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While we're on the subject, where is the author of Trout Fishing in America now that we need him? In an urn destined to be emptied over a mountain in Montana is the sobering answer. North Beach hasn't been quite the same since Richard Brautigan shot himself with a borrowed .44 magnum last October, leaving no note and an empty bottle of bourbon on the floor. The 49-year-old novelist had been a fixture of San Francisco's writing community for nearly three decades, and judging by the stories about him that circulated at the wake held at Enrico's restaurant, his biographers are going to have fun. A few weeks later I invited North Beach doyen Herb Gold? to meet me at the Broadway establishment to share his reflections.
"I met Brautigan in the early 1960s," he began. "I remember his girlfriend's closet was lined with bottles of Wild Turkey — full ones. It was the most Wild Turkey I'd ever seen. He never wanted to run out.
"In those days, North Beach was like Montparnasse when all the writers lived there. Ginsberg? set the North Beach style, then Kerouac. Performers from the Hungry i - Lenny Bruce, Streisand, Woody Allen?. Mort Sahl — came to Enrico's, so writers came around, too. You could eat at any hour, and people came to sober up after the opera — you'd see Kenneth Rexroth in his moldy tux. Eventually, Brautigan replaced some of those people as a celebrity there.
"Richard used to come to my door to deliver a manuscript, pressing for help, but when he became famous, he became arrogant. He handled publicity to the detriment of his personal life. He stipulated that all his book jackets have his photo on the front cover. It was always with a different long-haired girl?. He's indifferent to her; she's in a groupie posture — almost with her head in his lap. I thought it was odd for a writer to be on his book jackets with anonymous, pretty flower children.
"What happens to a writer who has no strong connections with people, with family, with anything? When you hit your forties, you have to have some connection with the past. Brautigan was isolated. He had only intermittent contact with his daughter. He didn't consider others important. He didn't want to think about his family. He never dealt with his [absent] father. He could have done something moving..."
Cars hissed by in the November rain, and we contemplated the table, center rear in Enrico's portico, where Brautigan had whiled away the afternoons. "I have a feeling that the great characters of North Beach are going away," Gold said, "and I don't see the replacements." Indeed, no one had come to sit in Brautigan's chair. -T.B.
California Magazine?
January 1985: 116
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