Free Jubilee Hitchhiker by William Hjortsberg Page B

in April 1942. Wandering aimlessly around the city, he came across a newspaper spread over a storm sewer grate. “I could read the front page headline,” he noted. “It was ‘Doolittle Bombs Tokyo.’”
    In the last novel published during his lifetime, So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away , Brautigan wrote of moving into “an apartment that was annexed to a funeral parlor.” This happened when he was five, in the late spring of 1940. Mary Lou had been living an increasingly transient life. That year, she moved five times in two months. “Anytime I didn’t like anything, I moved.”
    One of these moves was to a street crowded with five mortuaries: Lyon’s, Buckley-King, Melinger’s, Lynn, Cassedy and Allen. Mary Lou occupied an apartment below Lynn. “I moved at night and didn’t know that it was a mortuary.” They lived below the mortuary only “long enough to find another place.” She woke up in the morning with Richard staring out the front room window. “He says, ‘Look, Mama, there’s a whole lot of people out in front of the house.’ I took a look and they were having a funeral. All the mourners were there. I thought, oh my god, no wonder it was so quiet.”
    Richard wrote of living near the funeral parlor “for a few months.” He described getting up early in the morning in his pajamas, while everyone else was still asleep, to watch the funerals through the window, so small he had to climb up on a chair to get a better view. It made a lasting impression. Thirty-nine years later, in his fiction, Brautigan recalled the mortician’s blond-haired six-year-old daughter, whose ice-cold hands terrified him. Death remained a recurring image in his fiction and poetry. Like a funeral cortege haunting a sunny spring day, graves, shadows, cemeteries, and other glimpses of mortality add a pervasive melancholy to work so seemingly lighthearted on the surface.
    A short while before Mary Lou occupied the apartment below the mortuary, either late 1939 or early in 1940, her brother Edward moved out of the family home. His friend Ron Bluett wanted them to head up to Seattle and find work in an aircraft factory. Instead, Edward Dixon took a job with Simms & Drake Construction Company in San Francisco. Ron Bluett ended up working in the timber industry, where he met his death. Within the year, Edward traveled to Midway Island in the Pacific. Simms & Drake was building an airstrip for the U.S. Navy. He had always written poetry. Many of these poems, composed during his off hours, were printed in the Gooney Gazette , the island’s military newspaper, which Edward mailed home to his family.
    In 1941, when Richard Brautigan was six, he and his mother lived in one of an ongoing sequence of low-rent buildings in Tacoma. A ninety-three-year-old woman occupied another
cheap apartment on the same floor. She had been a widow for seventy years and lived by herself. Twice each week, on Monday and Thursday evenings, Richard played Chinese checkers with her. She served him tea and cookies and told stories about a deceased husband who had drawn his last breath during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant. “I always liked old people,” Richard Brautigan wrote forty years later, “so I spent as much time with them as I could. They fascinated me like spiders.”
    America’s sudden entry into World War II had a profound effect on Richard Brautigan. On December 7, 1941, units of the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Midway as well as the U.S. Naval Base near Honolulu. Uncle Edward heard the incoming planes and hurried outside to help set up a machine gun. He managed to fire off a few rounds before a bomb exploded and everything went black.
    Edward Dixon woke up on a hospital ship bound for Hawaii, head swathed in bandages. The doctor studying his chart by the foot of the bed said, “I know you. I used to go to school with