Jubilee Hitchhiker by William Hjortsberg Read Free Book Online Page B

who didn’t want to be bothered.
    Feeling uncomfortable, I muttered something about how he’d talked plenty to the newspapers when the story first broke. “Go read the newspapers then,” Brautigan snapped, slamming down the receiver.
    The following June found me snooping around the Pacific Northwest again. I spent several weeks in Eugene, Oregon, where I interviewed Mary Lou Folston, as well as several of Richard’s friends from high school, and unexpectedly stumbled upon a cache of six early Brautigan notebook manuscripts sealed for more than thirty-five years in a safe deposit box belonging to an old woman named Edna Webster. The key was lost, and I hired a locksmith to drill the box open. After Xeroxing this serendipitous literary treasure trove, I headed north to Portland and on to Tacoma, Washington, where I paid $11 for a photocopy of Richard’s birth certificate at the Health Department’s Bureau of Statistics.
    Richard Gary Brautigan was born at the Pierce County hospital. His mother’s maiden name was entered as Lula Mary Kehoe, age twenty-three; occupation, housewife. Bernard F. Brautigan, a “common laborer,” aged twenty-seven, had been listed as the father, with 813 East Sixty-fifth Street, Tacoma, recorded as their shared address. The baby’s birth was declared legitimate.
    I looked up Bernard Brautigan in the white pages by a pay phone at the Board of Health. The address listed on Sixty-fifth Street was not that far away. I found the place easily, a modest one-story house on a side street off McKinley Avenue, set well back off the road behind a spacious sloping lawn fringed by fruit trees. A low fence bordered the property, and a sign on the gate read
BEWARE OF THE DOG. Walking to the front steps, I exercised a certain caution, half-expecting huge red-eyed Dobermans to leap savagely for my throat. My fears verged on the preposterous when a lap dog’s enthusiastic yapping greeted the doorbell’s ring.
    A moment later, a small ancient man appeared behind the screen door beside the frantic leaping terrier. Veiled by wire mesh, his shadow-masked features were difficult to discern. I remember thinking it curious that two such tiny people (Mary Lou Folston was a petite woman) might have produced such a towering son. I introduced myself, mentioning my previous phone call seeking an interview. His brusque manner remained the same. He told me through the screen that he had nothing more to say about the matter. I said his son was one of the most famous American writers of the century. “He’s not my son!” Brautigan spat venomously. “That woman even said so.”
    Feeling like a gambler with little to lose, I called his bluff. “I’ll pay you $100 an hour to talk with me,” I said. Bernard Brautigan shut the door in my face.
    The late summer of 1993 found me back in the Pacific Northwest. I attended Richard’s fortieth high school reunion in Eugene, an event he would himself have avoided like a dose of the clap. One inebriated woman unfamiliar with Brautigan’s work cornered me in a banquet room at the sprawling Valley River Inn. “Why do you want to write about him for?” She waved her plastic cocktail glass and told me she wrote professional verse for greeting card companies, a career she considered more worthy of a biography.
    Early in September, I worked my way back up the coast to Tacoma for more interviews. I took advantage of a sun-drenched day and explored Richard Brautigan’s childhood neighborhood with a simple aim-and-shoot thirty-five-millimeter camera. Snapshots provide handy visual aids when writing description. I proved such an inept photographer that all of the film came out blank.
    Circling the narrow two-story white frame house on East Sixty-fifth Street where Richard had lived as a small child, shooting a roll of film, I thought about Bernard Brautigan’s place, only ten blocks away down McKinley