William Hjortsberg - Jubilee hitchhiker: the life and times of Richard Brautigan

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Table of Contents

books by william hjortsberg

Alp

Gray Matters

Symbiography

Toro! Toro! Toro!

Falling Angel

Tales & Fables

Nevermore

Legend of Darkness (A Screenplay)

Odd Corners
The Slipstream World of William Hjortsberg

this book is
for the board
of directors

Talent does whatever it wants to do: genius only what it can do.

EUGENE DELACROIX
(QUOTED BY KENNETH TYNAN IN A LETTER TO JOHNNY CARSON, APRIL 22, 1979)

With talent, you do what you like. With genius, you do what you can.

JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES
(QUOTED BY JULIEN GREEN IN HIS DIARY 19281957)

Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can.

OWEN MEREDITH
(QUOTED BY JOHN POWERS IN VOGUE, JANUARY 1999)

GENIUS DOES WHAT IT MUST, AND TALENT DOES WHAT IT CAN.

ANONYMOUS
(FOUND IN A FORTUNE COOKIE, AUGUST 1993)

OM
for Richard

O
Venus
Unblinking
Third eye
Watching above
The grinning
Crescent moon
High
In a pale evening
Sky
Buddha
Dreams
Of love

3/11/96

Written in the Utah desert, somewhere on Route 50
(the loneliest highway in America) on the road to
Fallon, Nevada, for Brautigan research

part one:

flowerburger

one: john doe number 9

RICHARD BRAUTIGAN NEVER heard his final gunshot. Traveling three times the speed of sound, the Winchester Western Super X .44 Magnum hollow point exploded up through the poets head, destroying his face, dislodging his wire-rimmed eyeglasses, blasting off the back of his skull. Continuing on, the bullet tore a hole in the molding above a corner window, struck a one-by-four nailed inside, and fell back into the space within the wall. At the same instant, all his dreams, fears, hopes, and ambition were erased forever, his brain disintegrated, the nerves of his spinal cord were disconnected, and Brautigans knees buckled, his body dropping straight down, as the weapon, a nickel-plated Smith & Wesson Model 28 revolver, flew from his lifeless hand. He was dead before he hit the floor.

It was a beautiful bright Sunday afternoon: September 16, 1984. Clad in tan corduroy trousers, a T-shirt, and socks, Richard Brautigans body lay on its back in the main living area on the second floor of his house at 6 Terrace Avenue in Bolinas, California, a small seacoast village he referred to as the freeze-dried sixties. His left front pocket held a crumpled $5 bill and a couple singles. A radio in the kitchen at the back of the house blared at full volume. Richard Brautigan was forty-nine years old when he died.

Next door, in a smaller house sharing the same unpaved semicircular driveway with Brautigans place, his neighbor, Jim Zeno, watched football (Raiders/Chiefs) on TV with a friend. In the middle of a noisy touchdown, they heard an explosive boom outside. It seemed to come from Richard Brautigans house. The two men exchanged a glance but said nothing, continuing to watch the game. Zenos wife, Karly, came upstairs. Did you hear that noise? she asked. They discussed the strange sound, definitely a loud bang, but there was no thought of going over to check on it. Part of being what Brautigan described as impeccable neighbors involved not entering his space except when invited, so the Zenos remained at home to watch Los Angeles come from behind and defeat Kansas City, 2220, with a nineteen-yard field goal in the final minute of play.

Across the way, the acrid smell of cordite hung in the still, hot air. All the windows and doors at 6 Terrace Avenue were tightly shut, the blinds drawn. The shadowy house resonated with a radios insistent discordant jabber. Four small bedrooms on the third floor were rarely used because Brautigan believed the ghost of a young Chinese woman dwelled in that part of the house. Various stories circulated about her. Some claimed she had drowned in the Bolinas Lagoon during World War I. Others said shed been a servant, employed by the original owners, who had committed suicide in the house. Richard hung a looking glass on the wall over the stairway, telling his friend Dr. John Doss, The reason I have a mirror here is because ghosts cant see themselves in mirrors. Brautigans daughter, Ianthe, believed the mirror kept the ghost from coming downstairs.

Several visitors reported walking through mysterious cold spots, and an Eastern woman journalist claimed to have seen a young female sitting next to Brautigan on the torn black Naugahyde sofa while she interviewed him. When the writer Keith Abbott volunteered his pickup truck in 1973 to move boxes of books out to Bolinas, he was startled to see a momentary apparition in the tiny junk-filled upstairs east bedroom, almost like a slide being placed in a projector of a girl wearing a white nightgown. He dismissed the unearthly vision as a mild hallucination. Richard told him three other people had seen an identical specter.

The novelist Don Carpenter believed the ghost was a twelve-year-old Japanese girl who lives in the house and determines what goes on. He based this assumption on testimony from two people who didnt know each other but had both seen the ghost on separate occasions. After Dons apartment in the city burned to the ground, he was living in his ex-wifes place in Mill Valley. Richard offered him the use of the Bolinas house for $100 a month, a joke because the heating bill alone was $100 a month.

Keith Abbott and a buddy came over with his truck. They packed up Dons furniture and drove it to 6 Terrace Avenue. Because of a ruptured disc, Carpenter was unable to lift anything heavy, so he went inside to have a look around while Keith and his friend unloaded. Ive never had a more awful, dreadful, terrible, foreboding feeling, Don Carpenter recalled. Except when I thought I was dying of cancer.

Don went back out to the driveway. All his furniture stood waiting to be moved inside. Keith, he said, I cant live here.

Because he had done none of the physical labor, Don felt uncomfortable about this. These guys who were doing this for free. I didnt want to say, Weve got to pack up this truck and go back to Mill Valley. But I did and Keith said, I understand perfectly. We packed up the truck and off we went.

The spacious second level served Brautigan as a combination living quarters and office. A large California state flag hung from the ceiling, functioning as a room divider between the barren fireplace and the kitchen door. The back roof leaked, and the floor boards in the rear had warped and buckled. The flag concealed the damage. Beneath it, the haunted sofa added solidity to the makeshift partition.

Richard Brautigans six-foot four-inch body stretched full length in the southwest corner of the room. What remained of his head faced an unmade double bed, the tangled blankets suggesting a bachelors inattentive housekeeping. His feet pointed toward the corner windows, where the .44 Magnum landed, barrel forward, on the seat of a blood-splattered white school desk, the kind with a single wide writing arm. A bloodied eyeglass lens rested upon it.

Brautigans writing area, a large round table littered with various works in progress, stood to the right of his body, the hard blue chair he favored on the far side. A coffee cup sat among the scattered manuscripts and notebooks. Like some macabre action painting, blood and brains splashed vividly across the tables surface and sprayed the adjacent window. Richards tan IBM typewriter sat nearby, the plastic cover gray with dust. When writer and performer Bobbie Louise Hawkins saw the shrouded machine she assumed he wasnt working. The ex-wife of poet Robert Creeley thought her friend had been fibbing when he came an hour late for a breakfast invitation, claiming to have written fifteen pages that morning.

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