San Francisco is under a state-mandated shelter in place order.

It’s a ghost town.

I’ve got nothing better to do since transportation in SF is mostly an hour wait (or an hour walk to anywhere) than to follow the ghost of Richard Brautigan around town.

Here we are at Geary Blvd waiting, and I realize I’m a block from the house where Trout Fishing in America was built.

Richard Brautigan’s San Francisco. Presidio and Geary. 1967-74. Trout Fishing in America was here.

Of course, Trout Fishing was born long before that.

But the skyline still exists.

We are standing at Richard Brautigan’s home corner 1967-74, looking north from Geary and Presidio toward Presidio Library, on Sacramento. (Cover of The Abortion).

And if we walk a half a block we can share Richard Brautigan’s Geary Blvd view, that is, Geary btw Presidio and Lyon:

“… a typical turn-of-the-century, high-ceilinged, San Francisco apartment. The front door was wooden, ornately carved, with a small window against which Brautigan always kept small things taped. The front room contained a brass bed, always made and covered, for a period of time, with a buffalo hide. There was a fireplace in the room but it never worked. The built-in cabinet shelves were loaded with books and a collection of intriguing items: keys, rocks, feathers, and Hell’s Angels mementos; a switchblade in the shape of a dragon, stuck open and wrapped in a rosary, a small Bible covered in mink fur, and a small piece of gold lame given by Janis Joplin.” -Biographer Keith Abbot

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Brautigan-iana: While I follow the ghost of Richard Brautigan around, I stop to reminisce:

After work at Giorgio’s Pizza, 3rd and Clement, and pints at the Plough and the Stars, we’d get a hangover breakfast here late into the night, Geary/ Masonic. Open 24 hours. Me and my friend Mia. How I loved Mia!

Mia looked like famous Charlie’s Angel Kate Jackson- everyone said that!- and was a total delight too. Shaking my head. Yes.

Copper Penny. The roof was bright red, and it was a perfect greasy spoon circa 1978.

(Richard Brautigan’s unknown apartment was down the block.)

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Ghost-walking w/ Richard Brautigan ca 1966

Brautigan-iana: the building at 406 Duboce is across from where I work today at Maitri. The third floor was home to 1967 silk screen press and stencil cutter for the Communication Company- which published four-color hand-distributed broadsides for the Diggers, and published poems by Richard Brautigan. It’s the center of a vortex of sixties art and activity.

The Diggers were a big influence on Brautigan and the culture of Haight/ Ashbury, including Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, as well as many dada/ disruptive and productive social causes.

The Communication Company published an early collection of Brautigan’s poetry, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace.

Brautigan’s early poems originally appeared as typed broadsides, given away for free.

https://www.diggers.org/archives.htm

-My first contact in SF in August 1977 was just a block away at my sister’s flat on Church at Duboce one block down. Hers was a meeting place of string-band, old timey and puppetry and performance art in the underground tradition. A narrow walk, now- gated, led to a inward facing courtyard, a perfect artist cottage and all the neighbors were friends.

The musicians and performers played at a garage theater on Ramona St near 14th and Guerrero, and at Savoy Tivoli in North Beach in the punk/New Wave Era.

That compromises a thumbnail of 25 years of San Francisco culture. Something to consider when waiting at a bus stop. Where to now, Richard?

The distance between 1967 and 1977 seems like a century now; so much art and activism.

***

Ghost-walking with Richard Brautigan. San Francisco arts in the 1970s:

Ramona Street Theater 1977, the Mission. Performances every Sunday. Avant-garde puppetry, shadow puppet plays, MC with a scary hook and all musicians welcome. The marionettes were not well behaved. This is the garage theater entrance – it might be the one next door.

Pass the hat. My sister co-produced the bizarre and sometimes beautiful ongoing performance pieces here. Some performance art connected with the back room stage at Savoy Tivoli, Grant St North Beach. Scripts written, demons of the eighties released.

Brautigan wasn’t here but he’d recognize the scene. He read excerpts of Trout Fishing in America not far from here at a church on 17th.

***

Earth Day 2020: Let it Breathe

The Quintessential Earth Day book has to be Please Plant This Book by Richard Brautigan, printed on seed packets, and handed out by RB for free.

https://www.diggers.org/plant_this_book.htm

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Ghost walking the Haight with Richard Brautigan:

(Sheltering place has thinned the time and space dimensions, so time travel is easy now.)

Grand Piano Cafe. It rained like hell in that winter in the late seventies. I was always soaked like a rat, so how nice to find a warm cafe.

It was a pretty plush bohemian hangout with nice lamps to read by and fine espresso and dignified woman proprietor with striking white hair, a follower of Goethe Institute and Rudolph Steiner. Theosophical and Poetic. Streamed up windows and classical music. 1977-8.

A friend and I lived in the Haight on upper Downy Street- he was at the Art Institute and I think I was a bike messenger for a short time.

Brautigan hung out on lower Downy St just down the hill.

We’ll walk there but I wanted to revisit the favorite cafe first.

“Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee affords.” RB

http://robert-gorter.info/robert-gorter-and-lexie-ahrens/

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Mon chambre during the endless Day of the Deli. 1979. Club 66. Looking down Lloyd a block from Haight. No passwords were harmed in the making of this post.

I lived with a musician who wrote songs and had a basic jazz quartet and virtuosi would just knock on the door and move in or jam nightly. From chamber music to king crimson rants to jaco pastorius/ paco de lucia excursions and Zappa. And mysticism.

Are you reggae vegetarian bike messengers with an electric bass and sing like Adrian Belew? You’re in.

A trumpeter from the Boston Symphony, who hangs with Dane Rudhyar? Cmon over.

A mop- haired teenager who plays like John McLaughlin? Enter.

No books were written and no beers were spilled.

Ok Richard we have further drifting to do. That’s what you do now, right? Oh, fog-surfing. Whatever.

Continuing.

***

Let me explain.

I realize my ghost memoir is sort of silly- What had happened was, my roommate Peter had enrolled at the SF Art Institute in 1977, and he invited me to drive from our small Ohio town with him.

White VW van chugging across America, 1977.

We had a friend with a house in San Mateo and lived there like crack-addled hippies until someone in the laundromat at Cole and Carl told me about a flat for rent nearby on Downy St, in the Haight-Ashbury. I walked over and walked right in. The landlord was chasing mice out of a kitchen drawer and said we could move in immediately. That would never happen today.

Our rent was $210/ month for five room railroad flat with an overgrown garden in back down ri

My Haight will be a little different than Brautigan’s; my Vesuvio will be a variation on Brautigan’s I’m sure. But I love it all so much now that it’s a ghost.

Cole and Carl:

I was apartment hunting on the bulletin board here 40 years ago and someone in this laundromat told me there was an apartment on Upper Downy St top of Ashbury. Rent was $210 /month for a railroad flat with five rooms and a kitchen with garden backlots. Split it with my best friend. 2 hippies in a five room flat, 1978. Now that fateful laundromat is gone forever and so is reasonable rent. (2016)

Ghost walking with Richard Brautigan: Brautigan Country 

Downey Street 1978:

My best friend had enrolled in SF Art Institute in 1977. He invited me to drive from our little Ohio town. We chugged across country in a big white VW bus.

We broke down once and were given wrong directions by Mormons in Utah -(we were freaks) but otherwise we did fine.

We had a friend with a house in San Mateo and lived there like crack-addled hippies until someone in the laundromat at Cole and Carl told me about a flat for rent nearby on Downey St, in the Haight-Ashbury. I walked over to the place and walked right in. The door was wide open.

The landlord was in the kitchen chasing mice out of a kitchen drawer and said we could move in immediately.

That would never happen today.

Our rent was $210/ month, for a five room railroad flat with an overgrown garden down rickety stairs in back. The banjo played “Cindy” and all was well.

We called Downey St “Dog Shit Street” because Harvey Milk had not yet proposed the poop scoop ordinance that changed things forever.

What does this have to do with the ghost of Richard Brautigan?

If I had but known, the sign at Cole and Carl could have said:

“Welcome to Brautigan Country”

***

Addenda:

sfgate: 1978

Aug. 29: The Board of Supervisors unanimously passes a “pooper scooper” ordinance that makes it illegal for pet owners not to clean up their dog’s droppings. Supervisor Harvey Milk says, “This is the first step in the right direction.”

***

Further Ghost Walking, Haight and Cole, 1979

At the foot of this structure for many years, Neda’s Flowers: resplendent, flowers just falling, trailing from stalls in front, and it is in my mind that in an apartment here lived a painter I knew. A large painting of his depicts an intense red field and shadow of almost black- charcoal, earth- and one wonders about the epidemic of the eighties that took him. His painting now hangs in the high-ceilinged front room of a Victorian over on 18th St by Dolores Park, looking out of a front window roughly in the direction of the Mission a few blocks away, and the Lake of Sorrows, which now runs underground.

That room has northern exposure, which for San Francisco means excellent light.

We worked in the deli across from Cafe Flor, ca. 1979, era of High Punk and New Wave, and he paid for art school as a cashier, watching desserts from Just Desserts going around their tiered little display. The painter was handsome- an even earlier era would’ve said dashing-and had the most laconic expression at all times.

I could be wrong about this. I don’t care. It was the eighties. And Neda’s had to be the sixties. Back in the nineteen- hundreds, right, ghost-of-Richard-Brautigan? You tell me.

You’re the ghost, and I’m the one that’s living. Ok?

Let’s drift on.

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