Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Siew-Hwa Beh, Richard’s girlfriend in the mid-1970s, heard much the same story years later. “When Brautigan made money, McClure wanted to borrow money from Richard for a down payment on a house,” she said. “Richard refused to loan the money because he felt that if he did that it might break up their friendship. He felt that once he loaned friends money things become different. But their friendship ended anyway because he wouldn’t give him the money.”

  Brautigan had strong feelings about such transactions. In a fatherly way, he once gave his daughter some advice. “Never loan your friends any money,” he told Ianthe, “or you will always be disappointed.” It was best, he counseled, always to consider any “loan” to be a “gift.” That way, when there were no expectations, there could be no regrets. In 1978, Ron and Kitty Loewinsohn needed to come up with a large sum for the down payment on a house they wanted to buy in Berkeley. Richard gave them the money, but the Loewinsohns considered it a loan. Influenced by Brautigan’s own plaque-making proclivities, which Ron observed on a trip to Montana in the summer of 1974, he nailed an engraved bronze plaque to a post in the basement of his new house. It read: the richard brautigan memorial house.

  “Ron paid him back every cent,” Kitty said. Loewinsohn earned the money teaching summer school. Kitty thought “this was one reason why Richard really trusted Ron, although it was in the context of a whole life they had shared. He just felt that this was a man who kept his word, and if he said he was going to pay him back, he would do it.” She sensed that Brautigan “had had unfortunate experiences with other people.”

  Don Carpenter recalled a time when his debt to Brautigan totaled $4,000. After Simon & Schuster paid Carpenter $25,000 for Turnaround in 1980, he started paying Richard back. Every time the publisher sent him an installment, he’d “slip a grand off each payment and send it to Richard,” along with a formal letter saying he hadn’t forgotten about the debt. “I never got $4,000 of pleasure more anywhere in my life than paying that off,” Don said, “because it made him so fucking happy. He never expected to see that money again.”

  Around the same time, Sherry Vetter became a benefactress of Richard’s philosophy when he gave her $500 to help finish building a house. “About a year after he gave it to me, I said to him that I was gonna pay him back when I sold the house,” Sherry recalled, “and he said, ‘Nah, forget it. Do you know how many thousands of dollars my friends owe me? Five hundred bucks is nothing.’”

  Money matters aside, another possible cause for the schism between McClure and Brautigan might have been envy. Sam Lawrence once told Gatz Hjortsberg that the entire Frisco crowd was jealous of Richard’s sudden and unexpected success. Richard had taken Sam out to a Marin County picnic in Mill Valley, where Sam sensed Michael’s envy during a conversation with the poet. Keith Abbott wrote in his memoir about hearing “rumblings of displeasure. The remarkable sales of Brautigan’s Delacorte Press books had created a backwash of envy and jealousy among the writers” in San Francisco.

  Abbott also quoted Peter Berg regarding his final break with Brautigan. The former Digger felt disgust, rather than jealousy, when considering his old friend’s preoccupation with an ever-growing fame. “Richard would talk about how many books he sold last week,” Berg told Abbott. “It was constant, to the point where that was his only conversation, and I started calling him Richard Career. That was the end of our relationship.”

  Perhaps the final words on the matter belong to McClure, who wrote “an angry poem” about Richard in the year of their breakup. He called it “Nineteen Seventy-two,” and the opening lines sound harsh and accusatory: SO, AT LAST YOUR PERSONALITY

  HAS BECOME A COPROLITE!

  ((Fossilized shit!))

  A few lines further along, Michael got to the heart of the matter: BUT STILL I CAN HARDLY BELIEVE

  that you sit there telling me:

  about the women you fuck,

  how much money you make,

  and of your fame.

  As if

  the last twenty years

  never happened.

  It is impossible not to detect an undertone of deep resentment beneath the surface outrage of McClure’s words. It comes as no surprise that he “hoped [Brautigan] would never see the poem” when it was published two years later in the collection September Blackberries. An important era in Richard Brautigan’s life had clearly ended. Michael McClure’s poem provided a bitter epitaph, not only for a lost friendship, but also for those heady bohemian years when poverty, obscurity, and art provided the matrix for a profound outpouring of literary creativity.

  thirty-eight: lit crit

  IN THE SUMMER of 1972, Richard Brautigan, Jimmy Buffett, photographer Erik Weber, and I set off for Sixteenmile Creek, a legendary Montana fishing spot. Our directions veered somewhat askew. Finding Sixteenmile on a map, flowing out of the Shields Valley (named for Sgt. Shields, who passed through with Lewis and Clark), we assumed driving north on U.S. 89 was the best way to go, unaware the fishery was located mainly on the huge CA Ranch across the Meagher County line eighteen miles southwest. The correct approach was from the Gallatin Valley, via Maudlow.

  Instead, we found ourselves in Ringling, a ghost town named for the circus family whose huge surrounding ranches once grew hay to feed their traveling menageries and the draft horse brigade hauling gilded show wagons down Main Street America. We were an odd quartet, a literary luminary accompanied by three unknown artists. At this point, Buffett’s career appeared to be faltering. He’d struck out in Nashville, bailed from a failed marriage, released an unsuccessful first album in 1970 (Down to Earth sold a total of 324 copies), and recently started working day jobs while singing in Key West bars at night. The songs he wrote over the summer were soon to make him famous. This trip resulted in “Ringling, Ringling,” a melancholy ditty that later graced Buffett’s Living and Dying in 3/4 Time album (1974).

  Ringling was indeed “a dying little town.” All that remained of the bank was the fireproof vault, standing stark and alone amid the surrounding debris. Only the bar survived, a squat log building crouching beneath a towering aluminum Matterhorn of discarded beer cans glittering in the late morning sun. We stopped to ask about access to fish Sixteenmile and got the bad news, staying on for most of the afternoon, doing our part to enlarge the alpine empties pile.

  Erik Weber remembered an aloof Brautigan sitting at the end of the bar, while the rest of us horsed around playing pinball. “He was talking to the person running the place, this older woman. But he wouldn’t relax. He wouldn’t have any fun.”

  Hoping to rescue what was left of the day, we headed later up through White Sulphur Springs to the Musselshell, a slow-moving river the color of coffee and about as fishable as an irrigation ditch. Before we encountered the final sad truth of a fruitless fishing trip, conversation in the car volleyed amiably from front seat to back. Richard grouched about bad reviews from the East Coast literary establishment. I replied that the harshest criticism I ever received came from Ben Stein, a former state senator who had edited the remarkable journals of Montana pioneer Andrew Garcia. A Tough Trip through Paradise was a book I much admired. When I bumped into Stein and his wife outside Sax & Fryer in Livingston the previous winter, I told him so.

  Stein said he’d recently read my first novel, Alp. The senator further observed that it was the most depraved and disgusting book he’d ever encountered, so foul he felt compelled to carry it out back behind the barn and bury it in a manure pile.

  “I said, I hoped a beautiful rose grew in that spot,” I told Richard, who grinned behind a lattice-mask of steepled fingers. “Stein said the only other books that ever caused such a violent reaction were ‘that Trout Fishing abomination! and Tom McGuane’s The Sporting Club.’” The senator claimed to have hurled both volumes into his fireplace, burning them.

  “Hmmmm,” Richard pondered, covering his sly grin. “I wonder if he ever thought of drawing and quartering a book.”

  thirty-nine: my home’s in m
ontana

  IN THE SPRING of 1968, having sold The Sporting Club to Simon & Schuster and ready for a new adventure, Tom McGuane picked the town of Livingston off a map of Montana. It was no random choice. Fly-fishing dictated his selection. The Yellowstone River flowed through Livingston. The Madison and the Gallatin lay within an hour’s drive. All were blue-ribbon trout streams, and Yellowstone National Park, fifty-seven miles to the south, held the promise of backcountry wilderness angling.

  That summer, Tom and his wife, Becky, rented a nine-room, two-story brick house on H Street. The rent was $28 a month for the ground floor only. They were soon joined by Jim Harrison, J. D. Reed, Dan Gerber, and Bob Dattila, all fellow alumni of Michigan State.

  Harrison, whose first book of poetry, Plain Song, had been widely praised, published a second, Locations, during his stay in Livingston. Gerber’s brief but spectacular career as a Trans Am driver ended with a near-fatal crash when he ran his Ford Cobra into a concrete wall at 110 miles per hour and “ricocheted into other possibilities.” Among these was Sumac, a literary journal Gerber founded and was coediting with Harrison. The first issue was due out in the fall. Dattila, not yet the aggressive literary agent known within the publishing world as “the Hun,” worked in the rights department at McGraw-Hill. The unfurnished H Street house had wall-to-wall carpeting. Everyone unrolled his sleeping bag and crashed.

  McGuane returned to Montana the following summer. Duane Neal, a professional outfitter, loaned him a small ranch in Paradise Valley, where the Yellowstone flowed north out of the park toward Livingston. Harrison, at work on a sequence of ghazals, joined the McGuanes again, funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship. By the end of August, Gatz Hjortsberg and his family rattled up the gravel road past the Pray post office in a VW microbus. Alp, his first novel, was scheduled for publication in the fall. Between fishing trips, the three young writers worked at separate rustic workbenches in Duane Neal’s barn, portable typewriters clattering, surrounded by curling uncured deer hides and dismantled farm machinery.

  By September, armed with movie-money from The Sporting Club, McGuane bought fourteen acres on Deep Creek, about twelve miles south of Livingston. The land surrounded an old ranch center, complete with corrals, a log barn, several venerable outbuildings, and an ancient root cellar carved into a nearby hillside. After hanging drywall to conceal the knotty-pine paneling in the farmhouse living room, Tom and Becky departed for Key West, where they maintained a winter residence, a modest one-story conch bungalow enclosed within a minijungle of tropical foliage.

  McGuane’s enthusiastic review of Trout Fishing in America appeared in the New York Times Book Review in mid-February 1970. More than a year went by before Brautigan exchanged letters with McGuane. Having just read and admired The Abortion, Tom wrote Richard in March of 1971, inviting him to come and visit either in Key West or Montana. Brautigan replied in April. McGuane wrote back in May, saying he would be out on the coast in the summer to do a magazine piece on Point Reyes, and would call when he arrived, adding, “I would love to see you.”

  Tom wrote again in September. He was “just sitting down, with glee,” to read Revenge of the Lawn. McGuane thanked Brautigan for sending him a copy and wished Richard had come out to Montana that summer. Another year went by before Brautigan took McGuane up on his offer. By the summer of 1972, the ranks of the expatriate population in Paradise Valley had grown. The Hjortsbergs returned the previous fall, after sojourns in Mexico and Costa Rica, buying a three-story nineteenth-century farmhouse across the road from the Pine Creek Methodist Church.

  Landscape painter Russell Chatham, his wife, Mary, and their baby daughter arrived in the spring, leaving a rented apartment upstairs at the Druid’s Hall in Nicasio, California, for a stucco-covered former schoolhouse with a wood-burning basement furnace, high at the upper end of Deep Creek above the McGuanes’ place. A superb fisherman, Chatham had for a period of years held the world’s record for a striped bass taken on a fly.

  In Key West the previous winter, McGuane made a number of intriguing new friends. Jimmy Buffett, a twenty-five-year-old country singer from Mobile, Alabama, earned a marginal living as a Key West bar singer and perfected the beachcomber lifestyle he later celebrated with great commercial success in “Margaritaville,” his 1977 hit. He and Tom ran amok together, brother berserkers howling at the moon and crawling at dawn down the yellow line dividing Duval Street.

  Harrison and Chatham came south that winter for the tarpon season, as they had the year before. Jim Harrison had made his first trip in the winter of 1969, before the McGuanes bought their Ann Street house and were living in a rented place on Summerland Key. The two men fished together on Tom’s secondhand Roberts skiff. While hanging out at the marina one day, they encountered a tall aristocratic fellow with an unflappable demeanor. Woody Sexton, a famed saltwater fishing guide and mutual friend, introduced them to Guy de la Valdène.

  An American-born French count on his father’s side and a member of the socially prominent Guest family on his mother’s, Guy lived a life devoted to sport, dividing his time between fly-fishing and bird hunting. Harrison later wrote, “Valdène is the best shot, and also the best saltwater flycaster I know, but I should add that this apparently isn’t very important to him.” The three became fast friends. When Chatham joined them in the Keys the following year, he rounded out a Rabelaisian quartet devoted to the robust pleasures provided by the pursuit of fish, game, mind-altering substances, and attractive young women.

  One evening that summer, Brautigan sat at a table in Enrico’s with Erik Weber and Bob Junsch. He’d known Brooklyn-born Junsch for about four years, since back when Bob tended bar at Mooney’s Irish Pub on Grant Avenue. Junsch shipped out frequently as a merchant seaman, but was currently “looking for a ship,” and when Brautigan mentioned driving to Montana, he was along for the ride. “Richard mentioned this trip very much like it was a business venture,” Junsch said, “and he offered it to me more or less like a job, you know, as his driver.”

  Brautigan wanted to rent a car, a really large car. Bob rented a “big comfortable station wagon” from Hertz, putting down $650 of Richard’s money as a deposit. In the second week in August, the expedition headed east over the Sierras and across Nevada, bound for Montana. Erik Weber had previously discussed going on a fishing trip with Richard and went along as the designated photographer. Bob Junsch had never seen that part of the country before and greatly enjoyed himself. Richard “was a great passenger,” he said. “Terrific passenger for the long drive.”

  The trio planned to make it straight through in a single twenty-four-hour driving marathon but ran into car trouble in Idaho. The rental started “limping along” outside of Twin Falls. Junsch recalled that the “rear end went out.” Weber remembered a bald tire. They pulled into Twin Falls for the night and negotiated for a new car the next morning at the local Hertz office. Brautigan remained aloof while Weber handled the bargaining. “Richard would have nothing to do with this. He had a hard time in pulling things like that,” Weber said. “He just stood in the background while I conducted the business and got us a new car and a few days off the rental price.”

  When Brautigan and his pals arrived at the McGuanes’ place on Deep Creek they found a full crowd already in attendance. “It was a wonderful summer,” Tom’s wife, Becky, said, “because everybody was at the house, which was about twenty-seven people. The main thrust was what were we going to have for dinner.” Among those lining up for chow were Jimmy Buffett; his girlfriend, Jane; their chum Roxie Rogers; Guy Valdène and his gorgeous blond wife, Terry; Bob Dattila (who had operated his one-man Phoenix Literary Agency out of a studio apartment on New York’s East Side for the past couple years); Jim Harrison; Scott Palmer (a young man who worked for the McGuanes); and Benjamin “Dink” Bruce, another friend from Key West, whose father hung around with Hemingway in the thirties, all drawn to Montana by what Don Carpenter called Tom McGuane’s “magnetic Irish warlock personality.”

  Everyo
ne, men and women alike, was attracted to McGuane. Six foot four with hair hanging down past his shoulders, shooting from the lip, punning one-liners faster than the speed of delight, Tom reached new manic heights during the summer of 1972. He had taken up the mandolin and riffed duets with guitar-playing buddy Buffett. Hard at work on a new novel set in Key West, McGuane unwound at night presiding over roundtable literary discussions in his kitchen, half-gallon jugs of bourbon and vodka fueling the energetic conversation. Becky, a petite honey blond barely five feet tall, provided the domestic glue binding this disparate social mix with her cheerful disposition and hearty crowd-pleasing meals.

  Brautigan was impressed with Becky’s pint-sized beauty. When he phoned Sherry after arriving, he said, “I want you to lose weight. I want you to become devastatingly thin.” According to Sherry, “devastating” was a favorite word of Richard’s at the time. Five feet tall and 108 pounds, Sherry reacted to her lover’s request to lose weight with dismay. “God,” she thought, “I only wear a size 2. Where can I get any thinner?”

  Becky made the new visitors feel right at home. She set Richard up in the guest house, a converted one-room log chicken coop a stone’s throw from the main building. Weber and Junsch bunked down in the back end of a long living room, divided in half by a Sheetrock wall. The first night, everyone gathered as usual around the round oak table in the kitchen. Tom McGuane’s initial impression of Brautigan was of someone “helplessly odd under all circumstances, pauses in conversation, some of the places you weren’t used to. He started stories late in the story. He had a penchant for honing in on crazy seemingly inappropriate details.”