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by John Thomas?
Most people would connect Richard with the Hippies, I guess, but really he dates way back. In Beat days he wanted to be a poet, studied formally with Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer?, put out little stapled pamphlets of his verse. He was a walker, that man! Well, a shambler. But he shambled (usually alone) all over San Francisco. You'd see him everywhere. Market Street, the Mission District, Potrero Hill, Golden Gate Park, on the bluffs out behind the Palace of the Legion of Honor. Shambling, shambling. And even at a distance (at least in profile) he was recognizable. A blond vulture. What I mean, with that fleshy beak of his, and his yellow soup-strainer mustache, the sway-backed forward bend of his neck... and in those days he always wore a jacket with a fake fleece collar, which uncannily resembled the ruff of a turkey buzzard. A blond vulture, and all over town.
I mean, dig, see him moping along Grant Avenue past the Cafe Trieste, then you'd grab the Union Street bus, go over Russian Hill to Polk Gulch, walk briskly down to the Marina... and there Richard would be, vulturing slowly, myopically, along the water's edge. How the hell did be beat you there? Remarkable. Almost eerie. I suppose he recognized me, too. We hadn't really met, but if we passed one another on the street, he would always nod.
The first time I truly met him? A book of his prose had just come out. Trout Fishing in America? One of those. And he threw a party at his place. He lived out around Clay and Masonic then, I think.
Poet Geoff Brown was going, with his wife Judy and Monk. Remember Monk, their little pot-head pup?
"Come with us, John. There'll be lots of food, and he's bought several cases of good wine. Besides, he told us he'd like to meet you."
I didn't believe that "he'd like to meet you" part, but the prospect of food was decisive. I'd been living on peanut-butter-and-mayonnaise sandwiches for days. So we all took off, crowded into their little black Bug. (This was once upon a time, when Volkswagens had 6-volt batteries. Remember?)
The party wasn't worth recounting here, except for our formal introduction. Brautigan was already pretty boxed out when we arrived. I grabbed a chair beside the food table. Dips, chips, cheese, sliced roast beef, and ham, the usual—but, as Geoff had promised, plenty of it. Samuele Sebastiani wine (Sebastiani made a pretty good red back then).
I was scarfing meat by the handful when Richard lurched up, "working the room." Geoff introduced us. And I paid him an extravagant compliment on his new book. He blushed around his moustache. "Thank you very much." And with that, embarrassed, he tried to make a formal bow. A clumsy cat, Richard: the bow was more a combination of curtsey and tangle-footed jig... and he fell into my lap. Where he stayed for a good fifteen minutes, while we discussed Jack Spicer, the poet we both liked best. Funny, I guess: one straight guy sitting in another straight guy's lap, swapping quotes from the verses of one of the gayest of the gay. But Jack was such a fine poet. Come to that, I'd do it again tomorrow. Fall by, manly reader, and sit in my manly lap, and I'll talk Jack Spicer with you for an hour. After that party night (from which I returned with my pants pockets full of greasy beef and melted cheddar cheese), Richard and I talked with fair frequency. The Coffee Gallery or La Pantera or Vesuvio's (Richard and I both liked Lemon Hart's, a dark 150-proof Jamaican rum they stocked at Vesuvio's). Just chance encounters. But I don't recall the subjects. No, hey, wait. One thing does stay with me. Richard was often cranky, and he always groused about the same thing. Seems he was uncircumcised, and love-making often caused him to tear the tip of his too-tight foreskin. An hour of passion followed by a week of penile discomfort. He'd grump about it at length, in clinical detail, and to nearly anyone.
The last time I saw Richard was at a 1982 Poetry Festival at the Palace of Fine Arts. I had come up from Los Angeles by train. My reading was scheduled for the evening, but in the afternoon there was a book-signing at City Lights. Several of us (LeRoi Jones, Isaac Bashevis-Singer, some others) sat at a long table behind name cards and stacks of our books to autograph. Richard came in. We hadn't seen one another for maybe fifteen years, but he recognized me and crowded in beside me. We signed books and chatted and he presented me with his fancy Japanese ball point pen. Turned out his reading was that evening too.
"Let's take a cab together, John." "Fine. But it's still pretty early."
"We'll kill the time at Tojo's."
"Tojo's?"
"It's a Japanese restaurant over on Green Street. They have a new bartender, straight from Nagasaki, and he fixes drinks just the way I like them." "Okay, man. Sounds good to me."
After the signing (he sold twenty times as many books as I did) we walked to Tojo's. I'd been slipping him dexamyls all afternoon, so he was in fine fettle and talking, talking, talking. Tojo's was small and dark, with a narrow bar. Richard had a tab there. The new barkeep looked very much like our Hawaiian senator, Daniel Inouye, except that he still had two good arms. With which he served us drinks, lots of drinks. And what was Richard's big favorite? Just sake, ice-cold sake. What the hell was that? Sake you drink piss-warm, right? But Richard insisted that nearly-frozen sake was the current "in" drink of Japanese artists and intellectuals—and he'd recently been to Japan, marrying that beautiful Japanese gold-digger (I forget her name), the one who had come back with him and dumped him not long before. But ice-cold sake? It was drinkable, yet, but I couldn't believe that all the hip Japanese were guzzling it. I think they were just putting him on.
We stayed pretty late, while Richard told me all about Japan and his Japanese marriage disaster ("She's just a whore, John!") and —yes, right, about his current foreskin tear. Left in a hurry, hailed a cab, jumped in. But half a block down Columbus, there she was on the sidewalk. Ravishing. Richard's gold-digging ex-wife.
"Stop the cab!"
Richard talked her into the back seat with us and off we went to the Palace of Fine Arts, which they entered arm in arm, hip to hip. Poor Richard. A few years later he shot himself in a cabin up there in the wood. Wasn't found for... eight days, was it? Not pleasant. But peace be with you, my man.
Transit?, 10
Spring 2002
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