It's 1983 or 1984 and I'm barely out of high school... dropped out sophomore year, actually. I was bored. Huntsville, Alabama was a town as culturally split down the middle as it was geographically, by a bracket created by Memorial Parkway running north and south, and I-565 (which arrived on the scene after I moved to North Carolina in late 1987) running northeast hooking from State Highway 72 to Chattanooga, and southeast dead-ending into Decatur. Within the eastern clump of that bracket is the hotshit pretty downtown area stretching toward Five Points and Monte Sano. Lots of trees and nice old houses, a synagogue well over a hundred years old, liberals and button-down lefties far as the eyes can surely spy. On the west side of the clump, there was poor, working class, and military families connected with Redstone Arnenal, PhD's in Engineering being churned out of UAH, and if you dared to take a day trip to a minor metropolis like Atlanta or Memphis, a baccalaureate would be heard asking such incisive questions like, "Whut'n'a hayull ya gonna go thur fer?"
However, there were pockets of culture, safe spaces if you will, on both sides of town. To the east was a coffee roaster/bar/music venue called The Kaffeklatsch and the independent bookstore in Five Points, Books As Seeds. The west side was defiantly dotted with Tattooed Lady Comics and Collectibles, Isis Books, The Booklegger, and Sunburst Records.
Although, it was that morning at Books As Seeds that a lovely young worker with an asymmetrical bob and owlish glasses and what Richard Brautigan recognized in other young ladies as a "rose meow smile" had me pegged as a sensitive artist type (it had nothing to do with the acrylic paint smeared on my jeans, I swear!), trapped me in her Brie Larson like gaze, and informed me that Richard Brautigan would be my cup of tea. For almost fifteen minutes she schooled me on all things Brautigan and gave me good backstory.
That girl was so friggin' right... and cute.
Books As Seeds had newer editions, but I suspected The Booklegger had most of the original paperbacks from 1967 to 1980... and they did indeed. Fifty cents to two dollars each and with a ten dollar bill I bought a small library which included Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Bob Kaufman.
I had no idea Brautigan recorded an album fourteen years previously, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Within a few months I learned of his suicide by shotgun and I was shattered. I breathed his words and would wander through Huntsville reading "The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster" to many concerned stares and very few knowing smiles. Thirty three years on and I love his writing just as passionately, but if I read his work aloud on the city buses of Charlotte, people would petition to throw that crazy old man into the insane asylum.
So, back about 1999 I received a couple of audio cassette copies of the original Harvest record from a fellow Brautigan fan in Gunnison, Colorado. I was finally able to connect Brautigan's voice with his words, that gentle singsong Pacific Northwest lilt and that mischievous chortle.
Besides his readings of poetry and short stories, we get Brautigan in conversation with his friend, Price Dunn and his girlfriend, Valerie Estes at home. Price and Richard keen that they should cook up some lunch, then Price flashes on, "Hey! I know what we could do, too... we could do something RADICAL... that could cause some strange, mystic vibrations in your kitchen..." suggesting that he could go to the store and get a pound of "real coffee." Richard sputters, "REAL COFFEE? IN MY KITCHEN? What'll I do with my instant?"
"REAL COFFEE???"
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