Jubilee Hitchhiker (78 page)

The night of April 14 was cold and misty. The crowd gathered in the Panhandle at six, and the Diggers handed out hundreds of free candles. Lawrence Hammond of Mad River recalled Brautigan standing up onstage with the band “and candles all over this flatbed truck.” As Peter Berg described it: “Richard had everyone light the candles at the same moment. Women were holding up white sheets; everyone was holding candles; Richard was beaming.” Brautigan had achieved his creative vision. Here before his eyes stood a human candelabra, a lyrical take on Digger-style life theater.

Angry Arts Week concluded the next day with a big Spring Mobe peace march beginning downtown on Market Street and proceeding up Fell Street through the Haight, where it doubled in size before overflowing into Kezar Stadium in Golden Gate Park. Richard Brautigan did not participate in the march. He voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 because he believed the New Dealing Texan would end the war in Vietnam. When Johnson escalated the conflict, Brautigan felt betrayed and never voted again, maintaining an apolitical stance for the rest of his life.

Com/co published
Karma Repair Kit: Items 1–4
, Richard's numbered four-part poem (the fourth part deliberately left blank) early in April and Brautigan distributed the poem in the streets of the Haight-Ashbury. Kenn Davis, who drove a cab during this period, remembered cruising through the Haight and seeing Richard relaxing on a plastic lawn chair, handing out free poetry to the passing crowd. Brautigan made an effort to ensure special friends saw his newly published work, mailing copies of
Karma Repair Kit
to Michaela Blake-Grand, Susan Morgan, and Wes Wilson, the poster artist whose work advertised the Trips Festival and many of the dances sponsored by Bill Graham and Chet Helms.

Trout Fishing in America
had been planned for release early in the summer, but a monkey wrench was thrown into the production schedule when a San Francisco typesetter turned down the job because he objected to a chapter (“Worsewick”) that ended with sperm floating on the surface of a hot spring after the narrator and his woman made love in the water. Donald Allen had to rethink his publishing strategy. The Four Seasons Foundation operated on a shoestring, and the loss of the typesetter provided a blessing in disguise. Allen decided to print the book using an offset process and hired Zoe Brown, wife of Brautigan's friend Bill Brown, to type the manuscript and create a photo-ready dummy. The publication date was pushed back until fall.

Brautigan took the news in stride. The Communication Company afforded a more accessible publishing venue, and Richard decided to use the Duboce Avenue facilities for more than simple
broadsides. Since his stint at Cal Tech, Brautigan had written a number of new poems, and it made sense to bring out a collection of his latest efforts. As always with his com/co productions (indeed all his earlier self-published chapbooks), Richard acted as his own designer, overseeing every aspect of production.

Erik Weber lived right next door, but Richard wanted a photographer with closer connections to the Haight-Ashbury for his cover shot. At the time, the three best-known camera artists in the Haight were Tom Weir, Bob Greene, and Bill Brach. Both Brach and Greene hung their work in the Psych Shop. Bill Brach owed his singular reputation in part to a number of fine studies made of Janis Joplin. He simply asked prospective subjects if he might take their picture. He did this with Brautigan, and Richard said yes.

Brach didn't find Richard Brautigan especially social. “I used to see him all the time,” he remembered, yet they never hung out together. When Bill Brach showed up one afternoon at the apartment on Geary Street, he was visiting the home of a stranger. Brach took a number of photographs of Richard that day. Scouting for an interesting new location, they went down into the basement, where Brach posed Richard in a doorway, sitting in a laundry sink and staring out a small street-level window.

Brautigan favored this last shot and took it with him over to com/co later in April, when it was time to assemble the new book. Hayward had an IBM Selectric in his apartment, and Richard typed up thirty-two of his most recent poems, including all his previous com/co broadsides. Knowing it to be one of his best, he chose “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” as the book's title poem. Brautigan wrote out the title of each poem by hand and signed his name on the printed title page. Claude can't remember where the paper and ink came from, although he's certain Richard must have supplied it. “There would have had to have been a vehicle involved,” he wrote years later, “because 1,500 copies was four cases of paper.”

The entire production took only a couple days after Brautigan completed the typescript, which “passed rapidly through the Gestefax.” Hayward needed a few hours of “tinkering” to get “the right degree of graininess” for Bill Brach's basement window photo on the yellow cover stock. H'lane helped with the cover layout as Claude manned the Gestetner. Hayward finished the printing “in an overnight burst of energy.”

Brautigan assisted in collating the pages, a “tedious” nontechnology of walking round and round the table stacking the sheets. The Communication Company now owned a folder and a stapler and the edition was assembled in a remarkably short time. The haste sometimes showed, as certain copies were bound with pages out of order, others with duplicate pages, pages upside down and missing. Several purpose statements appeared on the reverse title page and front free endpaper. The first of these began, “Permission is granted to reprint any of these poems in magazines, books and newspapers if they are given away free,” and the last ended, “None of the copies are for sale. They are all free.”

Brautigan misspelled the photographer's name in the second of the statements. “Bill Brock lived with us for a while on Pine Street. He took the photograph in the basement. It was a beautiful day in San Francisco.” Brautigan lived alone on Geary Street. Bill Brach shared an apartment on Pine with Mime Troupe actor Peter Coyote and a “crazy artist” named Carl Rosenberg. Brach recalled that a Digger couple lived out on the back porch in a pile of rags, “in squalor like rats.” Fifteen hundred copies of
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
were handed out for
free. Richard Brautigan made sure a copy was sent to Malcolm Cowley. Not one was given to the photographer. To this day, Brach has never seen the ephemeral little book.

Andrew Hoyem arranged for Basil Bunting to give a reading in San Francisco at the end of April. Sponsored by the Poetry Center, Bunting read the complete
Briggflatts
(published the previous year) at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Afterward, the Frisco poet community wanted to show him a good time. A small group got together at the home of John and Margot Doss. Lew Welch was there, along with Don Allen. Andrew Hoyem brought his girlfriend (later his wife) Judy Laws. Richard Brautigan came with Lenore Kandel.

They all smoked pot (Richard included) and went out for dinner in Chinatown. Sitting around a big circular table for eight at a Grant Avenue restaurant, waiting in a cannabis afterglow for the food to arrive, the group invented an impromptu game of stud poker, using knives, forks, and spoons in place of cards. “We just made it up as we went along,” John Doss recalled. Basil Bunting told a war story about the time his Doberman pinscher ate his commanding officer's toy poodle and got the whole group singing a jingoistic imperial military song. “An old British-army or service-person-overseas kind of song where everybody gets screwed,” according to Dr. Doss. The Chinese waiters looked on impassively as the strains of “Troop Ships Are Leaving Bombay” lilted discordantly through their establishment.

After the meal, when the bill was paid, Brautigan and Lenore Kandel “went skipping down Grant Avenue.” The Dosses assumed they were headed for a romp in the sack, forgetting that no sane man deliberately cuckolds a member of the Hells Angels. According to Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Brautigan told her that Kandel was one of a quartet of women “he thought of as friends, very distinct from women he thought of as drivers, cooks, lovers.” The other three were Joanne Kyger, Joanna McClure, and Hawkins herself.

At the end of April, the Communication Company moved out of the Haight-Ashbury to an office far off in the Richmond District. The new address (742 Arguello Street) was not made available to the public, and community participation dropped off. Chester Anderson had fallen out with com/co over what he felt was a betrayal of the McLuhanite vision he espoused at the start of the enterprise, four months earlier. He and Claude Hayward were no longer speaking.

The hard-core faction in the Diggers demanded that com/co attend mainly to their own political agenda. Digger announcements and flyers occupied an ever-increasing proportion of the available printing time. In addition, the Diggers insisted on donating com/co's services to the newly formed Black Panther Party over in Oakland. The first issue of the party's newspaper was printed on the Gestetner. In May, com/co's output “shrank by more than half.”

The huge billboard in front of Brautigan's house on Geary Street advertised Australia that May, with a gigantic picture of a kangaroo. Watching the big marsupial at night made Richard ponder the vitality of the written word versus the raw power of graphic imagery. He noted that the lights on the billboard switched off at midnight and wondered what time it was down under.

After his first two trials ended with hung juries, Ken Kesey pleaded
nolo contendere
on May 2 to “knowingly being in a place where marijuana was kept,” a lesser charge carrying a ninety-day penalty. That same afternoon, Brautigan went to see
Billy the Kid versus Dracula
, a horror movie playing in a cheap theater on Market Street. Both men were a long way from the Heilig Theater in Eugene.

At high noon on the fourth of May, the Diggers offered free spaghetti to office workers on the steps of City Hall. When asked what they wanted City Hall to do for them, the Diggers answered, “Eat.” Later that month, strange five-foot-high posters appeared all over town, picturing two Chinese tong hit men lounging on a street corner above the slogan 1 % FREE. The posters were designed by Peter Berg and stencil artist Mike McKibbon. They borrowed the “1 %” from the Hells Angels, who wore the symbol on a patch sewn to their “colors.” The motorcycle club referred to themselves as the original “one-percenters.” Together with a bunch of other Diggers, the Hun and McKibbon spent the night plastering their work to city walls, fences, and freeway columns. Soon afterward, the tong image appeared as a com/co handbill and in place of George Washington's portrait on a flood of newly minted “Digger Dollars.”

Alvin Duskin, the clothing mogul, introduced a plain shirtwaist minidress boldly decorated with large peace symbols in May, creating an instant hit in the local boutiques. On the fifteenth, the Gray Line canceled the Hippie Hop bus tour, even though it had grown so popular there were two trips each day. Traffic congestion on Haight Street was the reason cited. Close to the end of the month, a unanimous jury declared
The Love Book
“obscene and without redeeming social value.” Two days later, Lenore Kandel donated 1 percent of the book's profit to the Police Retirement Association. She said this was her way of “thanking the police” for bringing her work out of obscurity. Before the cops raided the Psychedelic Shop, the Thelin brothers had sold perhaps fifty copies of
The Love Book.
After the bust, sales climbed to over twenty thousand. The donation amount was tongue in cheek. Kandel's husband, Bill “Tumbleweed” Fritsch, was a Hells Angel.

At a time when nearly everyone seemed to be living a dream, Brautigan's ascending star in the hip community added further elements of the surreal to his bohemian life. After staying up most of one night writing and drinking red wine, Richard was awakened just before dawn by an insistent pounding on his front door. He lay thinking about it for a while before padding down the long cold parachute-hung hallway in his nightshirt.

A striking statuesque blond named Cassandra Finley stood on his doorstep. She looked like an exotic reincarnation of someone from an earlier earthier time. Her singular dress reinforced this image, ropes of glass beads, black fur-trimmed shoes and gloves, her hood lined with white fleece. She didn't know Brautigan, seeking him out for unknown reasons of her own. Shivering, Richard contemplated her beauty, at a complete loss for words. “I came to be with you,” she said.

Brautigan turned without a reply and headed back to bed. The mysterious blond stranger followed him through the chilly apartment. She undressed while he watched, shivering under the covers. Like many gypsy voyagers on the road to Nirvana, Cassandra traveled light, wearing most of her clothes to minimize luggage. She took off several loose cotton blouses and layer after layer of full embroidered skirts. When she was naked (except for her long lapis earrings), she slipped into bed and wrapped a trembling Richard Brautigan in her pliant arms. Cassandra's blond pubic hair excited Richard. He remarked upon it later. In his notebook, Brautigan wrote a prose-poem he called “Magic,” saying he had “never laid a blond woman, and being so carefully naive,” he wondered if they were “blond all the way down as I am.”

Cass Finley didn't stay with Brautigan for long, a few weeks at most. During their brief time together, he took her out to Bolinas one Sunday to visit Bill and Zoe Brown. They liked her, intrigued by her commanding presence. As they returned to the city, their driver worried about
finding a parking space. When they neared their destination, Cassandra gave him directions, saying he'd find a spot at the end of the block. Just then, a car pulled away from the curb. Impressed with her powers as a seer, Richard asked Cass to tell him what his own future held in store. She refused. He demanded to know why she kept silent. “Know only I won't be with you,” Cassandra Finley replied. She was right on that score.