that asshole gave us,” Brautigan wrote several years later, describing how he in turn gave the manuscript page to a ninety-year-old woman who lived downstairs. Not long after, she moved to the Tenderloin, a single room in the Kit Carson Hotel being all she could afford on her pathetic $70-a-month pension. And that's how Richard imagined the final resting place of the illuminated manuscript, “stuffed under the bed [. . .] surrounded by the smell of boiling celery root.”

On June 16, Richard sold another pint of blood, adding twenty bucks to the kitty. They waited for Ginny's federal income tax return, and when the check finally arrived in early summer the Brautigans headed south. They hitchhiked from San Francisco to Nogales, Arizona. It was excruciatingly hot in the desert, never a pleasant prospect when thumbing a ride. While on the road, Richard stopped shaving, deciding to grow a beard.

After crossing the border, the young couple boarded a bargain-basement-priced bus, embarking on an arduous journey along the Gulf Coast past Guaymas to Mazatlán, where they stopped at a cheap hotel. Ginny remembered “a kind of night bus trip to forever.” The next leg was much shorter, and they traveled by bus only as far as Tepic, the nondescript capital of the state of Nayarit. They spent the night here. In the morning, another bus took them over the mountains through Guadalajara onto the central plateau toward Mexico City.

Richard and Ginny rolled into the “ass end” of the Federal District, past “a huge ten-mile slum,” acres and acres of hardscrabble shacks like a tidewater line of poverty washed up against the gates of the city. They caught a cab at the bus station and asked to be taken to an inexpensive hotel. “I don't know who he thought we were or what he thought we wanted,” Ginny recalled. The driver took them to a whorehouse in the Zona Rosa. Their room reeked of cheap perfume. A garish maroon and yellow satin spread covered the bed. Having no place else to go, they stayed for the night.

In the morning, Richard and Ginny found a different hotel, “more like a bed and breakfast,” eventually staying in a couple places, wandering around the city, sightseeing for about eight or nine
days. One afternoon, Brautigan, sitting by himself in a sidewalk restaurant eating the
comida corrida
, observed a couple kids moving from table to table, carrying three or four beige puppies. The kids approached and asked if he wanted to buy one. Richard declined, knowing dogs would not be welcome in his hotel room. He thought the puppies were “cute, but doomed.” After the urchins left, Richard reflected on their lives. “The kids had about as much future as the dogs,” he scrawled in his notebook twenty-four years later. “In Mexico, I wouldn't bet on the future of anything.”

After a week or so, Richard and Ginny took another, more luxurious bus south to Oaxaca, Oaxaca. Here they entered a world far different from the slums and high-rises of the capital. The population of the state and city of Oaxaca consisted largely of indigenous Zapotecs, and the citizens crowding the narrow streets fronted by stately Spanish colonial architecture were all Indian, their faces innocent of any European stain. At the time, there were only nine Americans living in Oaxaca.

Richard and Ginny located their friend John from Marin, who together with his wife and young daughter made up one-third of the Oaxacan gringo population. With John's help, they looked long and hard for a place to live, finally locating a house in the cornfields on the outskirts of town. When it rained, water puddled on the flat roof and the ceiling leaked. For almost all of the three months the Brautigans occupied the little place, several men laid new tile above their heads, a never-ending job. The workmen were always polite, but Ginny thought they were up on the roof “just to observe us.”

In the marketplace, observant shawl-wrapped onion vendors were considerably less courteous. These were Tehuanas, women from the Gulf of Tehuantepec on the Pacific Coast, noted for their flashy gold jewelry and rude behavior. Ginny remembered how they loved teasing Richard, calling him
chivo
(goat) because of his new red beard. The Brautigans spent a lot of time sitting in sidewalk cafés fronting the fancy hotels surrounding the Zócalo, Oaxaca's central plaza. One could nurse a drink, watch the evening
pasejar
, and listen to brass band music played in the ornate circular bandstand at the center of the square. The price of a Coke or a brandy entitled a customer to use the hotel lobby's clean tiled bathrooms.

On the plaza, they befriended a ragged twelve-year-old urchin who hung around, selling Chiclets or shining shoes. He approached Richard and Ginny, wanting to give them a shine. They wore sandals, and this became a big joke, laughter cutting through the language barrier. Richard asked the boy if he ever went to school. The kid explained he was a member of the Union of Unsalaried Workers, which ran a night school for boys like him. Richard and Ginny were greatly amused at the notion of unpaid workers joining a union. Perhaps they paid imaginary dues.