Below Brautigan’s towering barn, the old ranch dump sprawled down a cut bank hillside, with decrepit washing machines and kerosene stoves, coils of baling wire, fifty-gallon drums, and archaic farm implements, all swept up in an avalanche of broken bottles and rusted tin cans. It provided an excellent site for shooting as the steep slope afforded a safe backstop. It grew dark by the time Price fired the last of his shells and headed back to the house. He had found the shooting “boring.” A far more interesting exercise in marksmanship awaited him.
Richard had started drinking early. “He was soused,” Price recalled, “and I just joined him.” They had a few together. Around midnight, Richard suggested it might be fun to go out on the back porch and blast a cap or two.
Price attempted dissuasion, knowing the danger of shooting in the dark. He turned the conversation toward other topics. Richard mentioned “maybe” learning to drive. He proposed a Model A Ford as his training vehicle. Price thought this absurd. “Time must have a stop,” he quipped.
Brautigan agreed. To emphasize the point, he picked up his Winchester rifle and took a shot at the electric clock hanging above the refrigerator. Richard’s aim was off by about three inches. “You missed it,” Dunn observed.
“No. No,” Richard insisted. “The point is you aim as close to the edge as possible without hitting the clock.”
And so began a bizarre night of drinking and indoor marksmanship. After a number of near misses, Brautigan attempted a long shot from the adjoining bathroom and hit the clock dead center. The rules of the game immediately reversed. “We sat there and drank the rest of that bottle of whiskey,” Dunn recalled, “and shot the shit out of that clock. Richard was really far more juiced than I.” By the time they called it a night, the two sharpshooters had blasted at least fifty rounds through the kitchen wall, blowing the unfortunate clock asunder.
The next morning, surveying the results of their nocturnal shenanigans, Richard and Price made a disturbing discovery. While the bullets they’d fired penetrated the Sheetrock kitchen wall with small neat holes clustered close together like a shotgun’s pattern, the mushrooming slugs splintered through Brautigan’s brand-new redwood siding when they emerged out the other side on the back porch. Much expensive craftsmanship had been utterly destroyed, a problem that required a swift application of the checkbook. Richard immediately phoned for help. When the carpenter surveyed the bullet holes in the kitchen, Brautigan shrugged and said, “I had some friends over last night, and they got a little frisky.” In Montana, this passed for a reasonable explanation. A couple days later, the exterior of Richard’s house looked as good as new.
Brautigan left the bullet holes in the wall above the fridge undisturbed. He found a plain wooden picture frame at a secondhand store in Livingston, just the right size, and hung it around the damage. Only the bullet-punctured dial remained from the clock. Richard replaced it in its original position, hanging the dial within the frame from a protruding nail. Later, Brautigan attached a small brass plaque to the bottom of the frame. On it he’d had engraved: shootout at ok kitchen. r.b. and p.d.
This framed memorial to a drunken boisterous night remained in Richard’s kitchen for as long as he lived at Pine Creek. After his death, his daughter sold the place to a speculator, who resub-divided the forty acres into smaller lots and took the frame and riddled dial away with him as a trophy, leaving the bullet holes intact. After a resale, the new owners, out of respect for an author they never knew, preserved the cluster of gunshots as if it were a work of art.
Brautigan enjoyed shooting (and having his guests shoot) at a variety of objects (TV sets, pachinko machines, various books, an old bathtub) from off his back porch. Richard’s gonzo target practice became so frequent Tom McGuane dubbed his friend’s back porch “the lead Disneyland.” Once, when the nocturnal gunplay grew especially loud and annoying, Brautigan’s neighbor John Dermer, a refrigeration mechanic who lived diagonally across the road in the parsonage of the Pine Creek Methodist Church, shut off the gravity-feed water line and refused to restore the flow until Richard called a truce on his late-night fusillades. Without water, Brautigan had his Livingstone lawyer, Joe Swindlehurst, propose a deal. Richard and his friends would shoot off the back porch only between the hours of 5:00 and 7:00 pm. Dermer agreed and turned the appropriate valve.
Toward the end of June, Ianthe Brautigan flew out from California to spend the summer with her father, her first opportunity since infancy to have that much time with him. The moment she glimpsed him from the plane window, Ianthe felt “an overwhelming sense of joy.” A friend drove them over to Livingston. After a quick tour of town and a stop at the local IGA for groceries, they pulled into the state liquor store, where Brautigan bought gallons of wine and a case of bourbon. They stopped on their way home at the Tastee-Freez, Richard’s favorite spot for burgers and fries. For the rest of the drive, Ianthe listened to “the bottles clinking together in the trunk.”
The year before, on her initial visit to Montana, Ianthe noticed for the first time that among a crowd of heavy drinkers, her father drank the most. Richard Brautigan “drank a lot.” On her second summer in Big Sky Country, she observed he was drinking even more. It scared her. Her father was having blackouts and acted suicidal. He came into her bedroom drunk at three in the morning to read newly written short stories. Once, Richard appeared in Ianthe’s doorway early in the day with a bar of soap in his hand. “This is my last will and testament,” he said. Another “bright and sunny morning,” Richard told his daughter, “If you weren’t here, I would have killed myself last night, but I didn’t want you to find the body.”
Summoning a courage she still finds amazing, Ianthe attempted to talk with her father about his drinking. Brautigan had raised her to believe that she could discuss anything with him, but when she said he was drinking too much, Richard flew into a rage. “After spending several nights listening to him in a drunken rampage, saying every hurtful thing he could think of, I realized I had made a mistake,” Ianthe wrote in her memoir. One night, he cornered her in the bathroom, a drink in hand. “Just what do you think you’re doing?” he raged. “When you are eighteen, you’re on your own. Don’t expect anything from me then.”
Reasoning with her father failed. Ianthe took a more drastic course of action. Once, when Brautigan was out on the town, she searched through the cupboards for all the bottles of George Dickel she could find. Richard favored this brand of expensive bourbon and bought it in quarts by the caseload. Ianthe gathered them up, uncorking each bottle one by one and pouring the contents down the sink drain. She worked quickly, hoping not to get caught in the act. When Ianthe was done, the kitchen reeked of whiskey and all the booze was gone.
Brautigan never noticed. Staggering in drunk later that night, he simply assumed he’d drunk it all himself and headed for town to buy another case in the morning. As the alcohol consumption increased, things went from bad to worse. Most of Richard’s friends remained unaware of any serious domestic problem, but Ron Loewinsohn, who came out for a four-day visit during the second week of July, left Montana wondering how fourteen-year-old Ianthe was possibly going to survive.
In his deepest imagination, Richard Brautigan envisioned his Pine Creek place not as some backwater bastion of boozy bacchanalia but rather a bucolic utopia where he might fulfill his childhood fantasies, no longer a dirt-poor ragamuffin berry-and-bean picker but the lord of the manor raising crops of his own. He promised his daughter as much, telling her Montana would be their new home. She could choose her own bedroom in a house untroubled by ghosts. He would buy her a horse. Richard made good on his pledge. Ianthe picked out a front room with several east-facing windows. She also got the promised horse, a part-thoroughbred bay mare named Jackie.
For the house, Brautigan bought a gas stove, matching washer and dryer, and a two-door refrigerator, all brand-new, “seventies yellow,” the first such appliances he had ever purchased in his life. The big new hospital-white chest freezer embodied
all of his agrarian dreams. As Ianthe noted in her memoir, “He bought this freezer with intentions that never came to fruition, secret dreams about the ranch and the life he meant to live there.”
Inspired by the “back to the land” lifestyle of his next-door neighbors, Brautigan envisioned his own self-sufficient farming operation. The year before, Gatz bought two wiener pigs at $45 each. By the end of the season, one went into his freezer, conveniently wrapped and labeled in paper packages. The other Hjorstberg kept over the winter and bred in the spring, hoping to establish his own wiener pig business. Nine piglets resulted. Unfortunately, the market price dropped to $15 per wiener. Brautigan bought four pigs at this bargain price, thinking to get a special tax deduction for raising livestock on his forty-acre spread. Richard referred to his tiny swine herd as “the porkers.” They provided much amusement throughout the summer, continually escaping from their pen and rampaging through the surrounding countryside.
In June, Brautigan bought fifty baby chicks for $14 at Agrineeds in Livingston. The price included postage. The little yellow birds were mailed from a hatchery in Great Falls. Richard’s old farmstead (complete with tumbled-down corrals, decaying brooder coops, abandoned sheds, and the monumental barn where the lower-level dairy cow stalls were packed three feet deep with densely compressed manure) retained a ghostly reminder of a prosperous agrarian life a half-century before. Vat-loads of elbow grease might see the place functioning again. Shoveling out the barn would require a Herculean effort equal to the Augean stables, but the chicken coop presented a simpler task. Gatz Hjortsberg got things in order for Brautigan, rebuilding the roost and cleaning the old nesting boxes. By the time the chicks arrived, a crude wire-mesh fence enclosed their little yard under the cottonwoods.
Chickens are funny creatures. Richard, like everyone who has ever watched their mindless clucking antics, was amused. He eventually wrote three short stories about chickens that appeared in The Tokyo–Montana Express. One of his flock had a club foot and walked with a distinctive wobbling limp. Brautigan named her Gimpy. She became his personal favorite. By fall, after Ianthe returned to California, the birds were full-grown and ready for slaughter. Richard had no intention of wielding the ax himself and enlisted Marian Hjortsberg to organize the task. Her husband bowed out. Over the course of the summer, Gatz had already killed his share of rabbits and chickens.
Marian recruited Russell Chatham’s wife, Mary, and a newly married young lawyer and schoolteacher, Kent and Becky Douglass, to assist her. Kent and Becky had arrived the year before from Colorado and quickly became part of a small community of local professional people, artists, and writers. Marian organized the event. She set three large kettles boiling over separate fires. Mary got the job of gathering up the chickens. Kent was assigned as the hatchet man. Marian and Becky scalded and plucked the beheaded birds. Richard gave specific instructions. His pet, Gimpy, was not to be killed. In the frenzy of slaughter, one bird out of fifty looks very much like another, and Gimpy went to the block with all the rest.
“It was a horrible scene,” Becky Douglass recalled. When it was over they were all splattered with blood. The crew received half the poultry in recompense for doing the deed. The other twenty-five went on the grill for a potluck Brautigan hosted that same evening. Marian told him that Gimpy, terrified by the carnage, had run off into the woods and they had been unable to find her. When the thirty-five other guests arrived, bearing casseroles, salads, and pies, the four butchers were still drenched in blood. After several stiff drinks and a couple helpings of freshly grilled chicken, none of it mattered anymore.
Later on, things started to get rowdy. Richard brought out some of his arsenal and urged those who felt like it to blast away at the flies on the kitchen wall. Most of the guests took off in a hurry. The next morning, head throbbing with a hangover and disgusted with his newly shot-up kitchen, Brautigan wandered down into the woods behind his house looking for Gimpy. The little crippled chicken was nowhere to be found.
Richard had recently acquired a number of cooking utensils, including a giant skillet the size of a manhole cover. Showing off his new pots and pans to Gatz earlier in the summer, Richard lamented, “You know how when you break up with a woman she always runs off with the cooking stuff?” His neighbor, married to the same woman for twelve years, didn’t have a clue. Assuming his most authoritarian didactic voice, Richard endeavored to further his friend’s domestic education. “I’m thinking of having a plaque made,” he said, pointing to the three-foot handle of the Paul Bunyan–sized skillet hanging on the wall. “I’ll attach it right there.”
“What will it say?” Gatz asked.
Richard smiled. “When you go, this stays.”
Jack Thibeau remembered an earlier time when Richard wanted to go shopping and they took the California Street bus downtown. On the way, Brautigan told a story about a girl he’d been living with. When she moved out, she took all the kitchenware. A week later, she called and said, “Richard, I still love you. Come over. I want to cook you a nice dinner. And please bring that Dutch oven.”
“Well, he went over, and she cooked the meal in the Dutch oven,” Jack said, “and, of course, kept the Dutch oven.” Thibeau and Brautigan got off the bus on Powell Street and walked down the hill to Macy’s on Union Square, where Richard bought a new set of pots and pans.
Brautigan had no live-in girlfriend during the summer of 1974. Off and on, he’d been seeing both Jayne Walker and Mary Ann Gilderbloom. Mary Ann came out in May for a brief visit, and Richard invited Jayne in June, but she didn’t make it. She thought she might come in August. Close to the end of the month, Jayne wrote from Ithaca, New York, where she had a teaching appointment at Cornell. “I’m so sorry that I couldn’t come to see you this summer,” she apologized. Walker really cared for Brautigan and hoped they might find time to get together if he traveled east in the fall.
Mary Ann became a frequent visitor to Pine Creek that summer, making two trips in July, one lasting five days, the other just a long weekend. Much private time was spent secluded with Brautigan in his exterior bedroom, the remodeled coal shed standing several yards away from the kitchen door behind the house. Inside this separate structure, a south-facing window had been covered over to reduce the sun’s direct glare. In its place, Richard had Russell Chatham paint a window-sized landscape providing an artistic interpretation of the former view. The room’s other window faced north. It was covered by a translucent blue drape, making the interior glow like a grotto with aqueous light. One afternoon after napping, Brautigan read aloud to Mary Ann from the manuscript of Willard, his work in progress. He planned on reading her the entire book.
“I fell asleep,” Gilderbloom recalled.
Richard woke her and started laughing. “Okay, this is the way I’m going to treat it.” He threw his manuscript across the room. As the pages wafted to the floor, Brautigan looked down at his supine companion. “You didn’t like it,” he said.
“You know,” Mary Ann replied, “it’s just a little bit too weird for me.”
Prior to her first July trip to Montana, Richard phoned Mary Ann with a special request. He had developed a taste for Jurgensen’s, a high-end, limited-bottling, sixteen-year-old bourbon that was the house brand of an expensive specialty food shop of the same name on Union Street in Cow Hollow. He wanted Mary Ann to stop by the store and pick up a case for him. At Jurgensen’s, Gilderbloom discovered the staff knew Brautigan quite well and their exclusive bourbon was on sale. When she got home, Mary Ann phoned Richard with the good news, asking if he wanted to buy “a little extra.”
For Brautigan, this was like winning the Irish Sweepstakes. “He had me buy like tons of it,” Gilderbloom remembered. She bought eleven cases, total cost of $1,069.46, tax included. “It was delivered to my house, and it sat in my closet for a long time.” Mary Ann brought two cases of Jurgensen’s to Pine Creek when she flew up for the Fourth of July. The remaining nine remained in Gilderbloom’s closet like hidden treasure.
“And so, when [Brautigan] was down from Montana, he would usually come over in some kind of stupor and say, ‘Can I have some bottles?’”
Richard called Mary Ann in San Francisco with another request before a trip to Montana in September. He’d grown tired of trout and “really good red meat.” Brautigan asked her to go to Swann’s Oyster Depot on Polk Street and order a quantity of seafood and shellfish. The day before she left for Montana, in mid-September, Swann’s delivered $59.50 worth of seafood to Philobiblon on Maiden Lane (two pounds of shrimp, two live lobsters, forty-eight small oysters in the shell, and six skin-on salmon filets), packed in ice for travel.
Mary Ann brought the ice-cold package with her on the flight to Bozeman. Richard hosted a party, a big seafood feast. Dessert was chilled watermelon. Everyone sat out on the back porch, spitting seeds over the rail. Black thunderclouds massed to the west. A powerful electrical storm blew across the valley, jagged lightning streaking down, heading straight over the Yellowstone toward Brautigan’s place. “It kind of went right behind the porch but never touched the house,” Gilderbloom recalled. “It was so bizarre.”
Dick and Nancy Hodge came out for a visit in the summer of ’74 and found things relatively tranquil. Richard’s attorney “always brought out the best in my father,” Ianthe observed years later. Brautigan loved a cheesecake Mary Ann Gilderbloom baked. To preserve the recipe, Brautigan asked Gilderbloom to write it out and give a copy to Nancy Hodge. “Long after he had stopped seeing Mary Ann,” Nancy recalled, “when Richard would come to dinner, he had me make her cheesecake.”
Brautigan bought his daughter’s horse from Lexi Cowan, a twenty-year-old rancher’s daughter. Tall and lean, with bright blue eyes and short blond hair, Lexi drove a ’66 Mustang and impressed Ianthe with her patient intelligence and wide-ranging competence. An accomplished horsewoman, she worked for a Livingston veterinarian and carried in her purse an eclectic selection of personal effects: “pliers and horse-worming medicine as well as exotic colors of lipstick.” Lexi warned Richard about discarded barbed wire, so common on old ranches, and potentially lethal for a horse. They all spent hours searching out strands of ancient rusted wire coiled like serpents in the underbrush. Although he “knew absolutely nothing about horses,” Ianthe wrote, “my father was good at that sort of thing. He found lots of wire.”
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