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by Barney Mergen?
Hearing of the death of Richard Brautigan last October brought back the memory of a warm June day in 1956 when he appeared at my door in Reno, Nevada, introducing himself, "Hello, I'm Richard Brautigan and I'm a poet," and scaring my grandmother half to death.
"There's a strange boy asking for you," she said as I got out of the bathtub after a day on a construction job. At the door I saw what she meant. About 6 feet 3 and thin as a reed, with blond bangs cut straight above his eyes, Richard did look different. Even in the "Biggest Little City in the World" men wore their hair short in 1956.
He told me that he was on his way to San Francisco from Portland, now that he was 21, and that he always wanted to see Reno. He had found my name in Brushfire, the University of Nevada literary magazine, and correctly guessed that I might be sympathetic to a homeless poet.
He asked if he could leave his belongings with me while he looked for work and a place to live. He could see that the apartment I shared with my mother and grandmother, in the only honest-to-goodness rickety tenement building between Chicago and Sacramento, didn't hold much hope. His possessions were packed in two cardboard boxes a little smaller than a case of beer. One contained manuscripts, and one held some socks, shirts and underwear.
We wandered around town that evening, getting bounced from the gambling clubs because I was underage and Richard looked "funny." We went to the coffee shop of the Mapes Hotel, and when the waitress said, "What do you want?" Richard replied, "A watermelon milkshake." The waitress narrowed her eyes, curled her lip and snarled, "You some kind of wise guy?" Richard smiled beatifically and we ordered coffee. I knew I had seen the future, and it worked.
We spent a lot of time together in the next few days. He found a cheap rooming house off Highway 40. He told me about his childhood. His father had been named Bernard; maybe why that is why he confided in me. I have forgotten many of the details, but it seemed his life had been remarkably like mine, only rougher. Abandoned by his father, he had grown up in extreme poverty. He had lived in the slums and worked in the canneries of Portland through high school.
A poor, skinny, dreamy kid, he had been picked on by other children and adult do-gooders in ways I appreciated. He told me about the time a bunch of men from some service organization had taken him fishing. After an evening of drinking around the campfire, one of the men suggested that they take Richard to a whorehouse, an act of charity common enough in those days, but only if he could prove himself worthy by showing then 10 inches. As Richard told the story, I understand that there were two points to it: one, that he had demonstrated the necessary length; and the other, that the episode proved man's inhumanity to man. Richard's mordant humor was deeply rooted in the past.
He talked about writers. He idolized Truman Capote for his audacity and William Carlos Williams? for his style. We agreed on the greatness of Whitman. He criticized my poetry, and I gave him a bookish analysis of his. He showed me his unpublished poems and "novels," some only a few lines long.
Then he went off to work in Fallon, a small town east of Reno. The editor of the local newspaper liked his poetry and published two poems ["Storm Over Fallon" and "The Breeze" in the July 25, 1956 issue]. I have carried the clipping with me for 28 years.
These may be Brautigan's first publications. He left for San Francisco shortly afterward and I never saw him again, but I followed his career through friends and his books and poems. I read the early poems: "Trout Fishing in America," "A Confederate General From Big Sur"; then I got bored. I always thought he masked conventional ideas in an easy surrealism; it was what made him so accessible and popular for a while. But I always admired his tenacity, his courage.
Richard was a product of the social class system of the West, a system that dictated that poor kids worked in the canneries and gas stations and didn't write poetry. Richard rose above the stereotype. Like Gatsby, he created an image of himself, which, though fatally flawed in the end, allowed him to write a few very good books.
Richard made us see watermelon milkshakes in the tawdry Lexalt flats of Nevada's casinos. He was a character out of a novel by James Crumley or a poem by Richard Hugo, making a stand for his own vision in a landscape where tourists go to play. He really was Billy the Kid and Trout Fishing in America and the last Confederate General. I miss him already.
San Francisco Chronicle?
January 20, 1985
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.
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