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In the Riffles with Richard: A Profile of Richard Brautigan

by Keith Abbott

The creek was made narrow by little green trees that grew too close together. The creek was like 12,845 telephone booths in a row with high Victorian ceilings and all the doors taken off and all the backs of the booths knocked out.
— from Trout Fishing in America


When I first met Richard Brautigan in 1965, he was living in rear flat of a spooky San Francisco Victorian which was a few minor aftershocks away from being a ruin. Surplus parachutes were strung along the long narrow hallway to keep chunks of ceiling plaster from hitting people on the head. His home decoration consisted almost solely of funky folk art and/or funky fish art.

The walls and bookshelves and floors and kitchen tables and window sills held icons of trout or trout fishing. Books on fishing, a quilted fish, book shelves with trout stream pebbles, childish line drawings of fish, and a giant butcher paper poster announcing a Richard Brautigan reading of Trout Fishing in America, which was unknown to me, as the novel was still unpublished. In the useless marble hole of a former fireplace squatted a rusty old pot-bellied camp stove with a thick layer of candle wax blanketing its shoulders. Perched on top of this waxy mound was a U.S. Army manual on Trout Fishing.

That grey manual intrigued me, never imagining that the Army went in for such instruction. I fantasized boot camp: "Awright, grunt, let's see you rollcast twelve of fifteen of these here Pale Morning Duns inside that old Jeep tire."

My first thought was, "Either this guy will read anything or he's a total nut about fish." That turned out to be right on both counts: Richard was a voracious, though eclectic, reader, and he doted on trout.

Talking to Richard for five minutes confirmed that the Army had never trained his mind in the secrets of the U.S. Government Trout Fishing regulations.

When he was a boy in the Northwest, trout fishing had given his days a purpose and had stoked his imagination. He had lived for the moment when a trout took a lure "like an ambulance coming straight at me, red light flashing, and then going away again and then taking to the air and becoming an air raid siren."

That shared pleasure provided a jump-start for our friendship. It turned out that we had many things in common. Richard had been born in Tacoma, Washington, and so had I. Richard had been obsessed with trout fishing as a teenager in the Northwest, and so had I. He was now a penniless poet and struggling novelist in California, and so was I. And although he had published one novel, and I hadn't even written one, we had a mutual friendship with that novel's hero, Price Dunn, who had driven me up from Monterey that day to meet Richard.

After viewing Richard's eccentric collection of trout memorabilia, Price, Richard and I went out on what was to become the first of a long series of adventures in San Francisco. It was fitting that this first afternoon's high point involved the romance and art of fishing.

Richard had cast Price as his hero Lee Mellon in the novel, A Confederate General From Big Sur, and while he retold his adventures with Price, such as silencing a pond full of frogs with two well-placed alligators, my first reaction upon reading the novel was "This is hilarious, but this Richard guy only told a fourth, at best, of the loony tune life of Price."

Here was a guy who ran a moving service called Blue Whale Movers, a guy whose constant need for new phone service (born from a firm belief that utility companies had more than enough money and didn't need his cash) caused his new phones to be listed under William Bonney, Delmer Dibble, Rufus Flywheel, Jesse James, and Commander Ralph G. Gore, and a guy whose first act upon renting a new house was to chainsaw all the interior walls, "because a man needs space to breathe."

An Alabama hedonist who loved good meals, good books and good classical music, Price could also play the role of macho hero with his barroom brawls and amazing seductions. There were unexpected moments when he revealed a startlingly vivid gift for verbal invention and runaway fantasies.

What Richard and I shared the most was an admiration for Price's imagination, which far outstripped both of ours simply by the fact that Price acted on his fantasies. Price not only acted on his, he sometimes inflicted them on the unsuspecting world. Some of his landlords, for example, who had uses for those interior walls.

Of course, Richard's appearance matched his notion of home decorating. In those prehippie days, Richard was already dressing like one: he wore a felt Injun Joe hat, granny glasses, a chambray shirt under a vest decorated with Hells Angels buttons, homemade beads, and faded jeans. On his feet were some gunboat-size black Beatle boots. With unruly blonde hair, a drooping blond mustache, and a stooped, high-hipped, long-legged six-foot-four frame, Richard looked like a cross between Mark Twain and a heron.

That afternoon, when we entered the Steinhardt Aquarium in Golden Gate Park, we were not mistaken for tourists by anyone. We were happily yakking to each other and cruising the fish tanks when Price turned the corner ahead of Richard and me, stopped in amazement, and yelled "Gars! Why we used to land them just as big as that down South!"

All heads turned toward us as Price advanced on the tank. We were surrounded by herds of tour-bus tourists, and Price's shout got their attention. Price pointed at the gigantic, improbable looking gars, with the bodies of monstrous carp and the snouts of alligators.

"Alligator gars!" Price yelled again. "Why, I haven't seen one of them in years. You know how we used to fish for gars down South?"

Behind the gathered assembly, the walls seemed to have exuded schools of Japanese tourists and they were all watching and listening to us. They looked puzzled and interested about this new tour guide.

"Well, first you got to get corn cob, and then a good long bamboo pole. Then you get a nylon line, high-test, because you can see how big those babies are, and then you put a hook on the end and put a corn cob on the hook."

More people were arriving in the space, but no one was moving out because they were all staying for Price's story.

"Then you throw the line out in the river," Price imitated the act with such vigor that he reeled back, pushing the crowd together even closer, "and let that corn cob drift down, and when that old gar comes up for the corn cob, you can see him real clear," Price's voice lowered as he dug deep into his boyhood memories. "Hell, they're as big as a house, anyway."

The crowd involuntarily leaned forward to hear better.

"So, when that old gar's comes up for your corn cob," Price lowered his voice further, crouching to show how the pole was held, his eyes on the huge six foot gars torpidly circling the tank, "and you can see those old gars real clear," Price shouted, "why you drop the pole, pick up your rifle and you shoot it!"

There was a stunned silence and then the crowd jerked back and fled, sure that Price and his two weird henchmen were about to relive those childhood memories by yanking out their Winchesters and blasting the tanks of gar fish in a Sam Peckinpah slow motion, glass-shattering, water-flooding slaughter.

Richard and I looked at each other. We were both Northwest fishermen, raised with a code for catching trout, an almost chivalric set of rules where craft and guile were the only skills allowable. This was most bizarre way to fish that we had ever heard.

You don't shoot fish, you catch them on hand-tied flies with little hooks!

And that was the moment when Richard and I really bonded. That day started our practice of Price as a subject of comic routines between us. From then on, whenever Price would retell one of his adventures, we would check each other out to determine who owned the literary rights to the story.

"Have you got that one?"

"Naw, that's too weird for my work, you take it."

Strangely enough, in the nineteen odd years I knew Richard, I never went fishing with him. I only witnessed Richard preparing to fish, much later on, in Montana in the mid-1970s. He bought a house near Livingston and used to spend his mornings on Pine Creek and other streams nearby.

All the time I was around his decaying flat on Geary Street in the 1960s and early '70s, I never even saw a pole or any fishing gear, certainly never a stuffed and mounted trout. The only representations of trout Richard allowed in his digs were ones that had passed through someone else's imagination.

Money had something to do with it. In his dirt poor days up until 1969, lack of it prohibited him from any fishing trips in California. And after he hit it rich with his writing, the fact that he didn't drive inhibited his travels and opportunities to fish, as did the sleigh ride of pleasure he enjoyed while servicing his growing fame with regular readings and book tours. The harvesting of the young lovelies who flung themselves at him also reduced his stream time.

As I learned more about his childhood in Washington and Oregon, however, I understood why trout fishing occupied such a large chunk of his imagination and functioned the way that it did in his books.

In his impoverished childhood, he lacked money, love, security and most of the normal pleasures of growing up. Novelist Tom McGuane once aptly characterized Richard as being the goofy kid "whose only toy was his brain." And this was true. "Poverty" is a word that doesn't do justice to his experience as a boy.

In Trout Fishing in America, Richard described the equipment for his first fishing trip: "I bent a pin and tied it onto a piece of white string." While written for a work of fiction, this was also probably no exaggeration.

But one of the pleasures of nature was the thrill and satisfaction of good fishing that was available during the '40s and '50s to practically every rural kid who could borrow a pole. For a boy dealing with abusive stepfathers, a wayward mother, daily drunkenness, welfare-motel life and, at times, abandonment, a trout stream's promise of adventure, thrills, and victory was one of the few things capable of sustaining a note of delight.

In Trout Fishing in America Richard wrote: "As a child when did I first hear about trout fishing in America? From whom? I guess it was a stepfather of mine. . . . The old drunk told me about trout fishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal."

Richard never lost that idea, that vision. Although he was one of the funniest and most companionable friends I have ever known, he never was a happy man. He was subject to insomnia, melancholia and depression. The solitude and peace fishing provided was a godsend to his childhood, and his reverence for it never diminished. He loved trout fishing because it saved his young life and his sanity, many times, when his days and nights were truly awful.

The peace that trout fishing can bring was well known to me. My father and I fished every weekend he could, from opening day to closing, and together we caught, killed and ate hundreds of trout all over western Washington. On summer vacations we fished in Vancouver B.C. and all around National Parks in the western states.

For my father, fishing a new lake or trout stream was as calming and reviving as prayer might be for others. Saturday or Sunday afternoons as we drove back from a morning of fishing, he felt grateful. He had usually revisited his sense of wonder and his sense of humor at our luck or lack of it.

For Richard, fishing renewed his lyricism, fueled his off-the-wall humor and restored his pleasure in the unexpected bonuses of travel and life. In Trout Fishing in America he describes the end of a productive day: "traveling along the good names—from Stanley to Capehorn to Seafoam to the Rapid River, up Float Creek, past the Greyhound Mine and then to Lake Josephus."

Hear his delight in those names and their histories becomes an infectious catalogue of found poetry shining in the list.

After catching his limit at Hell-diver, he describes his daughter's antics on their return to the shore of Lake Josephus: "She was soon running around with a big cutthroat trout in her hands, carrying it like a harp on her way to a concert—ten minutes late with no bus and no taxi either."

Richard was not a practical man. He learned what he had to learn to get by, but basically he felt he belonged to some other era. This feeling surfaces in his early fiction.

In A Confederate General From Big Sur, the two heroes, Lee Mellon (Price) and Jesse (Richard), are stone broke in outback Big Sur when they catch two teenagers trying to siphon their gas. Lee throws down a rifle on them which, unbeknownst to the kids, is completely out of bullets.

"Howdy, Jesse," Lee Mellon said. "Look what I got here. A couple of smart fuckers, trying to siphon our gas. Guess what, Jesse."

"What's up, Lee," I said.

Do you see how perfect our names were, how the names lent themselves to this kind of business? Our names were made for us in another century.

His sense that he was out of place also surfaced in his daily habits. Richard always relied heavily on his pals for the right information, whether it was about pots and pans, freezers, or flags. He would detail the friend's pedigree as an expert before reciting the preferred makes and models, as if to reassure himself doubly that he was doing the right thing.

Richard often enlisted my aid before trips, especially for any equipment purchases, not only because I owned a truck, but also because he relied on second opinions to counter his sometimes screwy, over-amped takes on reality. And sometimes that "sometimes" was fairly lengthy. It didn't take much for Richard's imagination to conduct him to La-La Land.

One of our buying trips was to R.L. Winston rod and tackle store in San Francisco to outfit him in new fishing gear. Richard was making his first visit to Montana, going up to visit his new friends, the novelists William Hjortsberg and Tom McGuane, and actors Peter Fonda and Warren Oates. He wanted to outfit himself for the trout streams there, and Tom McGuane had recommended R.L. Winston.

This was around 1974 or so, during the heady period when Richard's books were selling in the hundreds of thousands. Every new release of his was widely reviewed, optioned for movies, and usually the translation rights sold in up to seventeen languages. Richard did not lack for money, and he wanted the best for himself.

So, with this visit to the R.L. Winston store, not only was he buying something he needed, Richard was validating his new savvy friends and, by extension, his new fascinating life as a celebrity. This habit irritated some of his old friends, who thought it mere name-dropping, but I thought he was entitled.

Richard was the quintessential outsider. He was well aware that his grungy early life had largely taken place on the underside of the bottom rungs of society and he recognized that this had damaged him, deprived him of social graces and practical knowledge. Anything that relieved his perpetual insecurities was okay by me.

He prepared me for the store by repeating what McGuane had told him about the excellence of supplies there and detailing what honors Tom had recently reaped as a fisherman. He also assured me that, although Winston's shop was in the grotty wino-strewn part of San Francisco, this was the best.

The milieu was not misrepresented. Broken glass, desolate parking lots, and junked cars surrounded the place. The drunks were largely of the sitting stripe and when they did move, they moved slowly. Most had a sooty fashion look from coatings of asphalt dust and diesel fumes. This patina came from sleeping in the old delivery cellars tucked behind buildings. Very few panhandled, probably because it disturbed their concentration on alcohol.

Third Street was rasty. Richard's imaginary legless wino, Trout Fishing in America Shorty, would have swam with this school of bottom feeders.

The windows of Winston were high, small and barred, set in cement block walls. The sign gave no indication that this was anything more than another faceless supply depot that populated the area.

Richard was bursting with enthusiasm, hot to turn the itemized list in his pocket into reality that day. He also had a wallet full of hundred dollar bills. He never trusted that any shop would accept his checks, largely because he still dressed in chambray shirts, jeans and black Beatle boots. So he came prepared for his purchases with crisp Franklins.

Once inside, we saw that it was indeed a fisherman's paradise. In the workshop in the rear the shopkeeper raised his head when we entered, to check that we weren't winos and then, let Richard and I ricochet around the store. He took his time before he ventured out into the front.

The shopkeeper was completely unimpressed when Richard dropped McGuane's name. His eyes got a faraway look, as if he were mildly put out by any effort to conjure a face to fit that name.

Richard was too impatient about his upcoming buying spree to even notice the guy's reaction—beyond registering that he had failed to nail down Tom's importance.

And Richard pushed the point one step further, saying something about how McGuane had landed a state record for a brook trout recently in Montana, then waiting for a response.

At that point the shopkeeper turned Western.

He looked up at the ceiling, working his lower lip, turned and looked back in the corner where there were stacks of huge bamboo trunks leaning, took that short snorting inhale through his nose that sometimes signifies someone's about to say something—but might not—and then he cocked his head and, well, he ah-hummed.

It wasn't a short ah-hum.

It was long and deep and wide.

Richard felt his momentum falling into that vacuous ah-hum. Richard added that McGuane had sent him.

And the shopkeeper might have added this piece of info to his silent considerations, too, and then again, he might not have.

Richard started to tell something about McGuane's landing something fantastically difficult in Florida, a huge bonefish or a permit, on ridiculously small tackle, and then Richard faltered when he recognized that this story was having no effect at all.

At that point I wanted to take Richard by the arm, lead him outside, and enter all over again. Richard was way up the wrong trail with this guy.

There was a long silence.

Then the shopkeeper regarded the top of the wall behind us, examining it closely but still possibly thinking about that record brookie or whatever up in Montana, and finally, slowly, he nodded.

With that response, Richard almost jumped in with something else, but caught himself.

The shopkeeper's eyes ran the length of the entire wall to the corner and then back again.

"Yeah, Tom's come . . . ," the shopkeeper paused for just the right words, "come a long ways," and then paused for several beats, "in a short time."

His "in a short time" was Western code for "Don't tell me about anyone's fishing skills until they've done it for seven hundred years, and in the snow."

By the time we had bought two very expensive rods and a mountain of related equipment, the shopkeeper was tired of Richard, completely unimpressed by his Franklins, and impatient to get back to whatever it was he was doing in his workshop.

Richard did a final check of his list again and discovered he forgotten waders.

"I never needed or owned them before," Richard said. "When I was kid, my waders were tennis shoes. It rained so much in the Northwest, I was wet all the time anyway, so stepping into a river meant nothing to me."

Once he got to looking at the different types of waders, too many decisions about too many purchases had depleted his common sense. Richard turned instead to his abundant, fertile, and uncontrollable imagination, that other, much larger riot zone of his mind, where the simplest things became complex.

Suddenly he fretted that the waders weren't high enough for Montana trout streams. After all, he was going to be there in the spring.

Torrents of snowmelt deluged his imagination. Glacial runoffs foamed behind his eyes. Richard swept off his rubbery feet to a watery doom.

The shopkeeper looked up at Richard's six-foot-four-inch frame and then at the extra long waders in his hand and an amused interest entered his eyes. The pair of waders Richard was holding would have come up to his armpits, if not over his neck.

Richard's mind shifted to contemplation of a further possibility for disaster. "What happens if these fill with water?" he asked, holding them up and letting them pooch out so he could check the potential in gallons. "I could drown."

"Son, to fill those waders with water," the shopkeeper advised him gently, "you'd have to climb up on a rock and dive headfirst into a stream."

At the end of the 1970s, Richard's life went sour. Alcoholism, a failed marriage, declining sales of his books and his increasing alienation from his friends and admirers all contributed to his suicide in 1984.

During this time he alternated living between houses in Montana and Bolinas, with long visits to Japan. There his work was enjoying fame and success that almost matched his popularity in America ten years earlier. But even this return to the spotlight could no longer sustain him.

His friend, the photographer Erik Weber, said that during this time Richard "went down the list of his friends, knocking them off one by one."

While I never was one of those, I stopped making any effort to see Richard sometime around 1982. He was too angry, too drunk. He would call occasionally, but he was always sodden with booze, monomanically detailing grievances and complaints against other old friends.

His Montana retreats apparently ceased to involve fishing. Actor Rip Torn stopped by his ranch house in Montana to do some fishing, but Richard claimed he was working and refused.

One of the last things Richard did before leaving Livingston was to give his Winston rods to McGuane to store. He had made up his mind to commit suicide by then. He told his Montana friends he was in Bolinas, and he told his Bolinas friends he was in Montana. His body lay undiscovered for several weeks in his house. After his death McGuane opened the package and found his rods wrapped in dried flowers, along with a Japanese funeral urn.

California Fly Fisher?
March/April 1998: 44-45, 47, 69.



Copyright note: My purpose in putting this material on the web is to provide Brautigan scholars and fans with ideas for further research into Richard Brautigan's work. It is used here in accordance with fair use guidelines. No attempt is made regarding commercial duplication and/or dissemination. If you are the author of this article or hold the copyright and would like me to remove your article from the Brautigan Archives, please contact me at birgit at cybernetic-meadows.net.