Later, up in the barn in Richard’s studio, Richard handed Dan the poems from Japan one by one. “It was an evening filled with dread,” Gerber confessed, but he responded to the work, and things “turned out happily.” Richard fibbed to Dan, saying he was the first person to whom he’d shown the poetry. Gerber said “good things,” and Brautigan was “delighted. He was just so happy.”
Richard and Siew-Hwa left for Frisco soon after, insisting Dan, Ginny, and the kids use the house for as long as they wished. Finding a new designated driver to replace Price Dunn topped Brautigan’s priorities. The list of friends available for the job had dwindled to zero. Richard thought some anonymous admiring student of English literature might better fit the bill. He phoned his old amigo Ron Loewinsohn, currently teaching at UC Berkeley. Ron told him he’d do what he could.
Peter Lewis, one of Loewinsohn’s undergraduate students, studied at Reed College in Oregon for a year before dropping out to travel in West Africa, eventually enrolling in Berkeley in 1973. Lewis designed his own course of study to satisfy the degree requirements and worked closely with Loewinsohn. One afternoon during the summer of 1976, Ron asked Peter if he knew anyone who might want to go out to Montana for a period of time. Loewinsohn said a friend of his needed someone to take care of his property “and essentially to take care of him.”
“What about me?” Peter Lewis asked.
“Well, that’s fine,” Professor Loewinsohn replied. “If you want to do it, that would be fine.” At this point, Ron revealed his friend in Montana was the famous author Richard Brautigan. This was “neither here nor there” to Peter, whose own “literary affections went in a somewhat different direction.” Brautigan at the time was “a cult figure in Berkeley,” but Lewis regarded working for him mainly as “an opportunity to get out to the country and have some time to read and write and do something that seemed in and of itself pretty novel.”
Loewinsohn provided “an introduction” to Brautigan. Peter Lewis drove over to North Beach from Berkeley, parking near Richard’s building on Union Street. Peter never forgot that afternoon. After climbing a couple flights, he found the apartment door ajar. Stepping inside, Lewis saw Brautigan for the first time, a towering six-foot, four-inch “albino in his jockey shorts in agony.”
Richard suffered from severe back pain. He immediately loped down the hall to his bedroom and collapsed on the mattress. “Just in miserable shape, moaning,” Peter recalled. Siew-Hwa Beh hovered in the background, unable to provide any help. She left soon after Lewis arrived. From his brief glimpse of the couple’s dynamics, Peter observed they shared “a very tempestuous relationship.” Lewis himself suffered from a chronic back problem and knew what to do, taking charge of the situation.
Brautigan lay in “a terrible position.” Lewis rearranged his bed, placing pillows under his knees and supporting his lower back. After getting Richard “all squared away” with hot compresses on the pain points, Peter finally enquired, “Is there anything you’d like to ask me?”
“No,” Richard replied, his pained grimace easing into a smile, “you’ve got the job.” He never mentioned the curious coincidence of having another Peter Lewis in his life, erasing the founder of the Trout Fishing in America School forever from his memory.
The appropriate arrangements were promptly made, with a modest stipend for Lewis, basically just beer money, in addition to room and board. Brautigan bought Lewis a plane ticket to Montana and gave him a small amount of cash to get from the Bozeman airport to Pine Creek. At first, before things grew “uncomfortable,” Lewis had a delightful time, enjoying late August in Montana, hot cloudless afternoons easing into long balmy evenings and clear star-spangled nights. Peter’s duties seemed modest. He drove Brautigan around, did the cooking and laundry, and occasionally mowed the lawn. Only later in September, when hunting season opened and guests began arriving, did things start to change.
Not long after Peter Lewis arrived, Ianthe left to live with her mother and begin her junior year of high school on the Big Island of Hawaii. Lewis noted that Brautigan spent very little time with her. “Even when she was there,” he said, “He would sort of attend to his own regimen of writing or drinking or whatever else he needed to do.” Ianthe struck Peter as mature beyond her years. She seemed very solicitous around her father, manifesting “an almost maternal demeanor toward him.”
By the start of bird season, Ianthe had departed and things became more hectic around the Brautigan household. Streams of visitors arrived almost daily. Harry Dean Stanton, “a phenomenally gentle and lovely individual,” came for a short stay “but he wasn’t very comfortable” and soon left to find other accommodations. Bob Dattila showed up with his new girlfriend, a young magazine writer from Texas. They also remained only briefly. Every new set of guests demanded a corresponding celebration, and Peter found himself cooking for groups of eight to ten people almost every other night.
When Guy and Terry de la Valdène arrived for a two-week visit, they brought along four cases of liquor (Jack Daniel’s, Calvados, Stolichnaya, and Chivas Regal). By the time they left, only a couple bottles of scotch remained. The night before the Valdènes’ unscheduled departure, much of their booze was consumed at a boisterous dinner party for sixteen for which Peter Lewis did all the cooking. By the end of the evening, the place was a shambles, the dinner table littered with “glassware and china and half-empty platters.” They all felt too drunk and tired for any cleanup. Everyone except Brautigan staggered off to bed, leaving the mess for morning.
Alone in the early hours, Richard drunkenly calculated the time difference between Montana and Japan and phoned his friend Takako Shiina in Tokyo. Not yet asleep in his small corner of the house just off the laundry room, Peter heard Brautigan make the call.
Through the thin wall, Lewis listened to the muffled conversation. Richard went to the bottom of the stairs and called up to the guest bedroom “in this nasal, whining drawl.”
“Guyyyy . . . ? Guyyyy . . . ?” Brautigan crooned. “Come down and speak to my friend in Tokyo.”
Peter heard Guy tossing upstairs, cursing into his pillow. “Shit! I can’t believe this,” Guy muttered, figuring if he just stayed under the covers, refusing to budge, Richard would eventually give up and leave him alone. Brautigan continued his whining and pleading. It was four in the morning, and Valdène had no intention of getting out of bed. In complete frustration, Richard hung up the phone and ran amok in his dining room, smashing plates and throwing glasses everywhere. His berserk rage escalated. He upended the table, sending all the china crashing to the floor. In a final frenzy, Brautigan hurled two of his heavy chairs at the wall, punching holes in the Sheetrock.
Terrified, Peter Lewis cowered on the other side. “It was the most extreme outburst of physical anger and pain that I think I’d ever witnessed close at hand,” he said. “I felt like Chicken Little with the sky coming down on my head.”
With nothing left to smash, Richard’s anger subsided. An “eerie calm settled upon the house.” He picked the telephone out of the wreckage and “very pointedly, very systematically” proceeded to dial Takako’s number in Tokyo once again. With the connection made, Brautigan returned to the foot of the stairs. No longer whining, he called out in a completely matter-of-fact tone: “Guy [. . .] I’d like you to come down and speak to my friend.”
Utterly resigned, Guy descended the stairs with dignity. He took the receiver from Richard and, “in his most gracious countly manner,” conducted an extremely polite conversation with Takako Shiina. Guy asked about the weather in Tokyo and how business was going in her bar. He said “he was in Montana with his friend Richard and they were having a lovely time.” After perhaps forty-five seconds, Valdène handed the phone back to Brautigan and returned upstairs to bed.
The next morning, Guy and Terry cut their visit short and moved on to Tom McGuane’s place for the remainder of their vacation. The phone rang while they were sitting in the kitchen making their plans and having coffee. Ri
chard was still in bed, so Peter Lewis answered the call. It was the telephone company demanding to speak with Mr. Brautigan. Not knowing what else to do, Peter handed the phone to Guy. It turned out the calls to Japan had gone on for so long the charges totaled hundreds of dollars. Mountain Bell demanded an immediate payment. As a curious denouement to the previous night’s antics, Valdène assured them in his dignified way that they would have their money in short order.
Peter Lewis knew he would be the one responsible for cleaning up the mess in the dining room, but the sight of it pissed him off, and he did nothing for most of the day. He typed a small card, making it look like an art label: trashed dining room, 1976, r. brautigan, and tacked it to a column where Richard would be sure to see it. Peter wanted to present the scene to his employer as a perverse performance piece. Brautigan usually was up at eight in the morning to go to work. This time around, “he finally stumbled from his bunkhouse at two or three the next afternoon.”
Another night around one, a “crazy, weird sound” was heard in the woods out back of the house. Coyotes often came through the property, knocking over the trash cans, but this new noise sounded strange. Richard, “as usual, shitfaced by this hour,” stumbled into the laundry area next to Lewis’s room. Peter opened his door and found Brautigan rummaging around in the cupboards above the washing machine, a shotgun gripped in one hand. He was looking for shells.
Earlier that summer, reports of mutilated livestock had appeared in local newspapers. Horses and cattle had been found with their genitals and udders surgically removed. Several of these animals turned up in Paradise Valley. There were wild rumors of bloodthirsty interstellar alien invaders. Brautigan waving a shotgun made Peter Lewis nervous. “Anything could have happened,” Lewis said. “He was that drunk.”
Richard told Peter about the cattle mutilations. “He made cryptic weird references to some sort of satanic rock-and-roll plot to destroy the purity of Big Sky country.” Brautigan wanted Lewis to learn how to use the shotgun in case he heard someone disturbing the horses. “He encouraged me to simply go out and shoot to kill anybody that I might see in the pasture and reassured me that I’d receive the applause of all the ranchers in the valley.” Providing firsthand instruction, Richard grabbed a box of shells and stumbled out onto the back porch, where he proceeded to fire “twenty rounds or so” up into the trees, “branches coming down all over the property.”
John Dermer complained to the police. Half an hour later, the front doorbell rang. Two stern-faced state troopers confronted Brautigan. They told him his neighbors were upset and that he ought not to be shooting in the middle of the night. In a “slurred and halting” manner, Richard launched into a wild explanation about a feral cat constantly harassing him. The policemen asked him to put his gun away and “not to engage in these bouts of midnight sharpshooting.” After they left, Brautigan congratulated himself on talking his way out of an uncomfortable situation.
Beyond all the houseguests, Lewis observed, “It was a particularly social stretch. It was really a party frenzy. There were endless parties.” Richard did considerable entertaining that season. There were frequent dinner gatherings and potlucks at the homes of all the Montana Gang. Russell Chatham had a three-day exhibition of his new paintings at the Danforth Gallery in Livingston during the second week in September, with an artist’s reception on the last day. These events attracted unattached young women curious to meet an eccentric collection of the locally famous. Brautigan frequently picked up eager celebrity hunters and brought them home to Pine Creek.
Peter Lewis recalled young female groupies appearing sheepishly in the kitchen the morning after on at least a half-dozen occasions. Brautigan would roll over and “pretend not to know her or recognize her.” The “totally embarrassed” girl wandered over to the main house “not knowing what to do or say or how to get home.” Peter always made her coffee and said, “Hop in the car. I’ll drive you.” He had not anticipated this task when he accepted the job.
Peter Lewis could not remember a time during his stay when Richard was alone. “I certainly never really saw him by himself,” Lewis said. “There were a few evenings when just the two of us were at the house.” When Toby Thompson dropped by, he and Brautigan sat out on the back porch, “talking, drinking, and staring at the stars.” Thompson thought “it was clear that [Brautigan] wanted somebody to be a kind of protégé,” finding that Brautigan’s knowledge of early twentieth-century literature was “really quite impressive.”
Thompson asked Brautigan about his influences. Richard mentioned André Gide and Knut Hamsun. Brautigan also discussed the influence of Japanese writers, “particularly the genre of the Japanese I-novel.” He told Toby that “he primarily considered himself a poet” and laughed about how he had kidded Tom McGuane about it. “Hey,” Brautigan had said, “Look. I’m a poet, and I’ve already published eight novels, and you guys are struggling with your third or fourth.”
Thompson extended his Montana visit and stayed on in his cheap room at the Murray. He asked Brautigan for a blurb for Saloon. Richard came through with “This book is a good place to get a drink.” Toby “was hoping for something a bit more expansive,” but thought it “classic Richard Brautigan.” Thompson hoped to interview Brautigan for his sixties book. Richard remained elusive, telling Toby he didn’t want him to write anything about what was happening in Montana. At the same time, Thompson felt that Brautigan really wanted to be included.
When Brautigan came into town, he often wandered into the lobby of the Murray. If he encountered Thompson, the pair embarked on bizarre shopping expeditions. Toby remembered poking around in Anthony’s when Richard spied a collection of miniature felt doll hats, all in different colors, little fedoras and derbies and tiny Stetsons. “These are going to Rancho Brautigan,” he said, buying the whole lot. Brautigan took them back to Pine Creek and hung them on a row of nails driven into his dining room wall.
Another time, Richard and Toby went to dinner at a steak joint in the ghost town community of Cokedale, named for the ruined stone coke ovens lining the gravel road, remnants of the turn-of-the-century Montana coal industry. Brautigan liked this restaurant for its excellent meat and because the owners had decorated the place with a collection of tiny shoes. “They were all over the walls and the ceiling,” Thompson recalled, “weird little tiny sneakers. Richard loved that.”
Peter Lewis was an aspiring writer. Unlike Toby, he had yet to publish anything, and Richard rarely talked with him about literary matters. Once, Brautigan burst into Lewis’s room while he was writing and told him to grab the vacuum cleaner and follow him to the barn. Richard led the way up the multilevel stairs into his writing room. Peter was shocked by the enormous number of flies (“hundreds of flies, thousands of flies”) inhabiting Brautigan’s studio. “I know that had I tried to do anything there I’d have gone nuts,” he said.
Brautigan attempted to defend his private space against the invading insects by Scotch-taping the seams around the edges of the big picture window. Scotch tape had also been plastered in “odd patterns along the door jambs.” Richard asked Peter to vacuum up the dead flies littering nearly every surface of the office. Lewis went to work: floors, windowsill, Brautigan’s desk. Richard yanked the vacuum nozzle out of Peter’s hands and started using it like a hunting rifle to suck the buzzing flies out of the air. “He just went nuts.”
On a couple occasions, Brautigan shared literary thoughts with Lewis. Richard once observed that there was “only room for one general in Livingston.” Peter felt Richard was “upset that McGuane seemed to be leading the charge at that particular moment in literary history.” Lewis intuited “he clearly felt he was working in the shadow of McGuane’s burgeoning reputation.”
Another time, when they sat together out on the back porch, Brautigan spoke of the ways in which great American novelists had achieved significant fame after their first publications only to be panned in midcareer. Brautigan mentioned Hemingway and Faulkner. Lewis understo
od he clearly meant to be included in the same league. “He felt he was writing in the tradition of the great American novel,” Lewis recalled, “and would assume his rightful place in the pantheon.”
When poet Ken McCullough and Brautigan returned to Pine Creek from a workshop in Missoula, they engaged in a long literary conversation that struck Peter Lewis as “as close to a statement of his credo as I ever heard him deliver.” They discussed the metaphysical poets. Peter remembered Richard maintaining “that there were two things that he most fervently believed.” One was, “Somehow in the act of making love one died. That you achieved death in lovemaking.” The other was “specific information,” a point Brautigan stressed often in literary discussions. “He kept repeating this phrase over and over again,” Peter recalled. “Specific information.”
Brautigan’s disenchantment with Tom McGuane’s growing success came to a head one afternoon at a party given by Russell Chatham’s girlfriend, Sandi Lee, at her small Livingston home on D Street. Richard had recently begun telling his younger writing colleagues that they hadn’t “paid their dues.” Over barbecue at Sandi Lee’s, Brautigan said this to McGuane and touched a nerve. Tom’s volatile Celtic blood rose darkly to his face. Brautigan ignored this warning sign and pressed on with his non-dues-paying admonition. McGuane, his face the color of an eggplant, exploded. “You,” he bellowed at Richard, “you’re nothing but a pet rock! A fucking hula hoop! You should get down on your knees every day and thank God for creating hippies!”
The pair suddenly grappled in front of the astonished partygoers, lurching into Lee’s tiny bathroom, slamming the door behind them. The argument continued, muffled and indistinct, the angry words punctuated by the sound of blows. When the door burst open, Brautigan, pink and flushed, stormed off. McGuane had nothing more to say on the subject of dues payment.
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