Jubilee Hitchhiker by William Hjortsberg Read Free Book Online Page A

sequence of nearly anonymous stepfathers recycled through his young life. His true father’s identity remained a mystery. In researching Brautigan’s life, I spent more time with his father than he ever did. Richard rarely spoke of his impoverished childhood in the Pacific Northwest. One memory often retold involved a youthful search through downtown Tacoma for a man he’d been told was his father. His kid odyssey ended in a barber shop, the talc-scented bastion of 1940s masculinity. Richard approached the man he’d been told was his father. When he identified himself, the stranger steered Richard outside, handed him a big shiny silver dollar, and told him to go to the movies.
    In her touching memoir, You Can’t Catch Death , Ianthe Brautigan wrote: “When he was about four, Mary Lou had pushed him into a room with his father. My father watched him shave without saying a word and then his father handed him a dollar.” A second meeting occurred when Richard was about seven, outside the restaurant where his mother worked as cashier. His father happened along and stopped where he was playing on the sidewalk. Just enough time to say hello and give the kid fifty cents. Then, he was gone forever, a memory lost in a dream.
    Bernard Frederick Brautigan, the man later identified as Richard’s father, also knew very little of his own paternal genealogy. He was born on July 29, 1908, in Winlock, Washington, an isolated logging town in rural Lewis County. His father, Frederic “Fritz” Brautigam, born on January 12, 1878, in Hirschberg, Westfalen, Prussia, emigrated to the United States, sailing from Antwerp on the SS Kensington and arriving in New York on September 12, 1899, to follow the path of his uncle Ferdinand, who had come over twelve years earlier.
    The original spelling of the family name, “Brautigam,” so carefully rendered by Fritz in his fine Prussian copperplate hand on numerous courthouse documents, only gradually evolved into
“Brautigan.” In the 1910 census and the birth registration of his last child, Fritz spelled his surname with an “m.” At that time, his uncle Ferd was already known everywhere as Brautigan.
    Fritz quickly learned English and became a naturalized citizen, moving to the state of Washington at the beginning of a brand-new century. On June 14, 1906, Fritz Brautigam married twenty-three-year-old Rebecca Kingston, in a simple Catholic ceremony. Rebecca was born in Oakland, California, to George Kingston and Hanorah Hayes, both Irish immigrants. By 1900, the Kingston family moved to Lewis County and bought a farm. Fritz Brautigam died on July 1, 1910, three weeks before his wife gave birth to their third child. At the time, Bernard was not yet two years old.
    Rebecca Brautigan remarried a cook named William Morisette who had also come west from Wisconsin. Bernard Brautigan grew up next to the oldest in a mixed brood of eight kids. According to Mary Lou Folston, two of them died suicides, another drank herself to death at age twenty-four, and one succumbed to an infection from a self-induced abortion. “That was the craziest family,” Mary Lou remembered. “They never talked about anything they did. They just did it and forgot it.”
    When first investigating the life of Richard Brautigan in January of 1991, the story of the missing father who resurfaced only after news reports of his famous son’s suicide intrigued me. I found Bernard Brautigan’s phone number in Tacoma through information and gave him a call. The voice on the other end of the line sounded gruff and impatient. He clearly had no interest in further questions six years after Richard’s death. “Don’t want to talk about it!” he grunted brusquely when I brought the matter up.
    I mentioned the book I was researching and said I would be happy to present his version of events.
    â€œNot interested,” came the curt reply of an old man