brian nation: beat the devil

In Detroit John Sinclair introduced me to Trout Fishing in America. Later that year I was in San Francisco. Dan McLeod introduced me to Joanne Kyger whom I later visited on occasion. I believe she was still married to – although separated from – Gary Snyder. At Joanne’s apartment at 2921 Pine Street I met Ken Botto whose film I’d seen just days earlier. Botto shared an apartment at 2450 California Street with Jim O’Neill. Jim lived mostly with his girlfriend, so I moved in to his room. At Joanne’s another time I met Richard Brautigan.

The Presidio Branch of the San Francisco Public Library was just a few blocks away at 3150 Sacramento Street. I visited the library regularly for reading material and also because the librarian was yet another in a series of very beautiful women I secretly pined for. On one visit I was checking out Confederate General from Big Sur. She mentioned that she loved Brautigan’s writing. Suddenly there was Brautigan. I introduced them. Another magical confluence of romance, ideas, and events.

Brautigan invited me back to his place, also in the neighbourhood, four blocks from Botto’s at 2830 California Street. There I met his girlfriend whose name I can’t recall but which might have been Janice. I fell in love with her in an instant. I was 21, utterly single, and falling in love all over the damn place. Janice, Richard, and I became friends. Now and then I’d go by their place and we’d play Monopoly. Monopoly became a significant, recurring game during that particular time in San Francisco. And later, of course, Brautigan became a significant and very popular author for a couple of decades.

Janice visited me once in a while, with or without Richard. One day I told her she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life and asked to photograph her. We crossed the street to an empty lot where she stood before a wall and I ran off about half a dozen shots. Later I discovered the film had stuck in the camera so that every photograph, plus others I took later, were all exposed on a single frame. I discovered this months later, back in Vancouver when I managed to find a darkroom and it was too late to take more pictures of Janice. The negative was almost solid black in that spot but, determined to salvage even the ghostliest image of Janice, I exposed the photo paper for almost five minutes and this is all the evidence that remains of Janice.