Jubilee Hitchhiker (86 page)

Brautigan guarded his carefully honed image. He allowed no one but his chosen photographer to take his picture. “Richard only liked to be photographed when he wanted to be,” Edmund Shea recalled. Two years later, when Brautigan gained worldwide fame, McClure resented seeing him preening on the terrace at Enrico's. “He seemed to like being there by himself,” Michael wrote. “He managed a look that was at once wistful, self-intent, and intriguing.” What began as an innocent game of “boyish show-off macho” turned sour once the stakes grew higher than a passing mention in Herb Caen's column.

Brautigan told Robert Mills, his agent in New York, of Doubleday's interest in
Trout Fishing in America
, making no mention of Luther Nichols, their West Coast editor. Doubleday, uninterested in
The Abortion
, offered a two-book contract for
Trout Fishing
and another novel yet to be written. Richard wanted a $5,000 advance. Robert Mills wrote Brautigan in late April, with Doubleday's final proposal, an advance of $2,000 for
Trout Fishing
, payable on signing. They wanted to publish in October, before Four Seasons printed another edition. Mills liked the offer and urged Richard to take it. Brautigan ignored his advice, and the Doubleday deal evaporated.

The appearance of
Please Plant This Book
early in 1968, soon after the publication of
Trout Fishing in America
, gained Richard Brautigan much local attention. Herb Caen remembered first
seeing him handing out the seed packet poems on Powell Street. Richard made sure the journalist got a copy in the mail. Brautigan also sent copies to Art Hoppe, John Ciardi, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, and Harry S. Truman, among others, using The Glide Foundation (Glide Memorial Church) as his return address. Everyone wrote to say thanks. Humphrey thought it “A most unusual ‘book.'” Richard thumbtacked his letter to the wall of his writing room. Truman's secretary thanked Brautigan “for the little booklet of garden seeds.”

Brautigan claimed five thousand covers were printed (others think no more than twenty-five hundred), yet it is not known how many copies of
Please Plant This Book
were actually assembled. Some were put together at Jack Shoemaker's place in Santa Barbara, others at Kendrick Rand's apartment in San Francisco, and more done at Graham Mackintosh's printing shop. “When Richard would need some, he'd put together a little crew,” Jack said, remembering evenings spent folding cardboard covers.

Dave Robinson of Mad River recalled helping Brautigan glue the folders together in his kitchen as payback for him assisting the band to assemble the sleeves for their first EP recording. “We would sit there and lick these things and the glue tasted
horrible
!” According to Jim Harrison, even Robert Duncan, who professed to despise Brautigan's poetry, lent a hand in the manufacture of the give-away book.

Please Plant This Book
's piecemeal production makes the final number open to conjecture. Some estimated fifteen hundred copies. Possibly there were far less. Mad River joined the team of volunteers distributing the free book in public places. Rick Bockner stood on a corner in Sausalito handing out copies. Lawrence Hammond was given several copies, keeping a couple for himself.

The eight colored seed packets in
Please Plant This Book
were carrots, calendula, Shasta daisy, squash, lettuce, parsley, sweet alyssum royal carpet, and a mixture of California native flowers. The prose poems printed upon them constituted an homage to springtime and children. Not one had a direct reference to the seeds inside or the plants they would germinate.

Brautigan made a brief appearance in
Nowsreal
, a Digger film shot between the vernal and autumnal equinoxes of 1968. Spade in hand, he buried a book in a backyard garden. Richard read from “California Native Flowers” in a voice-over, sounding reedy and insistent: “In this spring of 1968 with the last third of the Twentieth Century travelling like a dream toward its end, it is time to plant books and pass them into the ground, so that flowers and vegetables may grow from these pages.”

Filmed by Kelly Hart on sixteen-millimeter “roll ends” with Peter Berg in charge of the audio,
Nowsreal
provided an intimate glimpse into daily underground life in the Haight-Ashbury. Beginning with a poetry reading on City Hall steps, the short film featured “Sweet Willie Tumbleweed” Fritsch wearing a red beret, radical young lawyer Terrence “Kayo” Hallinan (years later Frisco's district attorney), and a gay poet named Ama clad in an American flag shirt, a member of the world's most exclusive club, having jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and survived. Brautigan appeared briefly in one other scene, a tribute to his role as a Digger. Noted Hollywood cinematographer /director Haskell Wexler (
Medium Cool
,
Bound for Glory
,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
) paid for the final print of
Nowsreal
.

Richard produced one final giveaway broadside along with the
Please Plant This Book
extravaganza. The Communication Company had ceased to function. Brautigan turned again to the skills of Graham Mackintosh, who operated a flatbed printing press.
The San Francisco Weather
Report
possessed far greater production values than any of its Gestetner stenciled predecessors. The broadside showcased “Gee, You're so Beautiful That It's Starting to Rain,” a poem about Marcia Pacaud's “long blond beauty.” It appeared later in issue no. 45 of the
Paris Review
(Winter 1968). Poetry editor Tom Clark had recently moved from England to Bolinas about the same time that Richard's relationship with his Canadian girlfriend ended in the spring of 1968.

Around the beginning of the year, Brautigan embarked on a project revealing his inherent attitude toward romance. Based on the creation of cartoonist Al Capp, a leap year Sadie Hawkins Day celebration was planned for Golden Gate Park. Richard got together with the Rapid Reproduction Company, a commercial offset lithogapher who'd published several rock concert posters, with an idea for a broadside.
One Day Marriage Certificate
would be available only on February 29, 1968. Richard wrote the text: “This beautiful one day marriage is ours [. . .] because we feel this way toward each other and want forever to be a single day.” Blank lines followed for the signatures of the participants. An art collective called The San Andreas Fault supplied an elaborate illustrated border. It's not known how many copies were printed by the Rapid Repro Co. but thus far, only two are know to have survived.

As Richard directed his attentions away from the Haight-Ashbury, he began looking for a North Beach apartment. His search took the form of a prose poem called “The New Apartment Thing.” He was looking for a place “that has a sunny window for his plants.” Brautigan wished to trade his three-room $65-a-month Geary Street apartment for one in North Beach and was willing to pay “up to $100 a month” and asked that any messages be left at City Lights Bookstore.

Nothing came of it. He kept his place on Geary, yet spent most of his time in North Beach, missing out on the Hashbury street action. One morning, early in 1968, a young artist named Robert Crumb wheeled a secondhand baby carriage down Haight Street, hawking copies of a twenty-five-cent “underground” comic book,
Zap #1
. Crumb had drawn the entire issue himself the previous November. Printed by the beat-affiliated poet/artist Charles Plymell, who kept a small offset press in his apartment, the edition sold out quickly. Like Bruce Conner and Michael McClure, Plymell was a product of the “Wichita Vortex” and had also exhibited his work at the Batman Gallery.

R. Crumb followed quickly with a second printing (raising the price to thirty-five cents). It disappeared even faster. Crumb had a hit on his hands. Other artists admired
Zap
and wanted to participate. S. Clay Wilson, recently arrived from Kansas, teamed up with Crumb, along with poster artists Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso, to produce
Zap #2
a couple months later. Each artist worked in his own distinctive style. The end result was mind-boggling. Not since Depression-era eight-page Tijuana bibles had pornography and the funny papers so happily united. Janis Joplin became a big fan. The
Zap
audience also bought
Trout Fishing in America
.

Mad River cut their first album for Capitol sometime in the late spring or early summer, at the recording studio of Golden State Recorders on 665 Harrison Street. The band had grown disenchanted with the degenerate post–Summer of Love scene in the Haight and had relocated back across the Bay to Berkeley. They were assigned a veteran L.A. producer, Nik Venet, who had worked with the Beach Boys and Bobby Darin. He'd recently had a top-twenty hit with “Different Drum” by the Stone Poneys (featuring a very young Linda Ronstadt).

The band invited Richard Brautigan to take part in the session. They wanted to acknowledge Richard's generosity when they first arrived in the Bay Area broke and hungry. Greg Dewey recalled the invitation “was one of those drunk night ideas.” There were no rehearsals. Brautigan got together with the guys at the studio and read his poem “Love's Not the Way to Treat a Friend,” accompanied by David Robinson and Lawrence Hammond, playing a tune written by Robinson.

It was not an easy session. The band members had to direct Brautigan how to read his poem in sync with the music. “Richard had absolutely no concept of how to read it,” Greg Dewey remembered. On the first try, Brautigan read the entire poem before Hammond and Robinson finished the music for the first verse. “It was harder than he thought,” Dewey said. “I think he had considered that songs are a lot like poems, but he had never considered how you have to perform the poem within a song.”

In the end, everybody was happy with the results. Lawrence Hammond wrote to Brautigan a couple weeks later, saying “he was pleased,” in spite of a hang-up involved firing producer Venet. “Working with him is like having Otto Preminger make a movie of Woody Guthrie's memoirs,” Hammond reported when Capitol Records finally released the album,
Mad River
. The cut featuring Brautigan's poem was not included on the LP.

For the first time, Richard hired an accountant to prepare his tax returns. His gross income for 1967 totaled $3,081. Esmond H. Coleman, CPA, an English major during the Depression before switching to science, became Don Carpenter's friend when they both taught part-time at the University of California. Through Carpenter, Coleman got to know Gary Snyder, Phil Whalen, and Brautigan. Over time, he worked for all of them, handling their accounts. “I was sort of simpatico,” Coleman said. “We talked the same language. In between debits and credits, we would talk about literature.”

Coleman met Richard in 1964 when Don took him to an early reading of
Confederate General
. From time to time after that, he ran across Brautigan at Vesuvio and because the poet never had any money would occasionally buy him a drink. Once, when Coleman was at the North Beach bar with his wife, Richard approached him and said, “One of these days, I'm going to need you. I'll have a lot of money and I'll need an accountant.”

“I never thought he was a great novelist,” Coleman admitted, but he found Brautigan very thorough in his record keeping. “Meticulous in a kind of disorganized way,” he said. “He'd come in with a bag of stuff, every little tiny fucking receipt. Everything! If he bought biscuits at the store he would have a receipt for it. Shopping bags full of receipts.”

Coleman considered Brautigan's life as “something out of Dickens. He was a very lonely boy, and he learned to be a loner, and he was basically a loner. His relationships were not really deep. I don't think he was able to give much or accept much. He was sufficient unto himself, or at least he liked to think so.”

Throughout the month of June, at twenty-three separate venues throughout San Francisco, an “Underground Art Celebration: 1945–1968,” featured painting, music, films, dance, sculpture, drama, photography, memorabilia, environments, lectures, and poetry. Ken Maytag and his brother, Fritz, who owned Anchor Steam beer, put up some of the money to fund the various events, which were collectively designated the “Rolling Renaissance.” David Meltzer had a hand in organizing the poetry end of the festival. Meltzer invited Brautigan to participate along with
more than two dozen readers, including Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Lew Welch, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Patchen, Robert Duncan, Philip Whalen, and John Wieners.

Fritz Maytag threw a huge party at his brewery. Things soon started getting out of hand. Maytag didn't have a liquor license and worried that the commotion might attract the attention of the police. “It's my beautiful bubble you're bursting,” he shouted down from his office at the cavorting crowd. Allen Ginsberg reacted by taking off all his clothes. Irving Rosenthal (former editor of the
Chicago Review
and
Big Table
, who had recently moved to Frisco to edit
Kaliflower
, a free weekly newsletter published by the Digger-inspired Sutter Street Commune) also stripped naked, except for his fingerless gloves.

David Meltzer can't remember Richard Brautigan actually reading at the “Rolling Renaissance.” He recalled him stealing food and wine at Maytag's party “to bring back to his tribe.” Richard remained a Digger at heart. “What struck me is we were giving it away, and he was stealing from us and then giving it away,” Meltzer said. “That was a strange cognitive.”

At the end of June, a letter arrived from William P. Wreden, a San Francisco dealer in rare books and manuscripts. He enclosed a copy of “The Story of Joseph Francl,” which he planned to publish in a fine press limited edition of five hundred copies. Originally written in German, Francl's journal was a transcript of a mid-nineteenth-century diary kept by an emigrant from Bohemia who trekked west to the California goldfields, leaving a young wife back home in Wisconsin. Wreden wanted Brautigan to write a ten-page introduction for the book. He was interested in having “a contemporary literary interpretation of the phenomena of pioneer overland travel.”