Jubilee Hitchhiker (77 page)

Brautigan stage-managed the event, instructing Susan not to smile. Erik found Morgan a “long pretty” brunette and shot a roll of film, capturing her coy gamine look. Brautigan posed her standing next to the John Dillinger Computer poster and seated in a deep Salvation Army wicker chair. Richard perched in a proprietary manner on the arm. The pictures possessed a studied formality. Susan found them “not very flattering.” For Richard, they were strictly business, possible cover shots for one of the planned Coyote Press books.

During this period, Bruce Conner grew much closer to Brautigan. Conner taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, one class of his choice and title each semester. The first course Conner described as “a life drawing class.” His caveat was that only women students were allowed to register. “The concept was to see what would happen to an art class that was restricted to one sex,” Conner recalled. “And of course, me being a male teaching [it].” Conner had a budget to hire nude models. Once, he hired a good-looking male model and the students were instructed either to draw him or draw
on
him. “That was very popular,” the artist observed.

Richard Brautigan modeled for Conner's first or second class. He did not disrobe. Instead, the session became a reading, a Brautigan performance piece. Bruce Conner can't remember any of the students actually drawing. “This was a weird theater they had all come into.”

The event had been previously announced, and one young student asked if her mother might attend. “Obviously, she disapproved of Richard,” Conner drily observed. “Her daughter was taken out of the class shortly afterwards.” The students didn't know what to make of Brautigan. His reading was greeted with “dead silence.” Richard commented later to Bruce “that usually when he reads his good poems he gets laughter and stuff.” Not this time. “It was a dead response.”

Friendship with Conner and Michael McClure brought Richard Brautigan into contact with the Batman Gallery at 2222 Fillmore Street. Founded in 1960 by black-haired Billy Jahrmarkt, a wealthy young man “obsessed with the macabre and gothic,” the gallery was named by Michael McClure for the Dark Knight of the funny papers. Jahrmarkt had a taste for black clothing and hard drugs and was so taken with the comic book hero that he started calling himself Billy Batman. The walls of the gallery were painted black, a happy contrast to the sterile hospital white endemic to most art-selling establishments. Batman Gallery's inaugural show featured the sculpture and collages of Bruce Conner. Conner's show was a great success, launching the Batman Gallery “into first place in the avant-garde.” Conner observed, “It opened very spectacularly, but then it didn't function very well because Billy was a junkie.” Over the first half of the sixties, the gallery showed the work of Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, George Herms, and Joan Brown, all local artists of distinction.

The Beard
was published that March by Coyote Books. Shortly afterward, the fledgling publisher ran out of funds and Richard got word that they would not bring out
In Watermelon Sugar
or his book of collected poetry. In spite of this disappointment, Brautigan's primary concern throughout the endless impromptu party of 1967 remained the publication of
Trout Fishing in America.
Robin Blaser contacted him early in the year about submitting a portion of the novel for the first issue of the
Pacific Nation
, a new magazine he was editing. As customary with small literary periodicals, no payment was involved. Richard agreed to let him use the first five chapters from the book.

Having design control meant not informing Donald Allen of every decision. When Brautigan arranged a date with Erik Weber for a cover shoot not long after Susan Morgan's visit, he already knew what he wanted. After auditioning alternative muses, Richard Brautigan chose Michaela to appear with him in the photograph. It was hard to resist a woman who ended her letters with “Cookies” and valued Richard's storytelling prowess above his skills as a lovemaker. They gathered in the Webers' kitchen next door. Erik set up his camera. Richard had a pose in mind with him standing against the refrigerator and Michaela seated to one side on a little wooden stool.

Erik remembered their earlier shoot in Washington Square and suggested packing everything up and moving the whole operation across town. Richard thought this an excellent idea. They all headed over to North Beach. Once again, the statue of Benjamin Franklin became the focal point for the session. Erik Weber arranged his subjects to form a balanced composition. Brautigan stood slightly to the right in his high-crowned hat and navy peacoat. Michaela Blake-Grand, wearing a white skirt, calf-high black boots and a brass-buttoned military-style tunic, a wide lace ribbon tied around her red hair, sat on the low stool to his left. Dr. Cogswell's monument rose impassively between them in the background. Unbeknownst to Richard, the stool upon which his muse perched that day had been built in the furniture workshop of Clayton Lewis, the very man his former lover, Anna Savoca, had run off with to Virginia City five years before. Watching without saying a word, Loie Weber found the business with the stool a “little odd thing.”

Erik shot a roll of film. He experimented with different distances, yet the basic pose never changed after the first exposure when Richard stood to the wrong side, tugging on his hat brim with both hands. Once they got started, Michaela reached out to straighten Richard's jacket hem. He and his muse looked very relaxed, engaging in an easy banter. At one point, they cracked each
other up. Brautigan endeavored to assume a natural stance, crossing his arms, folding his hands in front of him, placing them on his hips, before finally clasping them behind his back. It wasn't until the twenty-ninth frame that Weber captured the classic image that embodied an era.

When Richard gave Don Allen the photo, he also included prints of the solo portrait Erik took in front of the Benjamin Franklin statue two years before. Allen preferred the earlier picture and wanted to use it on the cover. When Erik heard the news he was adamant with Brautigan. “No, Richard,” he protested, “you have to insist that it be this other one. It's much better.” Brautigan listened to Erik's advice. Since Richard retained complete control of the cover art, “the rest is history,” as Weber later observed.

In mid-March, Richard walked to the Fillmore Auditorium on a Thursday evening in the pouring rain to hear Gary Snyder read from his poetry cycle,
Mountains and Rivers without End
. Snyder sat on the stage floor with a candle burning at his side and read for almost two hours while pictures and colorful light explosions flashed on the wall behind him. Snyder was about to embark on another long trip to Japan, and many of his friends came to wish him bon voyage. Richard listened in the company of Albert Saijo and Lew Welch.

After the reading, a few people hung around, cleaning up the paper cups and candy wrappers littering the auditorium floor. Welch went out and bought a bottle of vodka, smuggling it back into the Fillmore, which did not permit alcohol. Lew and Richard shared a couple of shots, pouring booze into their coffee cups like kids at the prom. Later, Brautigan walked home alone up Geary Street through the rain. He was pleased to see a stream of rainwater pour down from a pedestrian overpass “like a small waterfall.” Richard wrote a poem about the evening, lying in bed that night while incense burned on the table beside him.

During the first week of April, the Gray Line bus company began a daily two-hour excursion (Monday through Friday) through the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Billed as “the ‘Hippie Hop' Tour [. . .] the only foreign tour within the continental limits of the United States,” the Gray Line expedition borrowed a page from the past, when tourist busses prowled the streets of North Beach during the beatnik heyday. As then, the interlopers were greeted with a mixture of derision, disbelief, and a certain amount of acid head amiability. Richard Brautigan met the bus with his shard of mirror, reflecting the gawkers' curiosity back into their incredulous faces.

On the same day tour buses started navigating the Haight, an organization calling itself the Council for a Summer of Love held a press conference in a converted firehouse. Composed of representatives from the Diggers, the Family Dog, the
Oracle
, the Straight Theater, and other factions of the hip community, the Council planned to organize art exhibits and “celebratory events” as well as providing “a liaison to the straight world.” There was only a halfhearted acknowledgment of the youthful hordes expected to descend on the neighborhood once school let out. In reality, the migration had already begun.

Bolder students heeded Tim Leary's advice and dropped out early. Among them were five young white men from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. They had formed a band together the year before, drifting out to Berkeley in the spring of 1967. Antioch required its students to leave the campus every other quarter and work at a real job as part of their education, so the quintet didn't technically “drop out.”

David Robinson (lead guitar), Rick Bockner and Thomas Manning (vocals, twelve-string guitars), Lawrence Hammond (lead vocals, bass), and Greg Dewey (drums) all got college credits for
being in a rock group called the Mad River Blues Band. Greg Dewey's sister had an apartment in Berkeley on Telegraph across the street from the Caffe Mediterraneum. Her pad served as a convenient rendezvous as the various band members drifted out to the West Coast.

The band abbreviated their name to Mad River and found their own Berkeley crash pad nearby on Blake Street. The group had a good tight sound but like start-up bands the world over had a hard time finding gigs. Not long after they arrived in Berkeley, Richard Brautigan became their benefactor. Each band member tells a different story about how the group first met Richard. Tom Manning and Greg Dewey recalled Brautigan shyly approaching one afternoon after Mad River played at an event in Provo Park, the new hippie designation for Constitution Park. “He wanted to meet us,” Dewey said, “pretty bizarre, actually.”

Early in April, Glide Memorial Church, having recovered from the aftershock of The Invisible Circus, opened its doors at 8:00 PM for a “Free Digger Poetry Reading.” A “Gestetnered” com/co flyer advertised the event as part of the Spring Mobilization against the War. Twelve poets stepped to the podium to read, including Brautigan, Ferlinghetti, Lenore Kandel, Lew Welch, Jim Koller, Ron Loewinsohn, Andy Hoyem, Bill Fritsch, and young Jeff Sheppard. This time, there were no naked bodies on the altar.

Brautigan read at Glide three more times the next year; first, at an event to raise money for the American Federation of Teachers strike fund at the end of February. Richard shared the stage with Muriel Rukeyser, Michael McClure, Kay Boyle, Thom Gunn, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among others. Foremost among the others was Elizabeth Bishop, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States, who said she was participating out of curiosity rather than political commitment. She had never seen any of the famous San Francisco poets and “wanted to know what they were like.” Bishop smoked pot before the reading and took a liking to Brautigan, who read for about ten minutes. Considering herself “a member of the eastern establishment [. . .] and definitely passé,” Bishop thought Thom Gunn's poems and her own “were the best.”

The second event, “San Francisco Poetry,” came in mid-June, when Brautigan read with McClure, Philip Whalen, David Meltzer, Lenore Kandell, Andrew Hoyem, Joanne Kyger and Bill Fritsch. Keith Abbott was listed on the poster but did not appear, being off in Monterey for the summer. Brautigan's last appearance was as part of a program put on by the Intersection for the Arts, a small coffeehouse ministry (like the Bread and Wine Mission) that had opened its doors three years earlier in a seedy former Tenderloin bar a couple blocks further down Ellis from Glide. Richard shared the bill with Michael McClure. Freewheelin' Frank was in attendance, along with several other Hells Angels. Robert Johnson, Intersection's director, remembered that the occasion coincided with one of Dr. Benjamin Spock's frequent arrests for protesting the Vietnam War.

“[Brautigan] went out and got a newspaper,” Johnson recalled. “[He] brought the paper into the church and started shouting and raving. People started throwing things from the balcony, set fire to the drapes.” The Hells Angels pitched in to help quiet everybody down. Freewheelin' Frank, who'd had a beef with Johnson earlier on the steps, now helped him get the riot under control. “He got some of his motorcycle guys to take charge.”

Angry Arts Week, organized by the Spring Mobe, got off to a jump start with a fund-raiser at Longshoreman's Hall featuring the Dead, Quicksilver, and Country Joe. Plans for a “construct-fully disorderful demonstration” at the IRS office downtown to protest the special Vietnam surtax
were put on hold. The following Tuesday the Gray Line tour bus was plastered with tomatoes as it cruised through the Haight.

Richard Brautigan did his part for the Spring Mobilization, creating a Friday night event for the Diggers. Peter Berg remembered it as “a memorial to someone who had died.” Loving sly wordplay, Richard called his happening “Candle Opera.” The com/co broadside, picturing a crude cartoon candlestick, advertised seven bands along with “candles, incense, love, etc.” Country Joe and the Fish were the headliners.

Brautigan secured a spot on the lineup for Mad River, telling them about the gig only the day before, when he dropped by their apartment in Berkeley for the first time. (According to music historian John Platt, the first of Mad River's free concerts for the Diggers “was a Be-In held at night in a canyon near San Francisco.” Given the timing, the Panhandle event likely preceded it.) The other groups scheduled for “Candle Opera” (New Age, All Night Apothecary, Group Morning Glory, Moebius) were all equally unknown.