Jubilee Hitchhiker by William Hjortsberg

Author:William Hjortsberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2012-03-02T05:00:00+00:00

Earlier in the summer, when Brautigan was still in New York, Welch sent Richard a sequence of seven postcards on his journey north and west from Colorado. Lew had spent five weeks as poet-in-residence at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. Magda and her son Jeff were along on this trip.

Coincidentally, Welch mailed one of his cards from Livingston, Montana. Another one, postmarked the previous day in Rock Springs, Wyoming, read in part, “The talk is about a hippy who ate the heart of a man he killed.” This referred to the cannibal murder of a social worker by two itinerant hitchhikers earlier in the year at La Duke Springs, along the Yellowstone River, about forty miles south of Livingston. Brautigan promised Lew Welch to try and get Helen Brann to represent his new poetry collection, Ring of Bone.

In mid-September, Tim Leary escaped from the minimum security prison in San Luis Obispo. Helped by the Weather Underground and disguised as a bespectacled, bald businessman with a fake passport identifying him as Mr. William McNellis, Leary, along with his wife, Rosemary, flew first to Paris and then on to Algeria, taking refuge with the exiled Black Panther Party. In an ironic reversal of fortune, they became the virtual prisoners of Eldridge Cleaver, ex-con, information minister of the Black Panthers’ American Government in Exile, and author of the best seller Soul on Ice.

As Richard’s affair with Sherry Vetter moved forward, he felt the need to check her out astrologically. One afternoon, sitting around with friends who were amateur astrologers, Richard offered Sherry’s birth statistics and they drew up her chart. Later that day, he knocked on her apartment door in Noe Valley. Sherry found Richard standing outside with a little packet of handwritten papers in his hand. “I’ve had your horoscope done. You’ve got every house on fire,” he said, with deadpan solemnity. “We can’t see each other again. This is the end.”

Sherry cracked up. “I thought that was the funniest thing I had ever heard,” she said, “because I didn’t even know what sign I was.” Sherry also found it amusing that Richard had used the expression “on fire” to describe the aspect of her various houses, instead of “in fire.” Brautigan wasn’t joking. He treated the entire matter with utter seriousness, but the young woman’s laughter got through to him and he relented, handing over his handwritten notes, which she discarded.

In spite of astrological misgivings, Richard Brautigan knew deep down that Sherry Vetter was a keeper. She was good for him. “You are my map to this other world,” Richard told her not long after they started going out together. “For twenty years, I’ve eaten spaghetti with no sauce and no meatballs. But now, I want to get into this other world.” Acting as his guide, Sherry took Richard to a party at her brother’s house across the Bay. Blaine Vetter worked as a headhunter in the computer industry and lived in a fine house on top of the Berkeley Hills.

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