When Ianthe came over on Christmas Eve, after her father gave her a gift check and burned the family photos in the fireplace, he started talking about his past, something he’d never done before. Brautigan told his daughter the story of throwing a rock through the Eugene police station window and being committed to the state mental hospital. He talked about electroshock treatments and seeing his mother for the last time shortly after his release. In retrospect, Ianthe came to believe her father contemplated suicide even then. Years later, she wrote that she thought he “wanted to make sure that I knew everything there was to know about his past before he died. He didn’t want me to find out from a newspaper or magazine.”
When something troubled his mind, it was Brautigan’s habit to spend a lot of time on the phone late at night, calling friends for advice. Hearing the despair in Richard’s voice, Jack Thibeau, always a dependable nocturnal consultant, offered to come up from Los Angeles and spend the weekend with his old pal. Seymour Lawrence got to Frisco before Jack arrived, hosting a gala event in the Pavilion Room of the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill. Between 6:00 and 8:00 pm on Friday, December 28, Sam sponsored an invitation-only champagne reception to honor Tillie Olsen and Richard Brautigan, two of the San Francisco authors he published under his own imprint at Delacorte Press.
Tillie Olsen was forty-nine years old before her first book, Tell Me a Riddle, a quartet of short stories, came out in 1961. It was an immediate success. The title story in the collection won the O. Henry Prize for best American short story. A high school dropout, Olsen had been a labor organizer and a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s. Sam Lawrence had published both Yonnondio: From the Thirties (1974) and Silences (1978) at Delacorte. This independent, crusading woman was the same age as Brautigan’s mother.
Jack Thibeau traveled up from L.A. the next day. He enjoyed getting together with Richard as something unusual often occurred. On a recent trip, sitting at a sidewalk table at Enrico’s with Brautigan, Thibeau was amused when Richard bought a couple roses from Millie, an old woman who sold flowers on the Beach. “She was sort of a dwarf,” Jack recalled. “On the scene every night at every bar. Come in and have a couple drinks and sell flowers. Everybody knew her.” After buying the roses, Brautigan “disappeared down the street,” returning with an envelope and some stationery.
Richard wrote a quick note and put it in the envelope with the flowers. Out on the sidewalk, he flagged down a passing taxi. “I’ll give you $5 to drive over this envelope and then pull back over it,” Brautigan told the confused cabbie. “The cab driver couldn’t believe it,” Jack observed. He drove back and forth over the envelope, pressing the roses flat. Richard paid him five bucks and the bewildered driver took off in search of other customers. Satisfied with the results, Richard Brautigan wrote Takako Shiina’s name and address on the front and mailed the tread-mark-decorated package off to Tokyo.
This time around, Thibeau met Brautigan at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, which opened six years earlier in the Embarcadero Center across from the Ferry Building. The luxury hotel had featured prominently in several Hollywood films, notably The Towering Inferno, High Anxiety, and Time After Time. Richard and Jack went immediately into the bar. The first thing Richard asked was, “Do you have any money?”
“Yeah,” Jack replied. “I have a couple hundred bucks.”
“Well, give it to me,” Brautigan demanded. “I’ll give you a check.”
Thibeau handed over all his cash. He wasn’t worried as he had several credit cards, financial instruments utterly unknown to Brautigan. Jack didn’t ask Richard the reason for his request because he knew “it was part of a ritual.” The Hyatt was the site of the ninety-fourth annual Modern Language Association Convention. Ten thousand college teachers came to town to present papers and attend seminars on language and literature. Richard Brautigan had been invited to appear on a panel chaired by Dennis Lynch, a graduate student at Northern Illinois University. The subject was “Zen and Contemporary American Poetry.” Lynch called it “a focal point of the convention.”
The other panelists were poets Robert Bly, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen, along with translator Lucien Stryk. Whalen and Snyder had both known Brautigan for more than twenty years. Each man talked about how Japanese culture influenced his work and then read poems illustrating that effect. Richard mentioned his forthcoming book of short stories, The Tokyo–Montana Express as well as “Japanese UFO,” a novel in progress. Governor Jerry Brown and his girlfriend, singer Linda Ronstadt, sat among a crowded audience that numbered almost one thousand.
After the panel discussion, Brautigan picked up another audience member, an attractive young assistant professor from the State University of New York Binghamton. She was working on a book about Sylvia Plath. Intent upon seduction, Brautigan didn’t mention he detested Plath because she stuck her head in the oven and killed herself while her little kids were in the house. Afterward, the prof went out to dinner with Richard and Jack and they all headed back to Brautigan’s place on Green Street for a nightcap. The comely academic ended up spending the night with Richard in his grand master bedroom.
The next morning, Thibeau was up early making coffee in the kitchen when the young lit professor wandered in, looking somewhat disheveled. “I’m so embarrassed,” she said.
“Why?” Jack asked.
“I mean, I just met this man, and I come home and spend the night with him. It’s embarrassing.”
“You’ve got it all wrong,” Thibeau told her. “That’s not the way things work in your academic world, but this is show business.”
“Oh, really?” The professor smiled. “Am I in show business?”
“Yes. It’s all all right.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful,” she said.
Later, when Thibeau told Brautigan the show biz story, he cracked up. “Richard always was in show business,” Jack reminisced. “Richard was like a rock star.”
Before Thibeau left for Los Angeles, Brautigan gave him a check for $200. It was the last time Jack ever hung out with Richard.
fifty-two: r.i.p.
THE OLD SALOON in Emigrant, Montana, hadn’t changed much since it opened in 1902. A narrow single-story brick shoe box of a building, it stood close by the railroad depot on the Park Branch of the Northern Pacific back when a train ran down from Livingston to the north entrance of Yellowstone Park at Gardiner. The depot was long gone, and so were the tracks, torn up when the line was abandoned in 1972. After Prohibition, the Old Saloon survived for a time as a soda parlor. The management finally threw in the towel and locked the doors in the early 1920s. Forty years later, in 1962, when the new Highway 89 opened to traffic, the owners swept the board floors clean and started pouring whiskey once again.
Aside from replacing the carbide lights with electricity and the ice chests with refrigeration, there were few concessions to modern times. Gold pans from the miners in Emigrant Gulch still hung on the walls. A big cast-iron wood stove offered heat, with indoor sport provided by a pool table in the rear. An ancient, goose-necked electric cigar lighter adorned one end of the bar next to the old Superior Quality cigar cutter. The brass cash register dated to 1904. A color television set hanging above the entrance to the tiny grill kitchen provided an anachronistic connection to the present.
The poet and songwriter Greg Keeler remembered an afternoon in the early eighties, when he, Marian Hjortsberg, and Richard Brautigan paid a visit to the Old Saloon after attending a barbecue party at the Paradise Valley home of former Montana governor Tom Judge. Richard’s sour mood on this occasion stemmed from his dislike of “yuppies,” many of whom had been in attendance at the governor’s place. As Greg recalled in his exquisite memoir, Waltzing with the Captain: Remembering Richard Brautigan, The three of us went in, and there was one of the wealthiest, most egotistical people we had seen at the party. He sat at our table, pretty obviously flaunting his acquaintance with Richard. Several cosmic cowboys were at the bar behind us when Richard decided to change the tone o
f things, took out his Buck pocket knife, opened it, and started stabbing away at our table. He then dropped the knife in Mr. Upwardly Mobile’s whisky. The whole bar took a deep breath, and I wished I was back in Richard’s kitchen eating beany weenies. But Marian saved the day. She daintily plucked the knife from the whisky glass, licked the blade, folded it up and put the knife down. The general breath was exhaled, unheard applause went around the bar, and things calmed down.
ON ANOTHER AFTERNOON not long afterward, Brautigan came into the Old Saloon with Marian and Becky Fonda. They were all three sheets to the wind and navigated erratically to a small table in the rear. Lynne Huffman, an aspiring writer whose career as a railroad brakeman had been cut short after being dragged sixty yards by a slow-moving train, sat at the bar with a couple cowboy pals. They sipped drinks while watching a noisy football game on the TV. Richard scowled with displeasure. Marian did nothing to stop Brautigan this time when he got up and approached the bar, disgusted with the raucous boob tube. “Would you mind turning it down?” Richard mumbled. “We’d like to play the jukebox.” It was difficult understanding him, and Lynne Huffman had to translate for the cowboys.
All eyes remained fixed on the screen. A wind-weathered wrangler said, “We’re watching the game.” Richard returned to his table. Several moments later, he was back. This time, he proposed to buy everyone a round if they would lower the volume. Again, nobody bothered to turn his way. “We’ve already got drinks,” another cowpoke observed laconically.
Richard slumped away without a word. Loud cheering continued with every televised play. Dropping quarters in the jukebox would have been a waste of money. Brautigan’s agitation grew. He walked up to the bar once again. Always penny-wise and pound-foolish, he said, “I’ll pay you $100 if you’ll just turn it down a bit.”
The cowboys swiveled on their bar stools, regarding Brautigan through narrowed eyelids. He towered storklike above them with his drooping General Custer mustache, long blond hair straggling out from under an absurd Elmer Fudd cap topped by a little woolen fluff-ball. “We’re not interested in your damn money.” The monotone reply sounded final. Richard nodded, getting the message at last, rejoining Marian and Becky at their table.
“Who is that guy?” one of the cowpokes asked Lynne Huffman. Lynne explained that he was Richard Brautigan, a writer and a poet who lived nearby.
“Well,” the ranch hand drawled, his words coming smooth and easy as a knife blade drawn across an oiled whetstone, “you better tell your friend not to come back to the bar or he’ll be Richard ‘Rest-In-Peace’ Brautigan.”
fifty-three: midnight express
AS THE FIRST year of a new decade began, Richard Brautigan sat alone, brooding in his cavernous empty apartment. His mind was troubled by the supposed betrayals of his wife, a woman he referred to hereafter as “that cunt” in conversations with friends, love and hate always the unpredictable heads and tails in the coin toss of love. Richard often fell asleep on the couch at night while watching TV. Early one morning about three, he awoke to the flickering of an old black-and-white Western, just in time to hear Gabby Hayes yell, “Why she’s got Californy fever!” Brautigan picked up the phone and called Greg Keeler in Montana to tell him about the singular moment. “To Richard,” Keeler wrote later, “this seemed like the ultimate existential commentary on what had happened with Aki.”
Not wanting to give Akiko any advantage, Richard hired an attorney. Sandra G. Musser was a partner in the San Francisco firm Musser & Schuler. She had represented Curt Gentry in his divorce. Brautigan signed a petition for the dissolution of marriage on January 9, 1980. In it, a man known to worry over every comma in a contract requested that all his copyrights, various real estate holdings, contracts, and royalties, as well as “a portion of the household furniture and furnishings,” be confirmed as his separate property. Musser submitted the document to the California Superior Court in the San Francisco City Hall the next day.
Work provided Brautigan a distraction from emotional pain. He plunged straight into completing a longer version of The Tokyo–Montana Express. He had started back on the project in December. Sometime during the interval, Richard recalled, “a friend suggested that the narrative voice behind the stories was perhaps more interesting than the stories themselves.” Thinking about this advice and wanting to create something that “was not simply a book of random stories,” Brautigan decided to incorporate previously published material into his new book.
Richard was also influenced by his longstanding admiration for William Faulkner, who considered Go Down, Moses to be a novel and was shocked when Random House first released it in 1942 as Go Down, Moses and Other Stories. When the book was reissued in 1949, Faulkner insisted his original title, Go Down, Moses, be restored. He wrote to his editor, Saxe Commins, “Moses is indeed a novel,” chiding that only a publisher would ever see it otherwise. Brautigan had read and enjoyed Joseph Blotner’s 1974 two-volume biography of Faulkner.
Richard added his preface to the limited 1968 edition Joseph Francl book to the mix, along with “The Menu” and “Homage to Rudi Gernreich,” as well as “An Eye for Good Produce,” “The Last of My Armstrong Creek Mosquito Bites,” and the story about discarded Christmas trees he did in 1964 with Erik Weber. Stories published in Outside, TriQuarterly, the CoEvolution Quarterly, Evergreen, California Living, and other publications were also included.
By adding copyrighted work from an earlier period to his book of short stories, Brautigan thought he “converted it into a novel.” Not everyone agreed with his assessment.
Robert Briggs told him flat out not to call the book a novel.
“What do you mean?” Richard replied.
“Just what the fuck I said,” Briggs shot back. “Call it a book by Richard Brautigan.”
More practical reasons demanded Brautigan designate his new book a novel. Twenty of the stories were in the forthcoming Targ edition bearing the same title. In a prefatory paragraph written for William Targ, Richard referred to the slim volume as “this small collection of short stories.” He was married to Akiko at the time and worried about the possible division of community property. Brautigan wanted to put as much distance as he could between the limited Targ printing and the big book he hoped to sell to Seymour Lawrence.
Richard assembled all the various “stations” on The Tokyo–Montana Express toward the end of January and shipped the whole package off to his agent in New York. She sent it to Dell as part of a previous option agreement. Helen Brann made an immediate deal with Sam Lawrence, confirming their verbal agreement on a $35,000 advance, payable on signing. The other terms remained identical to the Dreaming of Babylon contract, including a first refusal option on Brautigan’s next book.
Near the end of January, Sandra Musser received a letter from Verna A. Adams of the San Francisco law firm Savitt & Adams. She had been retained by Akiko to represent her in the divorce proceedings. Adams requested Brautigan’s financial records and other documents pertaining to his writing career. On the twenty-eighth, Akiko signed a partial financial declaration asking for spousal support to enable her to maintain her accustomed lifestyle. “My husband and I enjoyed a luxurious standard of living prior to our separation,” Aki stated. She alleged that Brautigan’s income was “substantial,” asking that he “be restrained from molesting or disturbing the respondent” and “from selling any property except in the normal course of business.”
Earlier in January, Richard got together again with his old friend Marcia Clay. They decided to cohost a huge party as a diversion from his marital troubles. “We hatched it up together,” she recalled. The apartment was empty, most of the furniture gone. It seemed the perfect opportunity for one last big blowout. They scheduled the event for January 31, the day after Brautigan’s forty-fifth birthday, to celebrate the start of a new decade. “We’ll have ten years of your paintings,” Richard said, “and I’ll do a poetry reading from the past ten years of my writing.”
Marcia designed a sm
all printed invitation card, “most elegant,” with a “really gorgeous” photograph of her at seventeen on the cover. It read: “One evening of ten years ‘Art by Marcia Clay’ at the home of Richard Brautigan who will read (don’t worry, briefly) six or seven poems of his last ten years.” Clay used her parents’ connections and contacted Pat Steger at the Chronicle, informing her of the planned party. Steger made mention of the coming affair in her social column. “Richard was like a kid when he saw that,” Marcia remembered.
Clay chose sixty of her paintings for exhibition, hammering nails into the bare walls of Brautigan’s apartment to hang them. On the day before the party, Richard received a surprise birthday present. A telegram arrived at 2110 Green Street from Seymour Lawrence. “The Tokyo—Montana Express is a wonderful experience,” Sam wired. “I am filled with admiration for this wise and wonderful book. I had the same sense of discovery and astonishment as with Trout Fishing.”
At seven in the evening of the thirty-first, hordes of invited guests and assorted gate-crashers began arriving at Brautigan’s second-floor flat. By the time the party reached its peak, three hundred people packed into the place. Among the milling throng, one man caught Marcia Clay’s eye. Born in China to Russian parents and raised in Japan, Alexander Besher wrote a weekly business column for the Chronicle. His friends all called him “Sasha.” Before the party was over, Marcia started calling him Sasha, too. They soon began spending a lot of time together. By the end of the year, they were married.
Nothing was said at the time, but the big decade-launching party marked the end of Marcia and Richard’s friendship. When Clay removed her paintings from Brautigan’s apartment, she left nail damage behind in the walls. “The landlords got pissed about all the holes,” she recalled, “and they made him pay for them.” It cost Brautigan about $400 to patch up the damage. He never mentioned this to Marcia, bottling up his resentment. The schism widened once he met Clay’s new husband. “This man I’m not interested in,” he told Marcia. For his part, Sasha “couldn’t stand Richard,” she said. “He called Richard a wimp. He called him a fink.” Clay had become a wife. Brautigan was never much interested in other people’s wives.
Jubilee Hitchhiker Page 122
