Petty legal infighting took its toll on Brautigan. Tony Dingman understood Richard’s deep depression. Alone in his cheap hotel room, working his way through a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, Brautigan swilled down a handful of pills and lay back on his narrow bed for the final glide into eternity. In the morning, he woke up as usual, an all-too-familiar hangover made even more bitter by failure. “He knew that he could not dose himself with pills,” Dingman said. “He was just that strong, a horse, a bear, and he knew he was just going to have to blast himself. It was inevitable.”
Richard always told Tony, “We never get out alive.” In retrospect, Dingman felt Japanese culture and poetry, which elevated suicide to a status at once honorable and romantic, had an undeniable appeal for Brautigan. “He was pulled to it,” Tony observed. “It was irresistible.”
Richard started walking to Enrico’s early, right after it opened, now that he lived in the neighborhood. He made a new friend, Richard Breen, a decade younger, often the only other person at the bar in the mornings. They found themselves eyeing each other from opposite ends. “A conversation was pretty inevitable,” Breen observed.
Richard Breen was the son and namesake of an Academy Award–nominated Hollywood screenwriter. Raised in the San Fernando Valley, he became fond of Frisco during his college years at the Jesuit-run University of San Francisco. Breen never graduated but acquired a taste for scotch, “pretty much my college experience.” For most of the seventies, he worked in L.A., writing scripts for television private eye series: Mannix, Shaft, Ironside, and Columbo, “dozens of different shows.”
Breen used his residual checks to buy drugs and “had a hell of a time.” He was young “and got bored real quickly,” so he gave up Tinseltown for Fog City and took a job parking cars at the Flying Dutchman lot next door to Enrico’s. He called it “the most significant car lot in the Western hemisphere.” It was a good job for a writer. “It made for great copy,” Breen said, “because all the weirdos were coming to me instead of me going to the weirdos.” Breen’s tales of “catering to the insane” attracted Brautigan. Richard soon found his way to the valet shack, clutching a bottle, to observe the weirdness first hand.
They made a strange pair: Breen in his long white valet’s coat, Brautigan wearing a denim jacket and a cowboy hat. “I’d have my bottle of Beefeaters,” Breen recalled, “and he had his bottle of Calvados.” Sometimes, Brautigan stayed there all by himself. “Richard used to hang out in a shack on the parking lot whether I was there or not,” Breen said. “Just sit there and watch the movie go by.”
A parking lot at night can be a dangerous place. Breen remembered customers pulling knives on him and having to talk his way out of bad situations. “Richard would never do anything to help out. He’d just take two drinks instead of one from his bottle, figuring if things were getting hairy it’s your fault for putting on a white coat.” Street people and petty criminals gravitated toward a parking lot, according to Richard Breen. “They don’t have a car, but they come up and ask for directions and ask for money, offer to sell drugs.”
The passing riffraff also sold stolen merchandise, stuff fallen off a truck. Breen claimed Brautigan bought “three hot television sets that I know of. It was irresistible to Richard. He had to buy something hot. Thought he was getting a deal.” There was no electrical outlet in the valet shack, no place to plug in appliances. It was never certain if the hot TVs even worked. Brautigan just left them there and forgot about it. Breen sold them back to the thieves at a lower price. “I made a killing,” he said.
A further excursion into crime cost Richard Breen his job at the Flying Dutchman lot. Sometime at a later date, Brautigan needed to “extract some stuff” from his unit at Army Street Mini-Storage. Breen “snatched a car from a monthly-parker” at the lot and with Tony Dingman for company, they set off for the storage unit. At a stop sign along the way, a Toyota pulled up alongside with a beautiful Chinese woman at the wheel. They all sared at her. “She was gorgeous,” Breen recalled, “a fox.”
Brautigan was mesmerized. After a moment, she drove off into traffic while they headed on toward Army Street. Richard had misplaced his key and had to hire a locksmith to get into the storage unit. After Brautigan retrieved what he needed, they dropped Tony off “someplace in the area.”
Richard looked hard at Breen. “We have to find that chick,” he said.
“OK. How are we going to do that?”
“Drive around.”
For the next seventy-two hours they did exactly that, roaming the Bay Area in search of the mysterious Chinese woman, fueled by liquor store stops (whiskey for Brautigan, gin for Breen) and frequent cocaine scores to keep the driver alert. It was like a gonzo version of American Graffiti. Once, they spotted an Asian woman and followed her across the Bay Bridge to Oakland. “Just bizarre shit.” At some point, Breen got worried and swapped licence plates on the stolen car. After three crazed days, they were cruising through Daly City when the Toyota driven by the Chinese woman pulled up alongside them.
“It’s the same chick.” She’d been following them. Her window was open. Brautigan rolled his window down.
“It’s about time,” she said. Breen thought this was “really freaky.”
“Too late,” Brautigan said, rolling his window back uup. “We better get this car back,” he said to Breen. “It’s over.”
“What do you mean it’s over?”
By the time they returned to the lot on Broadway, it was all over for Breen. He’d been fired from Flying Dutchman. “Golly,” he told Brautigan, “I stole somebody’s car just so you could go down and see dust on furniture.”
The first week in June, an inter-office memo at Delacorte Press warned about production delays for The Tokyo–Montana Express. Sam Lawrence moved the party at Enrico’s to November 6, with the California Living article reset four days earlier. The next evening (June 6) at 8:00 pm, Richard Brautigan appeared at the Fourth Annual San Francisco International Poetry Festival at the Palace of Fine Arts in the Marina. Fourteen months of planning had gone into the event. Seymour Lawrence boasted a month earlier to colleagues that the entire day would be devoted to Brautigan. Richard, in fact, shared the stage with six other poets, including John Thomas, Michael Ondaatje from Canada, and his old friend Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones).
Throughout May and June, Richard discussed divorce strategy with Joel Shawn, his new attorney. Richard jotted random thoughts on a legal pad. He questioned Shawn on the skills of the opposition: “Savett [sic], can you handle her? She ate Sandra like candy [. . .] Savett [sic] is tough. How can we settle this thing without going to trial?” In his jumbled lists of possible settlement amounts, Richard noted Akiko’s $7,000 Japanese hotel bill and estimates of her legal fees. He mentioned her possessions in Montana (sewing machine, skis) and household items in Bolinas, including an oak bed, an oak dresser with a marble top, and a dulcimer.
Richard made a point of wanting to keep the 1969 Plymouth Fury bought before their marriage and all the fishing equipment he’d given Aki. Brautigan’s biggest fear was that she might “destroy” him. “I’m at the best part of writing in my life,” he wrote, “and I don’t want to lose it to her [. . .] she fights for the written book. Make it a national case. If we [illegible] for the Tokyo–Montana Express make it a national case. ACLU.”
The galleys for Tokyo–Montana were ready early in June and sent to Brautigan for his corrections. Delacorte began mailing bound promotional uncorrected proof copies before the end of the month, a publicity quest embracing most of the usual literary suspects (Barthelme, Malamud, Updike, Barth, Matthiessen, Capote, Algren, Saroyan, etc.) as well as Brautigan’s longtime writer pals. A number of curious selections (Willie Nelson, Loretta Lynn, Senator Mo Udall, Robert Mitchum, Marisol, Walter Cronkite, Joan Mondale, and Bob Dylan) were added to the list.
On July 1, 1980, Richard Brautigan was deposed under oath by the opposing counsel in their San Francisco office. As soon after that as possible, he took off for Mont
ana. The Hjortsbergs’ marriage was also disintegrating. Gatz had moved to a rented furnished apartment in Livingston. Richard continued his habit of wandering over for coffee in the morning. Much to his surprise, he found himself becoming friends with Marian. He told her that he never related to the “wives.”
Sitting on the porch one morning, Brautigan said, “You were always up to your elbows in brine or in the midst of changing a diaper, so to me you were a nonhuman. I mean, you didn’t interest me at all. I’m just overwhelmed and delighted that you actually have a sense of humor.”
“Thanks, Richard,” Marian replied, not without irony.
She never cared much for Brautigan before that summer. “I wasn’t overly fond of him,” she said. “He wasn’t very open or friendly. He just cultivated the friendship of the more macho element. If Richard didn’t show you his charming side, he was not at all charming. He never showed me his charming side, and I obviously didn’t show him mine.”
That July, Brautigan turned on the charm. It wasn’t long before he and Marian became lovers. One day, he took her hand and said, “I think we should go to bed now.”
At first, she resisted his advances. “I really cared for Richard,” Marian recalled. “I had no desire to be with him because of who he was. I also wasn’t wildly attracted to him.” Their mutual affection grew so strong “that it was fine when we did do it.” Marian was careful not to take things too seriously and fall in love. “I’d seen his patterns,” she said. “It would have been a disaster. I would have been devastated. He was capable of being a loyal friend. He was incapable of being a faithful lover.”
One afternoon in the second week of July, Greg Keeler was hanging out at Pine Creek when four Japanese journalists drove up to interview Brautigan. They did a double take when they saw the two friends standing together in the front yard, “tall, blond, and pink” like enormous twins. The quartet, who all seemed to be named Ken, represented FM Tokyo and Pioneer stereo. They had come to record a program for their Welcome to Hard Times series. Pioneer manufactured a car stereo called “Lonesome Carboy.” They had already used Warren Oates in their Lonesome Carboy commercials and wanted to add Richard to the list.
The Japanese audio technicians recorded sounds of gunshots and the whistling Montana wind. Keeler remembered them wandering around the place, following Brautigan with a microphone and tiny “miraculous” recording devices “while he struck noble poses and made majestic sweeping statements about the West.” Richard went into full Imperial Mode in front of the mike. “To me, a good sentence, an accurate clear sentence, in writing,” he declaimed, “is the same as a bullet, moving and hitting its target.”
Later, Brautigan took his antique .22 caliber Winchester pump-action rifle down behind the barn to the dump for tin can plinking. “This gun sounds like the past,” he said, “it is a repeating rifle. The action is like poetry.” Richard was eager to publicize his forthcoming novel. Pioneer wanted to sell car stereos. The finished radio piece incorporated sounds of chugging steam engines and wailing train whistles, while the author intoned, “My name is Richard Brautigan. We are now on the Tokyo–Montana Express . . . going here and there, everywhere and nowhere at the same time.”
Not long after this, Seymour Lawrence traveled out to Montana to spend time with Richard. They had much to talk about. Lordly & Dame had already booked seven engagements for Brautigan, at $1,500 per appearance. These were at small, little-known colleges. Sam planned to make the most of it, scheduling tandem book signings at prominent local bookstores. Lawrence had arranged for copies of Brautigan’s titles (hardcover Dell and Laurel editions) to be stocked in Aspen, Boulder, and Denver in time for his university residency. He also had posters with the author’s photo advertising The Tokyo–Montana Express shipped to all the bookstores and the Colorado Chautauqua Association.
During Sam’s brief visit, he and Richard went for dinner at the home of Brautigan’s neighbor Bob Gorsuch, a handyman and jack-of-all-trades who did odd plumbing and electrical jobs for the writer. Bob not only looked after the Pine Creek house, he took care of all the repair and maintenance for Brautigan’s three rental properties in Livingston. Lawrence enjoyed “a real sense of Montana hospitality” and one of the best steaks he’d had in a long time. A large rattlesnake Gorsuch kept preserved in his deep freeze also impressed the publisher.
On a Sunday afternoon in mid-July, Gatz Hjortsberg drove out to Pine Creek from Livingston for drinks with Richard and Sam. The three men sat in the sunshine on Brautigan’s back porch, talking shop and sipping bourbon. At one point, Richard advised the younger writer to patch up his strained marriage. Speaking from firsthand experience, he cautioned Hjortsberg about the rocky pitfalls of divorce. Gatz collected antique tin windup toys. The colorful novelties stood ranked on shelves in his third-floor office in the house across the creek. “If you don’t put things back together,” Richard said, “you can kiss your little playthings goodbye.”
The next day, Brautigan left for Boulder, Colorado. He checked into a white, high-ceilinged corner room at the historic Hotel Boulderado at Thirteenth and Spruce Street. Since it first opened its doors in 1909, the block-long red-brick Edwardian building had housed presidents and statesmen as well as Ethel Barrymore (1915), poet Robert Frost (throughout the 1920s), and both Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington in the 1960s, a time when most other neighboring hotels would not open their doors to black guests. Unlike the sleek, modern Keio Plaza, the hotel had real charm and an understated elegance with a curved stained glass ceiling arching two stories above the tile-floored lobby.
Poet Edward Dorn moved to Boulder in the fall of 1977 on a one-year contract as “visiting poet.” He was invited back the next year, and the year after that, for what the Dorns believed was temporary employment, just another episode in a nomadic academic life stretching over two decades across six different campuses. They were happily surprised when Ed was offered “a tenure-track position” at the start of the eighties.
The Dorns’ half of a “duplex one-floor” on 1035 Mapleton was “the only rental on a street full of mansions.” Their friend, writer Ron Sukenick, called it “the worst house on the best street in Boulder.” For the next thirteen years, the place that “seemed to hang in the boughs of the trees outside” hosted what Jenny Dorn designated “a continual party”: visiting writers passing through, college students hanging out at all hours, school friends playing with the Dorns’ children, Maya and Kidd, all made the one-story home on the steep hillside echo with laughter and lively conversation. The Dorns’ kitchen became Boulder’s only true salon. Brautigan joined the crowd immediately upon his arrival.
Richard came to the Dorns’ kitchen every day and met Simone Ellis there. Simone dropped out of prelaw in 1974 to attend the Naropa Institute, a school founded the same year by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (named for an eleventh-century Indian sage), Tibetan Buddhist and Oxford University scholar. Ellis worked as Allen Ginsberg’s personal assistant while helping promote the new unaccredited Buddhist institution. The Beat Generation founding fathers swarmed to Naropa like moths drawn to a bright new flame. Simone moved to San Francisco in 1979 to study film at the Art Institute. Gregory Corso’s wife, Lisa, invited Ellis to rent an extra bedroom in their apartment on the edge of Chinatown. Lisa Corso moved out, and Simone and Gregory soon became lovers.
She returned to Boulder in the summer of 1980, to visit the Dorns and show her short films in their living room. Simone’s mentor, Stan Brakhage, one of America’s most influential twentieth-century experimental filmmakers (Dog Star Man and Window Water Baby Moving), and poet Anne Waldman were among the impromptu audience at the Dorns’. Ellis had enjoyed Brautigan’s writing since her student days. They hit it off from the start. Simone was surprised by Richard’s “chivalrous” nature, finding his behavior “very Japanese.”
The next Saturday night, July 19, Richard Brautigan gave “a little talk and read from his work” at Boulder’s historic Chautauqua Auditorium. Wendy Serkin made the
arrangements. Ginger Perry, a friend of the Dorns’ and a member of the CU Creative Writing Program, put up $300 to fund the publicity. Built of wood in 1898 and surrounded by forty acres of public park under the rugged ramparts of the Flatirons, the huge deteriorating auditorium had been recently restored. Portions of the original dirt and sawdust floor remained. It was still possible to see daylight through cracks in the walls. Chautauqua, born in 1874 on the shores of Lake Chautauqua in upstate New York, provided adult education in a summer camp setting, a rural platform for dramatic readings, lectures, sermons, live musical performances, and orchestral productions. By the height of the Chautauqua movement in the 1920s, several hundred permanent facilities, like the one in Boulder, prospered around the country.
Ed and Jenny Dorn sat among the “old-timey” audience of a thousand “freckled, ginghamed women and their freckled, ginghamed children and their homespun fathers.” Simone Ellis went with them. Dorn recalled Richard had been “very impressed” to learn Billy Sunday and William Jennings Bryan both spoke from the same stage. “He liked those old echoes.” Brautigan was in top form and was rewarded by “gentle reflective laughter. ” Ed felt the audience of hill people “obviously loved him.” Jenny filmed the entire event with her eight-millimeter movie camera.
The next afternoon, Richard went with Simone and the Dorns to a faculty/student garden party at Ginger Perry’s home at 744 University. Brautigan’s Chautauqua reading had been a success. Wendy Serkin paid Ginger back and offered to supply all the food and booze if she would host a party for the visiting author. Drink in hand, bored with the academic professorial chitchat, Brautigan scanned the large gathering until his eye alighted upon Masako Kano, an attractive young Japanese graduate student invited by Perry, a fellow classmate in Professor James Kincaid’s comparative literature summer course.
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