Genuine American Weirdness: On Loving Richard Brautigan and Mostly Failing as a Writer

Dave Newman

I did what I always did when I wanted to write and couldn’t: I picked up a Richard Brautigan novel and took it to bed. The novel was called So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away. It starts like this, “I didn’t know that afternoon that the ground was waiting to become another grave in just a few short days.” I love the drama in that sentence but I love the simple language, too. The next sentence in the novel is even better but you should see that one for yourself. You should buy So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away, then you should buy everything else Richard Brautigan wrote because even his bad books pay back more than they require.
 
I read the first couple chapters then stopped. It was late afternoon. I was on my back, dreaming a scene for the novel I’d been working on.
 
Richard Brautigan wrote in the mornings, probably hungover, then spent his afternoons watching B-movies. He thought the monsters on the screen, the blobs and UFOs, cleared his head for an afternoon back at his typewriter.
 
My head was filled with images, too many. There were school teachers and bar owners and taxi drivers, and those were just the minor characters. Everyone wanted to be in my novel until I put them in my novel then they didn’t fit.
 
This was 1998. I lived in a three-bedroom apartment in Hollsopple, Pennsylvania, a tiny town west of Johnstown and east of Pittsburgh. Hollsopple was basically a farm that grew Mennonites and people who voted Republican. There was a post office and, oddly, a gay bar. Hollsopple was a town that Richard Brautigan could have imagined. Weirdness, genuine American weirdness, was everywhere.
 
On Friday and Saturday nights, Christians lined up outside the gay bar with picket signs and walked around a barrel filled with fire until, in some agreement, the people who owned the gay bar allowed the Christians to use the basement for worship on Sunday mornings.
 
My reality, Hollsopple, often felt like a dream, and that’s how Richard Brautigan wrote. He didn’t take fast cars to Vegas or contemplate World War II. He drank wine in the park with hobos and bums and ate free sandwiches at the mission. Anyone could do war and Vegas. Hobos and bums and free sandwiches were the real hardships. Brautigan showed me that. So I went to the gay bar a couple times even though I wasn’t gay. I talked to the picketers one night even though I thought a gay bar in a farm community was a good idea. I warmed my hands over the fire in the barrel and drank a can of Schafer beer.
 
I knew a lot about Richard Brautigan: his writer friends, his drinking habits, his girlfriends and wives, the apartments in San Francisco, the ranch in Montana, the trips to Japan. I knew he liked guns and he’d once shot up his own kitchen clock. I thought knowing his life would help me understand his imagination and knowing his imagination would help expand my own. Richard Brautigan said, “Because you always have a clock strapped to your body, it’s natural that I should think of you as the correct time.” I didn’t have a clock strapped to my body and I didn’t know the correct time, and I was beginning to doubt I’d ever be a writer.
 
Richard Brautigan existed in a world where language and experience were inseparable. Going to the grocery store was enough to launch a brilliant metaphor. Anything more felt like a moon-landing. Brautigan wrote what is still the best poem ever about a blowjob. He probably typed it after a morning of fly fishing and before a night of whiskey drinking.
 
I don’t remember how I learned so much about Richard Brautigan back in 1998. Internet was available, but I didn’t have it. I didn’t have cable. My TV had bunny ears. My radio only worked if I balanced it on a window ledge. I’d had a job as a furniture store manager but I’d lost it. I had a little bit of money saved and I could collect unemployment. All I wanted was to be a writer with a book.
 
My novel was about a guy and his fat friend. There was a woman, too. She owned her own pharmacy, a Medicine Shop. She was a pill addict. I knew a woman like that. I knew the guy and the fat friend. But when I wrote them they all looked cartoonish and melodramatic.
 
Richard Brautigan wrote simple clean sentences. His characters were tiny in their flaws and in their successes, which is to say his characters felt real.
 
I wanted my characters to be real. They were real. They existed and had names and birthdays. But when I moved them from my world into my imagination and out onto the page they reappeared as clumsy and obnoxious blobs.
 
I looked at the Richard Brautigan novel. It didn’t make sense that I should be able to read such an interesting book so many times and yet not be able to write anything great myself.
 
So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away is a novel told in reverse. It’s the story of a grown man looking back on the day he bought bullets instead of a hamburger. It is—like the best of Brautigan—a brilliant book. The images are out there. The voice is as clear as a bartender asking if you’d like another or a bouncer telling you to go home.
 
Brautigan has a great line somewhere that says, “All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds.” Knowing your place in history is very important if you’re going to become a writer. I knew that, but I still didn’t know my place. I was not a cloud.
 
I was not even a furniture store manager anymore. I was 28 years old. I’d been out of grad school for a couple years. I owed 50 grand in student loans. If I didn’t become a writer soon I assumed I wouldn’t become a writer. Nobody, I believed, published their first book after 30.
 
Brautigan published his first chapbook at 23. He published his first novel, A Confederate General in Big Sur, when he was 29.
 
What had I done?
 
I’d published 40 or so poems and a handful of stories in literary magazines and journals. I’d been in the Wormwood Review with Charles Bukowski. I’d been paid 500 dollars for a short story by a New York magazine. I’d been drunk a few times with Ed Ochester, one of my favorite poets, and I regularly corresponded with Gerald Locklin, a poet who had corresponded and drank with Charles Bukowski. I’d been offered a job making 38 grand a year, a huge sum of money for me (then and now) and I’d turned it down because I didn’t think I could sell industrial parts all day and come home and still be an artist at night.
 
When I write that now, the publications and the friendships and the dedication to living as a writer, it all sounds brilliant, but it wasn’t brilliant at all. It was the opposite of brilliant. I’d been drunk with Ed Ochester when I was his student, paying tuition, and lots of other students, some not paying tuition but on scholarship, were drunk with Ed Ochester, too. Gerald Locklin, after four decades in the small press, was teaching four classes a semester at a state school in California, and still struggling to reach a broader audience. Charles Bukowski was dead.
 
I went back to my novel.
 
I went back to Richard Brautigan.
 
If I would have known that I wouldn’t publish my first novel for almost a dozen more years, I’m not sure I would have kept on. I might have gone back to the company that offered me 38 grand and said, “Please,” and, “I’ll sell anything.” Or maybe I would have thought: 12 years is nothing, and maintained pursuit.
 
But the distant future doesn’t matter to a writer.
 
Only the present matters.
 
The distant future is filled with so much success, so much money and so many prizes and an abundance of readers, that it’s barely worth dreaming on.
 
In the present, we have words to worry about, and how to get those words into a sentence great enough to inspire another sentence and so on until the sentences are lined up into a work someone else might want to read.
 
Back in my apartment, I went to sleep and woke up and went back to my novel then back to Richard Brautigan then back to sleep. It was endless. Writing had never been so little fun, so lacking in vision and spirituality. The whole thing was a fucking drag.
 
Two months before this, I’d written a query (or what I’d imagined a query to be; I’d never seen one) and shipped it off with some stories to 7 Stories Press. The publisher there, Dan Simon, said he liked the stories and asked to see my novel. I guess I’d mentioned I had a novel, but what I had were drafts of novels, most unfinished, all pretty bad. Now I was working frantically, as if I had a publishing contract and not a letter that said, basically, “Yeah, okay.”
 
7 Stories was (is) a great press. Dan Simon started it to re-issue the novels of Nelson Algren. Nelson Algren created a character, Railroad Shorty, that inspired Richard Brautigan to create a character, Trout Fishing in America Shorty. All I needed to do to continue on that train was write a novel, or revise a novel, into a good book, because what I had written was not good, certainly not good enough to be on 7 Stories Press and share space with my heroes.
 
Now I was stuck. I’d been up all morning. I’d written. I’d gone running. I’d written again. It was dinner time, and I didn’t have another thing to say. Richard Brautigan couldn’t save me. Nelson Algren couldn’t save me. I thought 7 Stories Press would save me, but thinking about 7 Stories Press and that pressure made me feel worse.
 
I had twenty pages completed. My goal for the day had been 30 pages. The math was obvious but I couldn’t add anything to the manuscript. I was bored. My characters were bored. My sentences were as long and winding as rivers and had about as much to say. What I’d written had not been easy, and it had emptied me like a trashcan on garbage day.
 
Does this sound bad?
 
It was.
 
If I didn’t finish and publish a novel in the next four months, my money would be gone, and I’d have to do what I’d promised myself I’d do: I’d become a truck driver and give up on all those things I imagined decent writers having: recognition, a job at a small college, a home that didn’t roll on 18 wheels.
 
So I focused on the four months. I had a stack of paper covered in words, what I would have called a “solid draft” but it was really a 300-page rant about bad jobs and worse friends, terrible sex and prescription drugs. I was 150 pages into the revision, but when I went past that, I’d get confused and disappointed and have to revise the first 150 pages. This had happened five or six times and I was afraid it was about to happen again.
 
To get my pages, I was willing to try anything: B-Movies, diet pills, fasting, a jug of water, a box of Little Debbie cakes, three two-liters of Mountain Dew. Coffee. Tea with honey and lemon. Tea without honey and lemon. I would have turned over and fucked the cover of So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away if I thought it would have helped, but of course fucking a pile of bound pages is no more inspiring than pressing the cover of the book to my forehead and demanding Brautigan’s images work their way into my brain through osmosis. Some days, I wrote with the window open. Other days, I wrote with the heater on. A month before this, I’d tried writing on dope but before I could form a thought and translate that thought into words, I puked in the garbage can. The rest of the day I spent in the bathroom, throwing up and sleeping under the toilet, feeling relieved that I wasn’t writing, happy to be unburdened.
 
Then I’d think maybe I needed to try dope again and not puke and just write.
 
Or maybe I needed to run more miles.
 
Or maybe I needed to eat better or worse or listen to more music or less music or burn more candles or smoke more pot but only as a way to relax and only with my good friend Bob.
 
The needs of the unpublished writer appear to the unpublished writer as infinite.
 
You need a book and a publisher, of course.
 
But to get a publisher, you need to write a book, a great one, and a great book—and all published books are great in at least one way—requires time.
 
Time, for writers, is measured in two things: the amount of words we read and the amount of words we write. I hadn’t done enough of either.
 
I burned more candles. I tried caffeine and valium. I moved my word processor from my bedroom to my living room which was also my kitchen. I moved it back.
 
What I should have done is written my novel straight through, then some poems then another novel then some more poems then some stories and so on.
 
No one, none of my writer friends and certainly none of my teachers, had told me it was so simple. You read and write until you have a book you’re proud of, then someone publishes that book. If they don’t publish that book, you write another one.
 
I finished re-reading So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away that afternoon. I re-read the rest of Richard Brautigan’s books as I worked on my own novel and I finished my novel, 370 pages, a month later. It was great—the finishing, not the novel.
 
So I got terrifically shitfaced drunk and fucked a woman I could barely stand. I sent my novel off to 7 Stories Press and knew that I was about to become famous, if not famous then celebrated, and if not celebrated then at least published. I’d have a book to put on my shelf. If someone asked, I could show them.
 
When 7 Stories Press didn’t get back to me, I signed up to become a long-haul trucker.
 
Being a trucker was awful.
 
It was not a job teaching college.
 
It was not being a famous, semi-famous, or an underground writer.
 
Being a trucker was not the job I’d paid 50 thousand dollars to go to college to become. Being a truck driver was not my vocation. I started to imagine I’d never publish a book, the kind of reverse fantasy that kills young artists.
 
And yet I kept writing.
 
I wrote more seriously and more thoughtfully than I’d written in graduate school or when I imagined 7 Stories Press publishing my novel.
 
I was in Montana one day, picking up a load at a warehouse, and I thought: Richard Brautigan. There were rivers and trees near the warehouse, I was tired, and my only thought was: Richard Brautigan. It was pure and simple and not connected to anything but the man and the books he wrote. The warehouse guys unloaded my truck. I drove on. Richard Brautigan, I thought. It was what I wanted to do with my life, think thoughts like Richard Brautigan or Nelson Algren, Ed Ochester and Gerald Locklin and Charles Bukowski. There was nothing else close to those thoughts.
 
Other things happened to me during my short time as a truck driver, some fun, some terrible, some both, but every day I wrote at least one poem and when I made it home to my apartment, I worked on my novel. I wrote stories then started another novel then wrote more poems. I did this for years. I do it now.
 
Working—reading and writing—matter more than publishing.
 
I know that now but forget it still.
 
I think this essay you’re reading is to remind me.
 
If you want to be a cloud, be Richard Brautigan.
 
If you want to be a writer, write.

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Dave Newman is the author of the novel Please Don't Shoot Anyone Tonight and four poetry chapbooks. He lives in Trafford, Pennsylvania.