Jubilee Hitchhiker (64 page)

Over the years, Brautigan, never before sentimental about material things, began to fill the cheap apartment with mementos and curious souvenirs. “You know what happens to artists,” the photographer Edmund Shea observed, “they become archivists of themselves.” Among Brautigan's bizarre trophies were a rusting Nambu light machine gun, a quilted fish, an old-fashioned car horn (with a rubber squeeze bulb) hanging by the unused marble fireplace, a U.S. Army manual on trout fishing, several gold ore rocks from the Great American River on the mantelpiece beside his square inch of Texas and a certificate naming Brautigan an honorary Texas colonel. A laurel leaf crown fashioned by Margot Patterson Doss hung nearby. (Richard came to dinner to celebrate the publication of a new book one day when Margot had been picking bay laurel. She wove the crown for him, and he wore it all evening.)

Loie Weber recognized the mythic importance these objects held for Brautigan. “He assiduously worked at creating his own style, his conscious creation of that apartment as a museum to the current culture then. He would just talk about every artifact. He loved it. The idea of it.”

Richard's oddest knickknack was a can of poisoned soup. Kenn Davis remembered a time either in '67 or '68 when botulism turned up in canned soup and San Francisco found itself in the grip of a health scare. Brautigan searched through supermarkets until he “found a can of this stuff with the proper identification numbers on the bottom that said, in effect, if you eat this you will die.” He positioned the can in a place of honor on a shelf in his kitchen. Whenever friends came over, he'd point it out and say, “Look, killer soup.”

Don Carpenter described Richard Brautigan's dreary apartment as “right out of Charles Addams.” The spooky aspects he observed included the ritualistic makeup of his friend's antique brass bed, purchased around 1969, when Richard first began earning serious money. “Had a patchwork quilt on it, and he would lay out this calfskin, rawhide up, orange colored, and on top of that he would place these rocks.”

Edmund Shea remembered Richard's “brass bed with this weird arrangement he had on the top of it.” The bed was covered by a buffalo hide spread weighted down with totem objects. Ianthe wrote of this as “my father's idea of a Buddhist shrine.” Sherry Vetter recalled “that little setup on the bed,” quartz rocks rescued from fishing streams, a marble, and “a little metal toy of some kind.” She also remembered a daily ritual. “When you got out of bed and you made the bed, you had to put these things back where they were.”

From Don Carpenter's perspective, the ritual enlarged to include the entire apartment. Whenever Richard left the place, “I would go outside and stand on the porch and wait, and he would come out and say, ‘Wait a second.' He'd go back in the apartment, and I'd follow him back in, and he'd be doing exactly the same routine, checking out every rock in the place, going through the kitchen, making sure the kitchen was okay.”

Richard Brautigan's apartment provided sanctuary from the outside world, and his writing room was the Inner Sanctum. He worked in a tiny chamber off the main hallway. To Loie Weber, the room seemed like a cave. “It was so dark and dreary, totally unappealing.” The place was a cluttered mess. Keith Abbott referred to it as “that den of debris.” A torn blue bedspread screened the nondescript view out the window. Light came from a bare bulb hanging by frayed cord.

A secondhand dining table, surrounded by cardboard cartons stuffed with magazines and miscellaneous papers, served as Brautigan's desk. A squat tan IBM electric typewriter sat square in the middle, all other available space taken up by piles of books and manuscripts. Keith Abbott claimed this “was the one room that few were ever invited in.” A notable exception was Richard's daughter, who slept here on “a special little bed” when she stayed overnight. Because she was afraid of the dark, her father always left the hall light on for her.

In the front room/bedroom, the top two shelves of the recessed built-in bookcase, “curiously dust-free” according to his daughter, contained copies of Brautigan's own books as well as the work of various friends. Volumes by Robert Creeley and Roxy Gordon (the authors' photos decorating their front covers) stood facing forward like family portraits. The bottom shelf held a few records, his dial telephone, and a stereo system. On the shelf above, Brautigan displayed rusting keys; an old wire-bound seltzer bottle; many shells, rocks, and feathers; an open dragon-shaped switchblade wrapped in a rosary; a scrap of gold lamé (a gift from Janis Joplin); a card reading “You have been assisted by a member of the Hells Angels”; a strand of barbed wire; and a tooled leather plaque with embossed lettering: “Oh, Flap City. Oh, those leather wings.” According to Keith Abbott, this was a spontaneous Brautigan quip often quoted by Lew Welch. The rest of it went, “I didn't get your cherry, and I don't want your prune.” Welch later titled his series of absurd plays
Leather Prunes
, delighting Richard.

In the opposite corner, a high-backed Gothic chair occupied a place of honor like a throne. The carved spiraling legs and fading woven upholstery made young Ianthe think of it as “the scary chair,” from a haunted house. No one ever sat in this chair. It was reserved for Willard, a three-foot-tall papier-mâché sculpture of an exotic bird. Vividly painted, with absurd round eyes, an enormous beak, long skinny legs, and a belly like a bowling ball, Willard occupied an active place in Richard's fantasy life for years.

The other large art piece in the room was a “collage” by Bruce Conner, who was the first to dub Richard's cluttered apartment The Museum. “When I first walked in there,” Conner said, “it was as if I were walking into one of my collages.” He later gave Brautigan a wooden stepladder painted black with a hanging row of small red pompons tacked along the front edge of each step. The ladder stood at the foot of the brass bed. In many ways, it remained a work in progress. Richard used the ladder as a showcase for “sacred” objects, notably a copy of William Goldman's shooting script for
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
, one of his favorite movies.

Bruce Conner recalled another modification. “There was one of those little red pompons with red string that had fallen off, and I noticed that there was an empty glass that the secretary [Loie Weber] had been drinking, a tall sort of cocktail glass type thing that was empty, except there was the red lipstick of the lips on it, and I put it over on the step of the ladder with this little pompon with a string which looked like a maraschino cherry with a stem and put it in there, and I told them, ‘Leave this here. This is part of the work.' I felt it was appropriate, a sort of commentary on Richard and his drinking and his girlfriends and his ladder and everything else. But when I was there again, the little pompon was there but the glass was gone.”

Conner considered the apartment “a classic cold-water flat,” yet told Brautigan that he wanted the place as a painting studio should Richard ever decide to vacate the premises. “It was not one of the greatest places in the world,” Bruce recalled. “The bathtub had this sort of brownish-red water. The pipes were so rusted and calcified that it would take about forty-five minutes to fill about six
inches of water in the tub, a kind of reddish muddy lump, not very hot at all.” This didn't matter as Conner had no plans to bathe in his new studio. Richard told Bruce that when he left “he was going to move out immediately.” Conner would have to get hold of the landlord right away. As it happened, Bruce had the flu when he got word that Richard was leaving. He couldn't get out of bed for three or four days and felt this cost him his shot at Geary Street.

Brautigan eventually moved out of the Museum in December of 1974 because the landlord informed him that the building was going to be torn down and all future repairs would now be his responsibility. Richard packed up his eccentric treasures. With the help of Keith Abbott and the trusty old Chevy pickup, everything went out the door, Bruce Conner's stepladder collage included. After Brautigan's death, Ianthe gave the stepladder to Tony Dingman, who later passed it along to actor/photographer Dennis Hopper. Conner remembered seeing the piece at Hopper's place in Los Angeles. “I didn't realize he had it. Dennis was really mystified as to why.”

After buying the Bolinas house in 1972, Brautigan commissioned Erik Weber to photograph the Museum. “He said to me, ‘Erik, I want you to come and document the apartment. I want you to document everything in it.” Weber ended up shooting twelve or thirteen rolls of film. He took pictures from every conceivable angle. Exteriors of the building, front, back, and both sides. Long shots down the narrow hallway. Wide angles of the front room and kitchen. Close-ups of just about everything.

Weber found it a bit peculiar. “He said, ‘Erik, I don't want anybody to see these photographs. Nobody to see these while I'm alive.' It is kind of strange to think about. He had me go around and photograph, complete coverage of the place. No one was to see them. And no one did see them. I just left them as contact sheets.”

Ianthe Brautigan felt “everything changed” once her father left Geary Street for good. In her memoir, she wrote, “Sometimes I fantasize that if he had never moved, he wouldn't have killed himself. He could have holed up there with his cheap rent and continued his life.” Keith Abbott interpreted the move as Richard's need to disengage from his old life once he encountered wealth and fame. Leaving a shabby slum for a newly remodeled apartment at 314 Union Street, on the slope of Telegraph Hill above Washington Square, meant stepping up in the world. Over the years Brautigan lived in the Museum, his rent rose to $75 a month. The new apartment's $365 monthly rate, close to a five-fold increase, represented a dramatic measure of his improving status.

“In his dank apartment the anachronism of Richard's hippie past was all too evident,” Abbott wrote. “Young and eager acolytes had passed through, leaving their gifts. A stuffed cloth trout, naive childish calendars, and a handmade quilt for his brass bed were still there, along with mimeo Digger Dollars and ‘God's eyes.'” Brautigan never abandoned any of these things. He packed it all in boxes and took it with him after Erik Weber photographed every last detail for some unknown posterity.

Brautigan's departure from the Museum was more gradual than any implied break with the past. Richard had not lived full-time in the Geary Street apartment for years. Toward the end of 1960s, he began keeping company with a number of beautiful, intelligent, self-sufficient women who all had attractive homes of their own. Marcia Pacaud's apartment in Sausalito and Valerie Estes's flat at 1429 Kearny in North Beach were in every way more pleasant places than the Museum. As Keith Abbott recalled about Geary Street, “his dump became a priest hole for him, used only for writing and time away from his social life.”

A lingering nostalgia for the Museum haunted Brautigan long after he departed. In March 1979, a little more than a year after his marriage to Akiko Sakagami, Richard moved to a grand Pacific Heights apartment on Green Street. It was a long way from Gino & Carlo's dive on the same thoroughfare in North Beach. Showing Keith Abbott around the huge sunlit place, Brautigan indicated a spacious closet situated at the top of the stairs. “In the old days,” he said, “that would have been my writing room. I probably wrote better without a view.”

twenty-four: the emperor's new clothes

S
AN FRANCISCO HAS always been fond of eccentric behavior. Back in the 1860s, Bummer and Lazarus, a pair of mangy mongrel mutts, had the run of the city, roaming freely through the streets, welcomed in all the eating and drinking establishments along the red-light district known as the Barbary Coast, where the pampered canines received ample handouts from every burly apron-wrapped proprietor. Tough men who'd slip their mothers a Mickey and shanghai their own brothers wept when the dogs died (Lazarus in October 1863; Bummer, two years later, November 1865). Huge crowds followed their funeral processions through the streets of town, and a public monument was eventually raised in their honor.

The most renowned San Francisco eccentric was Joshua A. Norton, a British-born businessman who arrived in the city with the forty-niners, prospered for a time, and suffered a mental breakdown after his financial affairs collapsed. Following a long absence from Frisco, he returned in 1857, convinced he was of royal birth and proclaiming himself Norton I, emperor of the United States and protector of Mexico. The city happily went along with this curious charade, San Franciscans tipping their hats as the Emperor Norton walked the streets in his shabby uniform, plumed top hat, and tarnished epaulettes. In those early days, his majesty was often accompanied on his daily perambulations by Bummer and Lazarus, who became his constant companions.

Norton I issued numerous proclamations over the years, which the local newspapers duly reported with their journalistic tongues firmly in cheek. Two of Norton's decrees were nearly a century ahead of his time. He proposed dumping landfill in the shoals off Yerba Buena Island to create a manmade island there. Another Norton idea called for building a bridge from Oakland to San Francisco by way of Yerba Buena Island. Considered zany at the time, both projects (Treasure Island and the Bay Bridge) have since come to pass. An edict ordering the city to erect a Christmas tree for children in Union Square every holiday season remains in effect today.

A friendly print shop produced the Emperor's spurious currency, which was honored by all the area merchants. Free seats were reserved for him at first-night openings at every legitimate theater, and the audiences rose to their feet in honor when he entered. His imperial majesty was also welcomed in Sacramento, where he would occasionally address the state legislature. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors amended the city charter to grant Norton I a lifetime allowance so that he need not appear in public wearing a tattered uniform. The Emperor ruled magnanimously, handing out free candy to children and worshipping at both Jewish and Christian services to promote religious tolerance. When he died in 1880, after a twenty-one-year reign, ten thousand “loyal subjects” turned out to mourn Norton I, filing past the ornate rosewood casket where his body lay in state. The citizens of Frisco truly loved their mad monarch.