Jubilee Hitchhiker by William Hjortsberg Read Free Book Online

jacket art, advertising copy. He was deeply involved in every detail and aspect of his books. He had an unerring eye and we gave him autonomy and latitude few authors enjoy. In Hollywood, it’s called ‘final cut.’ He was an American original in the tradition of Mark Twain and he deserved the best. He never let us down except to die.”
    Longer investigations were yet to come. Lawrence Wright arrived in San Francisco, asking questions for a lengthy article commissioned by Rolling Stone , where Richard Brautigan had published his short stories and poetry in the sixties. Vanity Fair hired Michael McClure and East Coast writer Peter Manso, who had a book due out on Norman Mailer, to assemble a spoken-word examination of Brautigan’s life and death. McClure later wrote, “Perhaps Richard killed himself because he’d made his point and used himself up like a butterfly uses itself up in the process.”
    McClure had been best friends with Brautigan in the early sixties. They had grown apart in recent years, but he still wished to protect his old white-port-drinking buddy’s reputation when Peter Manso arrived from New York, eager to go for the jugular. Manso, a small, intense man, considered Brautigan’s work “to be of very dubious significance,” his death “the price paid for overnight literary fame in a decade of media hype and narcissistic self-congratulation.”
    Given Manso’s preconceptions, Michael McClure did his best to rein in his new partner’s killer instincts. At one point, they drove out to Bolinas to check out Brautigan’s house. Approaching 6 Terrace Avenue on foot, Manso wanted to break in and snoop around. McClure dissuaded him. The place was still under seal by the police. They climbed up onto the second-floor deck and had a look in through the window. McClure clearly saw the death shadow of Richard Brautigan’s body etched into the floorboards where his corpse had lain undiscovered for many long weeks. Brautigan’s body fat had liquefied, what coroners call a “lipid breakdown,” and had seeped into the wood, leaving behind a phantom image.
    McClure saw just where his friend stood when he raised the revolver to his mouth. Turning, he took in Brautigan’s final view. More than a decade later, when McClure recounted this event,
slowly lifting his hand with the forefinger extended like a pistol barrel, tears welled in his eyes. Like a photographic ghost, Richard Brautigan’s impression might have remained forever to haunt the old shingled house. The new owners tried scrubbing it free, but no solvents or detergent would do the trick. In the end, they had to rent a belt sander to erase the final tangible memory of the poet Ken Kesey called an American Bashō. “Five hundred years from now,” Kesey observed, “when the rest of us are forgotten, they’ll still be reading Brautigan.”

two: honor thy father
    A PIRANDELLIAN PARADOX ARISES when an author turns out to be a character in the story he’s writing. Aspiring to truth only adds another layer of mystery, a further dimension to the puzzle. This is the tale of Richard Brautigan’s life. Gatz Hjortsberg is only a peripheral thread in a rich and complex tapestry. For narrative purposes, I plan on referring to myself in the third person. But, quick as a three-card monte dealer, I’ve slipped the first-person singular in under the reader’s nose even when promising otherwise. Verbal sleight of hand. Nothing is quicker than the I.
    Richard Brautigan was my friend, my neighbor for seven years, and a writer whose work I admired long before we met. In small, unexpected ways, my own investigative journey became entwined with Richard’s story. While wishing to remain concealed behind a third-person identity, from time to time, I must step out of the shadows and into a personal pronoun.
    Richard Brautigan knew nothing of his paternal lineage. A