Jubilee Hitchhiker (67 page)

A letter from Donald Hutter dashed all hopes of a sale at Scribner's. Hutter had read
The Abortion
, and although he thought it the best of the three Brautigan manuscripts and admired the “lovely, consistent quality,” in the end he felt “a sense of slightness, a feeling of scale too modest and ephemeral for hopes of impressing a general readership.” Following this rebuke, Hutter admitted other publishers might not agree with his opinion and offered “to forward the manuscripts to another house.” Richard wrote back, asking that the novels be sent over to Charlotte Mayerson at Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Amid the rioting and curfews following a fatal shooting in Hunters Point, Ken Kesey returned from Mexico, “as salt in J. Edgar Hoover's wounds.” He turned up at Stewart Brand's “Awareness Festival” at San Francisco State, flanked by a bodyguard phalanx of Hells Angels. The word was out: “Kesey's back.” Five days later, at the time of a full moon, LSD possession became illegal under California law. The date, 10/6/66, caused many in the Haight to think ominous thoughts. The number of the Beast of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelations was 666.

What a bummer! To exorcize the demons, Michael Bowen and Allen Cohen had planned a big celebration for the sixth that they called the “Love-Pageant Rally.” The promotional leaflets the
Oracle
printed contained a “Prophecy of A Declaration of Independence” and urged participants to “Bring the color Gold, bring photos of personal saints and gurus and heros of the underground . . . bring children . . . flowers . . . flutes . . . drums . . . feathers . . . bands . . . beads . . .” At two in the afternoon, seven or eight hundred new age citizens trooped into the Panhandle

At two in the afternoon, seven or eight hundred new age citizens trooped into the Panhandle waving banners and flags, beating drums and tambourines, joyously blowing trombones, tubas, and conch shells. A flatbed truck, newly painted red, served as a stage for the musicians. Three bands, Wildflower, Big Brother, and the Dead, played that afternoon while the assembly of free spirits danced with frenzied abandon under the eucalyptus trees. As Charles Perry observed in his history of the Haight-Ashbury: “It was one of those ideas people had been waiting for, like the Family Dog dances or the Trips Festival; a gathering to bear witness to the psychedelic life [. . .]”

The multihued Prankster bus stood parked nearby on a street flanking the Panhandle, flying a marijuana leaf flag designed by Mouse (Stanley Miller), the poster artist. Its owner, Ken Kesey, put in a brief appearance but split well before an undercover narc hopped on board asking to see him. The press was everywhere, reporters scribbling notes and five television film crews poking their cameras into the festivities, but the Love Pageant ended up not being the big underground story of the day. After all was said and done, Kesey stole the headlines in the
Chronicle
. In an “exclusive interview” with Donovan Bess, the fugitive talked about life on the lam and revealed his plans for an “LSD Graduation Ceremony” to be held at Winterland on Halloween night. Captain Trips upped the ante once again.

Michael Bowen and Allen Cohen watched the event from a vantage point on Clayton Street. The
Oracle
editors took pride in their achievement. Richard Alpert, Leary's former colleague, came walking by, and Bowen waved him over to ask what he thought of it all. Alpert agreed that the rally was a great success. Allen Cohen suggested staging another similar gathering and wondered what Alpert would call it.

“It's just being,” Dick Alpert said. “Humans being. Being together.”

“Yeah,” said Bowen. “It's a Human Be-In.”

Later that night, Bowen and Cohen elaborated on this notion in the “meditation room” at the rear of Bowen's apartment. Plans began to coalesce for a huge public event, something way bigger than the Love-Pageant Rally, a “gathering of the tribes.” Over in Berkeley, Emmett Grogan and Billy Murcott appeared in a weeklong Mime Troupe coffeehouse production of
In-Put, Out-Put
, a one-act “comedy-farce” written and directed by Peter Berg. The short run ended about the same time as their unemployment checks. Dead broke, Grogan saw nothing “soulful about panhandling.” He resolved to find a way to improve their sorry situation while at the same time benefiting the common good.

Billy Murcott owned a '55 Ford station wagon, and the two men drove to the San Francisco Produce Market on the edge of town. In an hour's time, Emmett's fluent Italian and his experience as a kid in New York City working with an uncle who trucked wholesale produce in Greenwich Village resulted in a jalopy packed with crates of food. Back at Grogan's apartment around eight in the morning, the pair transformed their haul, “tomatoes, turnips, green beans, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, onions, eggplant, squash, potatoes,” and fifty pounds of poultry parts into an enormous stew, using two purloined twenty-gallon milk cans as kettles.

By early afternoon, Billy worked the street, handing out several hundred newly mimeographed leaflets: “FREE FOOD GOOD HOT STEW RIPE TOMATOES FRESH FRUIT BRING A BOWL AND SPOON TO THE PANHANDLE AT ASHBURY STREET 4PM 4PM 4PM 4PM 4PM FREE FOOD EVERYDAY FREE FOOD IT'S FREE BECAUSE IT'S YOURS! the diggers.”

Billy and Emmett drove over to the Panhandle and set two steaming milk cans of stew and cartons of ripe tomatoes and fruit on the grass just before four, a block from where the Love Pageant revelers had frolicked. A hungry crowd of fifty stood around waiting, and an equal number soon showed up, tin bowls dangling from their belts. For the next week, Murcott and Grogan hustled wilted produce and day-old bread, boiled forty gallons of stew, and provided free food in the Panhandle every afternoon at four. This turned out to be very hard work as well as a brilliant bit of political street theater. Grogan and Murcott's Mime Troupe compatriots all felt attracted to the project. Peter Berg loved the idea. “Try to keep it going for another week, if you can,” he enthused, “and you'll really get your point across.”

Volunteer help was soon on the way. A group of young women, some sharing a Clayton Street apartment with a large kitchen, offered to assume the cooking chores. Mime Troupers took over daily delivery of the food to the Panhandle in a yellow VW bus known throughout the neighborhood as the yellow submarine. Blessed with considerable charm and guile, Emmett Grogan continued rounding up the discarded produce every morning.

Two weeks later, Berkeley's left-of-center underground newspaper, the
Barb
, ran “a quasi-journalistic story” on the free Digger Feeds written by none other than Emmett Grogan, who signed himself “George Metevsky,” an allusion to George Metesky, the infamous “Mad Bomber”
who terrorized New York City a decade earlier. About the same time, Billy Murcott “hustled some dough” and Grogan rented a one-story six-car garage on Page Street. The place was stacked inside with old window frames in various sizes. The Diggers nailed them to the wooden front of the garage and gave the establishment a name: the Free Frame of Reference.

Murcott bolted four two-by-fours together, creating a thirteen-foot-square aperture taller than the former garage it leaned against. Painted a bright golden orange by Emmett Grogan and dubbed the “Frame of Reference,” the structure was carried over to the Panhandle every day at four o'clock and propped upright between twin oak trees. When the cans of food arrived, everyone waiting to eat had first to step through the frame before being served, all performers in an elaborate piece of street theater.

Richard Brautigan began hanging out with Emmett Grogan and the Diggers. He took note of Grogan's angry poetic broadsides, the audacious food program, and the opening of the Free Frame of Reference. From its inception, the Diggers' free-for-all emporium became a magnet not just for the needy but also for anyone curious about the mechanics of social change.

Abbie Hoffman visited, taking note of the Diggers' tactics for his own later use in highly publicized political shenanigans. (In August the following year, Hoffman identified himself to the press as “a Digger” after throwing dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.) Allen Ginsberg showed up a bit later after the Free Frame relocated to Frederick Street, bringing Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. A group of young runaways chanted “You don't turn us on!” at them.

When Paul Krassner, irreverent editor of the
Realist
(the first true underground publication) came to Frisco, a visit to the Free Frame of Reference stood high on his itinerary. The store, like the food program, was a radical political statement. Everything in it was free. People took whatever they wanted. Whenever anyone asked who was in charge, the answer was always, “You are.” Ever the skeptic, Krassner maintained the free store was nothing more than old-fashioned “social work.” One of the Diggers told him to give Emmett Grogan ten bucks to see the difference. Nearly always broke himself, Paul offered up a sawbuck, and Grogan immediately set it on fire with his cigarette lighter.

This sort of outrageous gesture tickled Richard Brautigan's fancy. It wasn't long before he established a strong connection with the revolutionary group. Keith Abbott was puzzled by his friend's link to the Diggers. He wrote that their “anarchism attracted him the most, but he admired their public idealism, too.” Keith recalled a day when Brautigan asked to borrow both him and his truck to run a Digger errand. Richard regaled him with a story about “a socialite woman” who came by the Free Frame of Reference to make a donation. Brautigan pantomimed all the parts as he told Keith how the wealthy woman wrote a check and handed it to Emmett Grogan, who promptly tore it to pieces. Abbott learned later that Richard had not actually witnessed this event. “Typical of Richard's involvement with the Diggers, which was fueled by equal parts of fantasy, idealism and self-promotion.”

Brautigan needed Abbott's truck to pick up a load of pants. When the Diggers wouldn't take her check, the socialite asked what else she might provide. “Clothing,” Grogan told her. She arranged for a shipment of factory seconds to be delivered to her address. Richard and Keith drove to her palatial Jackson Street home and picked up the bulky garment cartons, trucking them to the Diggers' free store. The goods didn't last long. Keith Abbott remembered “the word got out on
the street, the hustlers descended, and armloads of pants were hauled off, probably for resale in Golden Gate Park.”

Jack Thibeau recalled visiting the Free Frame of Reference with Brautigan and Ianthe. They encountered a group of hippies carelessly throwing the free clothing around the store. Offhand remarks revealed the “shoppers” planned on taking the best of the donated goods over to the park and selling them to newly arrived runaways. “You know, Ianthe,” Brautigan told his daughter, “I don't like these people because they don't have any manners.”

“He had a thing about manners,” Jack recalled.

Richard was attracted to the Diggers as much by Emmett Grogan's style and panache as the social causes he espoused. Grogan liked that Brautigan referred to his poems as “tidbits.” Their friendship developed at a time when Richard and Erik Weber “were pretty close.” Too poor to afford a television, Brautigan brought various members of the Diggers over to Weber's place. Erik's TV provided a big attraction for the Diggers. “They would always come over to watch themselves on the news.”

Price Dunn met Emmett Grogan at Richard's Geary Street apartment. “I immediately recognized him for what he was,” Dunn recalled. “A real street-smart hustler, a con man—a real opportunist.” Price and Emmett were both larger-than-life figures, rival cocks in the barnyard, but the Confederate General “didn't have anything much to say” on the occasion of their initial meeting. Price remained friendly and listened as Grogan outlined his utopian ideals, noting that Richard had fallen “under his spell.” Later, talking it over with Brautigan, Dunn maintained that the Digger philosophy was “totally contrary” to their shared values. How was it possible to get something for nothing? “You believe in work,” Price said to Richard, “and I do, too.”

Early in October, at Don Carpenter's suggestion, Richard Brautigan got in touch with Robert P. Mills, Don's New York literary agent. He sent several reviews of
Confederate General
with a letter providing a career background. “If all three of the novels were published together as a single book it would give a better picture of what I'm trying to do,” he wrote. Mills responded immediately, impressed with the reviews. The agent promised a decision once he had read Richard's manuscripts.

Other correspondence involved Tom Clark and writer David Sandberg, who lived under the redwoods in Boulder Creek near Santa Cruz with his girlfriend, Phoebe. Sandberg, thought by some to be “suicidal,” owned a reputation as a consummate hustler. Once, he and a friend stripped an abandoned sports car and trucked the parts to San Francisco for resale. Another time, David and Phoebe convinced their parents back east that they planned on getting married in a traditional Jewish ceremony. Checks and gifts flowed in. It was all a ruse. The marriage never transpired.

David Sandberg had edited a single issue of a mimeograph magazine called, variously,
Or
,
O'er
,
Oar
, or
Awwrrrr
and was “looking forward to getting 2 or three poems from [Brautigan] in my morning mail delight” for the forthcoming
OR2
. Richard, chagrined to find himself thirty-one years of age, sent a humorous poem he'd recently written about his nose growing older, along with two others. Sandberg connected with Richard's work. Sometime in the fall he embarked on a project to republish
The Galilee Hitch-Hiker
, out of print for nearly a decade.

Tom Clark wrote to say copies of
Nice
were on their way. Lawrence Bensky, editor of the
Paris Review
, (“he, too, is crazy, unfortunately”), sent back the chapters from
Trout Fishing
, and Clark wanted to print them in
Spice
, which he'd be editing “before long.” Richard thanked
him and asked for the return of his manuscripts. Tom Clark's magazine arrived the third week of November, and Richard mailed a copy to Janice, his final gift the story in it dedicated to her.