On March 14 Brautigan got up from the couch to change the channel on his TV and tripped over a coffee table in his hotel room, breaking his right leg at the ankle in two places. At first Richard thought he’d only sprained it. After a day, the swelling didn’t go down, nor did his pain diminish. Brautigan phoned Dr. Burstein, his regular physician, who referred him to Felton and Klausenstock, MDS, Inc., specialists in the sort of fracture he described. Richard made an appointment for the sixteenth, taking a cab in the morning. X-rays revealed clean breaks. No cast was necessary. Brautigan’s leg was bound. He was advised to use a cane and take it easy for six weeks or so. Felton and Klausenstock billed Richard $56 for their services.
Brautigan flew to Bozeman, Montana, on April Fools’ Day. Greg Keeler met him at the airport as he limped off the plane with his new cane. In addition to his Montana State University salary of $1,500 a month, a faculty apartment had been reserved for Richard at the Peter Koch Towers on campus. He went to stay at Greg’s place instead. A long-standing friction between Brautigan and Judy Keeler was exacerbated by his unexpected visit. A few days later Richard wandered into the living room carrying an armload of laundry. He was “fresh from the bath,” clad only in a towel. “Where should I put these dirty clothes?” Brautigan asked Judy.
“Up in the washing machines at faculty housing,” Mrs. Keeler answered.
Brautigan took the hint and moved to his new apartment: a bedroom with a living room and kitchen divided by a Formica-topped counter, furnished in standard dorm-room modular. The place reeked of “industrial strength sanitizing agents.” Long accustomed to the anonymity of hotel rooms, Richard felt comfortable there. He told Greg Keeler he especially liked the toilet paper. Suffering from a recent herpes outbreak, Brautigan stuffed wads of tissue around his genitals to keep from chaffing. Little bits of toilet paper started “falling out of his jean cuffs.” Keeler found it funny. “He walked around with toilet paper all over the place.”
Brautigan never went to college and had not been a diligent scholar, but he taught Creative Writing 202 like a pro. A wise-guy student, handpicked by Keeler, challenged Richard on his first day. “I don’t like your work,” he sneered. “You call this teaching?” Brautigan thought the kid’s writing was “a fucking pile of pig shit.” Susy Roesgen was another story. A talented writer, she also started the course with a negative attitude, telling Richard she disliked his books. Richard “didn’t want to mess things up” and went to Paul Ferlazzo for advice. The department head clued him in on how to handle the situation. Roesgen ended the semester liking Brautigan’s class “a lot.” Richard wrote, “Dear Susy, A very good piece of writing. RB,” on one of her weekly assignments.
Greg Keeler noted that Richard played favorites, “but that was based on whether he liked their work.” Brautigan followed a traditional classroom approach. He gave weekly assignments, suggesting varied topics, “lightning, fishing, or death.” Richard never made line-by-line criticism on his students’ work, instead writing insightful comments at the top of each first page. On occasion Brautigan dashed off a quick story of his own, offering it to the class for their evaluation. One afternoon on his way to teach, Richard stopped at a small, private campus park surrounding a sundial to examine his “raging” herpes outbreak. In his ever-present notebook, Brautigan jotted down a quick tale “about an alien race of sores on another planet who had to trudge to a dark gloomy place called The Grotto to be drained.” His students never guessed it to be a parable based on their instructor’s private suffering.
Richard wrote this story in the warm month of June, close to the end of the term. Back in April, with the weather gripped by “a winter-like spring,” the little sundial park felt as hospitable as ice-bound Point Barrow. Greg Keeler observed Brautigan, alone and depressed, hobbling “drunk with his cane and broken leg from bar to bar around the freezing icy streets of Bozeman, getting a lift back to his room, bouncing around in the back of some cowboy’s pickup.” An evening at the theater provided an excellent excuse for getting in out of the cold.
Montana-raised Pamela Jamruska, a young actress who had received an MFA from the University of Wisconsin the previous year, was performing in the ballroom above the lobby of the Baxter Hotel in The Belle of Amherst by William Luce, a one-woman play about Emily Dickinson. Long an admirer of Dickinson’s poetry, Brautigan went to see the show. Jamruska portrayed fifteen different characters, roles originated six years before on Broadway by Julie Harris.
Enchanted by the play and the diminutive white-gowned actress alone in the spotlight at center stage, the audience felt they’d gotten to know a woman who had been dead almost one hundred years. One of the last lines, spoken in the voice of Emily Dickinson, struck a chord in Richard: “These are my letters I wrote to the world that never wrote to me.” Brautigan had received his share of vacuous fan letters over the years and understood the poet’s eternal dilemma: Is anyone out there listening?
A week or so after he started teaching, Richard went out for drinks with friends. One suggested he meet a woman they knew, someone equally “far out.” When they phoned, she said she couldn’t make it to the bar before closing time but suggested they get together later at the Four B’s restaurant for breakfast and coffee. Shortly after 2:00 am, Brautigan’s friends drove him west along Main Street toward his assignation. Richard had “never had any luck on blind dates” and didn’t know what to expect.
Four B’s was one of a chain of restaurants scattered about Montana serving breakfast twenty-four hours a day. When they pulled into the parking lot out front, Brautigan spotted the woman waiting alone in a booth. It was Pam Jamruska, but Richard didn’t recognize her without her stage makeup. Using his cane, Brautigan “hobbled over to the window,” waving his free hand “like a clown.” She wore loose-fitting clothing that camouflaged her “very good tight body.” Richard pressed his face to the glass, making a variety of funny expressions. “She was instantly delighted and started laughing.”
Brautigan and Jamruska talked until nearly dawn. It wasn’t long before Pam moved into his apartment in Peter Koch Tower. Greg Keeler remembered dropping by Richard’s place one morning, “and here comes Pamela Jamruska to the door,” obviously having spent the night. “Pamela was already in control,” Keeler recalled. “That was a funny experience.”
One evening Brautigan escorted Jamruska to the Robin Bar, just off the lobby at the Baxter Hotel. Small and dark, with a huge art deco back-bar mirror, the place was known among its regulars as the Melancholy. It was supposedly a “meat market,” but no one ever made a pickup at the Robin. Renowned as a graveyard for the romantic fantasies of total losers, the little cocktail bar had gained its nickname because all those who failed to connect on Saturday night gathered there to drown their sorrows on Sunday.
One evening Brautigan came into the Melancholy with Jamruska. Pam spotted her good friend Sean Cassaday at a table with three or four others, and they joined the group. L.A.-born Cassaday, then in his mid-thirties, had moved to Montana after graduating from art university in Toronto. He earned his living as a carpenter but along the way had created several successful businesses on Main Street in Bozeman. Cassaday’s most recent venture at the time was the Union Hall, a restaurant where Jamruska worked as a waitress. Sean had seen Richard at a couple parties over the years, but aside from casual conversation, they’d never talked much.
“It was a strange meeting,” Cassaday recalled. Brautigan sat directly behind him and “started talking to the back of my head.” Richard incorrectly assumed Sean and Pam were lovers. “There seemed to be some competition,” Cassaday said. “I don’t think I liked him at all at that moment.” Brautigan became confrontational in a passive-aggressive manner, directing his remarks to the others at the table. Sean didn’t respond “because he was being relatively negative about it, and she was there.” No one cared what he had to say. Richard left, hauling Pam along with him.
Brautigan didn’t like the Robin. His favorite joint in town was the E
agles, housed in the FOE Lodge far down Main Street at the eastern end of Bozeman. The polar opposite of the Robin in every way, including location, the Eagles was a workingman’s bar, inexpensive and rough around the edges. George Dickel sold for fifty cents a shot during happy hour. Dave Schrieber was the manager, working both the day and night shifts according to his schedule. When he tended bar, Schrieber was known for his generous pour. Greg Keeler had introduced Richard to the Eagles. They met for burgers (no drinks) at lunchtime before Brautigan’s class. After school got out, it was party time.
Friday Burger Night at the Eagles became “extra special.” Brautigan held court at his favorite table, searching for what he called the Great American Good Time. Sourdough Creek flowed past along the outside wall of the bar before it was tunneled under Main Street. During spring runoff, Richard enjoyed hearing the rush of water during occasional rare moments of quiet. The regulars at Brautigan’s table included Keeler, Dick Dillof, Brad and Georgia Donovan, and Georgia’s sister, Mary. The Donovans had purchased a trailer (number 66) at a place called Forest Park on the Gallatin River west of Bozeman. Mary bought the single-wide next door, creating a little family compound.
Over time the core group at Richard’s table expanded. Karen Datko, a young reporter at the Bozeman Chronicle, was among the first additions. Carol Schmidt, a colleague at the paper had arranged through Greg Keeler to interview Brautigan. The only condition stipulated that the conversation take place at the Eagles. Datko was invited to go along. She came into the office early that day, knowing she wanted to take off first thing in the afternoon.
After the interview, Schmidt returned to the Chronicle to write her story. Karen hung around, knocking back Dickel shots with Richard in the middle of the afternoon. “What the hell,” she thought, “I don’t have to go back to work.” After a while Keeler left too, and Datko was alone with Brautigan, “yacking, yacking, yacking.” They hit it off.
The two never became lovers, forming a close friendship instead. Karen had been born in a hardscrabble coal mining town in southwestern Pennsylvania. They formed a bond based on similar backgrounds, with single-parent working-class childhoods lived on the bitter edge of poverty. “We both knew what it was like to do without having money,” Datko recalled. “Without having a lot of food, without having clothes that you wanted to have, without having the kind of love in your home that you wished you would have had, without having two parents.” Richard started calling her Scoop. Everyone had a nickname at the Eagles. Karen dubbed Brautigan Old Uncle Richard. One night he told off-color stories, and she changed it to Dirty Unc. Brautigan thought this was great. Scoop always referred to him as Unc. “I never called him Richard to his face,” she said.
Carol Schmidt’s article on Brautigan appeared in the Chronicle on April 26, 1982. Along with bits of misinformation (Richard told Schmidt he’d “twice flunked first grade in Tacoma”), Brautigan had divulged a number of personal revelations. “I don’t know where my home is,” he said. “I’m trying to figure that out. My life would be easier if I knew where I really lived.” He admitted to being puzzled by his designation as a hippie writer. “There were tremendous changes going on in America then,” he said. “It was impossible not to be involved in those changes.” Summing things up, Richard observed, “There are those who say ‘Richard Brautigan sits down in an hour and a half and writes his annual best seller.’ I’m not quite that quick, although I am prolific. I work very, very hard to make things appear very, very simple.”
One night toward the end of Brautigan’s teaching stint at MSU, he reconnected with Sean Cassaday at the Melancholy. Richard’s brief springtime relationship with Pam Jamruska had ended. Sean had taken her show on the road in his car, touring The Belle of Amherst to Missoula; Rock Springs, Wyoming; and Billings. Jamruska had since moved out of their lives. The bartender at the Robin refused to serve Brautigan, saying he was under orders from the management: “He can get crazy when he gets drunk. If he leaves here drunk and gets in an accident, we’ll be held responsible.”
Sean went to bat for Richard, explaining to the bartender that his friend didn’t drive. They got their drinks, knocked them back, and moved down the street to the Eagles. After that night, Cassaday always had a seat at Brautigan’s special table.
Brautigan met every day with his writing class. Margaret Roiter, one of Richard’s students, recalled that “he talked about death a great deal” in class. A Brautigan assignment had the class bring in favorite examples from the Billings Gazette obituary column. Later in the spring, Richard volunteered to give a reading as part of his of his teaching residency. Greg Keeler felt nervous about this. “Few of the faculty seemed to care much about Richard’s poetry,” he observed. The larger Bozeman community had zero interest in poetry. Greg’s doubts escalated shortly before Brautigan’s scheduled reading when Richard asked about publicity.
There was no publicity, not even printed posters. “What the fuck kind of place is this?” Brautigan demanded.
“It’s a state university in Montana,” Keeler feebly replied.
At the last moment they made up a bunch of crude hand-lettered fliers and scurried about town, taping them in shop windows, tacking them to power poles, trees, and bulletin boards. Greg did not feel optimistic. Infrequent previous poetry readings had garnered only a collective community yawn. On the appointed hour, Keeler and Brautigan arrived outside Gaines Hall, home of the Chemistry Department. Richard rubbed snow on his face. Greg anticipated the worst.
The main lecture hall was packed. Three hundred seats filled. People standing in the aisles and along the walls. The noisy chatter subsided. A hush filled the auditorium as Brautigan “lumbered to the podium.” Keeler noted even the “conservative and religious” dean of Letters and Sciences was in attendance, shocked when Richard led off his reading with the poem “Fuck Me Like Fried Potatoes.”
The Montana springtime weather vacillated between warm sunny days and raging blizzards. Brautigan started spending nights at the Range Hotel, a few doors west down Main Street, past the Eagles and the Union Hall, only three blocks from Greg Keeler’s house. Dick Dillof, a connoisseur of such establishments, took a cheap room there from time to time and tipped Richard off to the peculiar amenities of the place. One of the last of the early twentieth-century downtown Western hotels, the Range housed an eccentric collection of retired cowboys, railroad workers, and loggers, who sat in the lobby on the ancient sagging furniture, leaning on their canes and dipping snoose. Brautigan liked the hotel for the same reason he enjoyed drinking at the Eagles and eating breakfast at the Western Café among weathered ranchers and construction workers. These establishments retained the essence of an America that Richard knew was fast disappearing into memory.
Brautigan fit right in with the codger crowd in the lobby. He no longer used his cane. One afternoon Richard gave it away to the troubled son of faculty colleagues when he and Keeler took the boy fishing on the Yellowstone. His sparsely furnished room at the Range provided an echo of living in the Hotel Jessie a quarter century before. Those memories triggered recollections of other overnight stops at anonymous lodging places on book tours. The more Richard recalled cheap rented rooms, a fancy suite at the Ritz, and family-style California motels, an idea took shape in his imagination.
Dick Dillof had a room one floor down, directly below Brautigan’s cubicle. Dick recalled sitting with Richard and a girl he’d brought, when the author waxed nostalgic about old small-town main street hotels. “When they are gone,” Richard said, “America will have lost her heart. It will be like the death of hitchhiking. The transient life is the nation’s heartbeat.”
Dobro mentioned he’d heard a rumor that the Range might soon be closing.
“I may be checking out before then,” Brautigan said.
“Out of the hotel?” the girl asked.
“Out of the Big Hotel,” Richard replied.
Back at Pine Creek, Brautigan started working longhand in a clean lined notebook. He called
this project “American Hotels.” Sitting on his back porch after breakfast, he wrote: “Waking at dawn, then a cantaloupe and some coffee, with time to watch a feeding grey thrush in the backyard and a skunk lurching just a few feet away [from] the kitchen looking for grubs I guess or whatever they eat, I am summoned to American hotels as a ghost is called upon to haunt a house.” On page 5, Richard digressed from his title and launched into a description of his posh thirtieth-floor room at the Keio Plaza in Tokyo. The words flowed fast and freely. It felt good to write about better times long ago and far away. Nine pages later, Richard took a break from his new project and returned to work in the notebook novel he had started on his birthday. His working title was “Investigating Moods.”
Brautigan needed diversions to take his mind off life’s harsh, insistent realities. His friend Nikki Arai was terminally ill. Troubled by unrelenting pain, she called Alan Copeland, who drove her to a San Francisco hospital. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Arai contacted Richard to tell him about her disease, sounding “very frightened.” Brautigan always thought of Nikki as “a very strong, purposeful woman with a very dynamic and aggressive personality. Cancer had reduced her to a frightened crying little girl.”
Brautigan’s writing seminar drew to a close in the first two weeks of June. Grading his students presented a dilemma. “I don’t want to discourage anybody,” he told Brad Donovan, “so I’ll just give them all A’s.” When Richard turned in his grades to the English Department, he was horrified to learn that MSU undergraduates evaluated their teachers at the end of the quarter. “When did this happen?” Brautigan complained to Greg Keeler. It was like “Zen students grading the masters.” He didn’t have to worry. Paul Ferlazzo agreed to exempt Richard from the class evaluations. As a visiting scholar, Richard was “a one shot deal.”
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