Brautigan departed Palma, Majorca on November 19, returning briefly to Amsterdam. He left no record of where he stayed on his second brief trip to the Netherlands. Next to the Singelgracht, Brautigan discovered a wooden food shack selling hot takeaway mussel sandwiches soaked in Thousand Island dressing. The place was run by “a real working-class hero,” a burly fellow with a thick black mustache. Richard enjoyed the food and went to the little place by the canal often during his short stopover.
Brautigan soon was on his way to Switzerland. He’d been invited to lecture at the University of Zurich, where Albert Einstein had earned a degree in 1900. Richard spent several days in the city, strolling around, looking at the Limmat River. In his aimless wandering along the river, he met a Swiss man interested in fishing who’d never cast a line for trout. He and Brautigan walked all over town, talking about the sport. Richard pointed out spots in the water where fish might be holding. The Limmat was no trout stream, but he enjoyed talking about angling. Brautigan thought Zurich was “all right” but felt an itch to get back to Tokyo. “After only a few hours in Zurich,” he wrote, “you would not confuse it for Tokyo.”
Richard left Switzerland, flying to Majorca for a few days. On the fifth of December, he took off for Frankfurt, starting the German lecture tour arranged by the U.S. Information Service. Brautigan flew from Frankfurt to Munich on Lufthansa, arriving a little after five in the afternoon. He was met by Günter Ohnemus, his German translator, and Edwin Pancoast, the director of the America House. Ohnemus thought Richard “was out of control.” Brautigan claimed that a computer at the Keio Plaza Hotel in Tokyo now handled all his future literary business.
They drove Richard to the America Institute at the University of Munich, where he spoke and read to an audience of students and faculty. After a reception, Brautigan spent the night at the Hotel Alexandria. Worried about his connections, Richard called Jakob Köllhofer, his contact in Heidelberg. “Listen, could you be there at the station to get me?” he pleaded. “Because I’m dyslexic and I can’t read the signs.”
Köllhofer assured Brautigan he’d be there. Richard boarded a train in Munich just before nine, arriving at the Heidelberg station at a quarter past noon. Jakob Köllhofer waited on the platform as promised, looking for a fragile, lost man. To his surprise, Brautigan bounced off the train with a bottle of Pernod in his hand. Köllhofer took Richard to his 2:30 program at the English Department of the University of Mannheim. After his informal activities with students and faculty came to an end, Richard went home with Jakob. “Do you have anything to drink?” he asked. Köllhofer had some schnapps. Brautigan drank that down and “ended up drinking every bottle of everything in the house.” His host considered it “an amazing performance.” Richard spent most of the evening on the floor, painting with Köllhofer’s kids. Jakob said he’d “never seen anything like it.”
Brautigan spent the night at the Hotel Schrieder. At 8:30 the next morning, he was on a train heading to Frankfurt, where he made a connection to Siegen, arriving there in less than two hours. Two members of the “Cologne program” staff met Richard at the station and whisked him off to the University of Siegen in time for his noon program at the Department of English, hosted by author and translator Glen Burns. Brautigan read to an audience of students and faculty.
After Richard’s presentation, the Köln staffers drove him to Bonn, provisional capital of the Federal Republic of Germany, situated on the Rhine, twenty-five kilometers south of Köln. They took him to the American Embassy guest house on Martin-Luther-King Strasse. Günter Ohnemus reported to Keith Abbott that Brautigan “had skipped or trashed readings” on his German tour, the only evidence of any unprofessional conduct.
On the seventh of December, an informal reception at the American Center allowed Richard to mingle with his fans and get drunk on his ass. In the morning, a representative from the Bonn program office took Brautigan to Bonn University in time for an 11:00 am appearance at the English Department, where he read to an audience of students in Dr. Eberhard Kreutzer’s modern American literature course. In the afternoon, an embassy staff car drove Richard to the Köln/ Bonn airport at Wahn in time to catch a 2:50 flight to the city-state of Berlin, an isolated island of Western democracy surrounded by the Communist Democratic German Republic.
An hour later, Brautigan’s flight touched down at the Tegel Berliner Flughäfen, located in a borough northwest of the city center. He was met at the airport by someone from the Amerika Haus Berlin, who drove him to the Hotel Astoria, a charming boutique establishment in a restored 1800s town house on tree-lined Fasanenstrasse. At eight in the evening, Richard stood before an audience of the general public at the Amerika Haus, a two-story International-style structure built in 1956 on the Hardenbergplatz. The Amerika Haus had its origins as a library of English-language books donated by American troops at the end of the war. Brautigan’s reading was the culmination of his German United States Information Service tour.
The next day Richard met with several “Berlin literati,” their identities erased from memory by the corrosive winds of time. Robert Creeley was not among their number. Brautigan did not get together with Bob and Penelope during his three-day stay in Berlin but found time on the ninth for a trip into East Berlin. Richard told friends he visited a concentration camp on his German reading tour. If so, it had to have been Sachsenhausen, located thirty-five kilometers north of Berlin in the DDR (Deutsche Democratische Republik), the only camp in the immediate vicinity. Later Brautigan suggested that his work in progress, The Complete Absence of Twilight, was based on this visit to a Holocaust death camp. Like a map of nineteenth-century Africa, most interior details of Richard’s eleven months in Europe remained a blank. Only his itinerary, a detailed peripheral outline of his journey, provided any clarity.
Richard Brautigan did not write a single letter between mid-October and the end of the year. He did no work in his ever-present notebooks. Not one poem, not a line of new fiction. This prolific author became mysteriously silent, as if in free fall in outer space. On December 10, Brautigan’s last full day in Berlin, he attended a 5:00 pm book signing event at Autorenbuchhandlung (the Author’s Bookstore) on Carmerstrasse in Charlottenburg, a section of West Berlin considered the heart of the city’s cultural life from the end of World War II until reunification.
The Author’s Bookstore was a shop close to Richard’s heart. Founded in 1976 by a group of writers dissatisfied when they couldn’t find their work for sale at other venues, the place opened with an inaugural reading by Günter Grass, followed by an impromptu performance a few weeks later by Allen Ginsberg. It’s not known if the “literati” Brautigan met the day before were in attendance. Günter Ohnemus claimed “Richard botched deals and had lost the chance to make a considerable amount of money while in Europe.”
Ohnemus didn’t have the whole story. While in West Berlin, Brautigan met with the editors of Transatlantik, the magazine that had published sections of Tokyo–Montana Express the year before. They were interested in using more of his work, and Richard sold them first German serial rights to “The Fate of a West German Model in Tokyo.” He later described it as an “article” in a letter to his new agent. There was never a typescript of the longer notebook version; this can only have been the six-page short story.
The next day Brautigan flew out of Berlin en route back to Spain. He cleared customs, getting his passport stamped “ENTRADA” in Palma, Majorca. Seven years after Franco’s death, elements of El Caudillo’s security apparatus remained. A traveler entered West Berlin with less scrutiny than he did the Kingdom of Spain. Richard spent the rest of December on the island of Majorca, probably never leaving Palma. His drinking spiraled into alcoholic oblivion. After returning to the United States, Brautigan told Greg Keeler he’d once fallen down drunk in an alley behind a bodega, sleeping beside homeless mongrel dogs. People passing by tripped over him in the darkness, not giving a damn. Richard “said he liked Spain in that respect,” Keeler recalled.
<
br /> Richard told a similar story to Klyde Young during the summer of 1984. In this version, Brautigan rented a room in Palma down a little street from a tiny bar where he like hanging out. It was not a tourist bar. All the other customers spoke Spanish. Richard was fond of a little dog living in the bar. Word got out that Brautigan was a famous millionaire American writer. One of the local newspapers sent a reporter to interview him. Richard said he was an American writer but denied being a millionaire. “I’m a writer and that’s it,” he said. “I’m just here visiting.”
The next day the newspaper devoted an entire page to a story about the American millionaire writer. Brautigan got totally drunk in his favorite bar. Unable to stagger back to his room, Richard lay down in the gutter to sleep it off. The little tavern dog came out and lay down on top of him. The same newspaper reported this event: American millionaire writer found drunk in the gutter sleeping with a dog. Richard “loved that story,” according to Young.
Fed up with his boozing and freeloading, the mysterious half-Korean/half-Spanish woman tossed Brautigan out on his drunken ass. The final schism likely came because of epic misbehavior on New Year’s Eve. Richard flew from Majorca to Barcelona on the first of January. His destination was Amsterdam, where he had “business to do,” wanting “to gather some breathing space” before journeying on to Japan. Brautigan could easily have flown nonstop from Majorca. A poster advertising European train travel, seen earlier in the window of a Palma travel agency, inspired him to alter his plans.
Richard landed in Barcelona around noon on New Year’s Day. He saw a 1:15 flight for Amsterdam listed on the departure board and knew he could be in the Netherlands that same afternoon. “With what little that is left of my life,” he wrote, reflecting on the moment later that month, “I am where I am supposed to be and often very bored. [. . .] I thought, no, I’ll never have the chance again to take the train from Barcelona to Amsterdam because I’m never returning to Europe. [. . .] I’ve got the time and I’m never coming back.” These lines, scrawled in a four-by-six ring-bound notebook in January 1984, were as close to a suicide note as anything Brautigan ever composed. “It’s one’s own business why one chooses to be one place or another and how one arrives at that decision is an individual matter like staring into a mirror too long until you are not totally aware whose image is being reflected.”
Richard made his way to the Barcelona train station and bought a second-class ticket to Paris. It was a long trip. At one point Brautigan found himself discussing Buddhism with a fellow passenger in his compartment, an American classical musician on his way to a week’s engagement in Rotterdam. An older couple, “sophisticated and worldly,” joined their company. The woman wore a sparkling array of costume jewelry. Richard’s American companion spoke to them in French.
“They’re gypsies,” he said. “They would like to tell our fortunes.”
“I’m having too much trouble with my present,” Brautigan told him. “I think the future would be too hard for me to handle.”
After more than twelve hours, Richard’s train rolled into le Gare d’Austerlitz early in the morning. Without any knowledge of the language, Brautigan made his way to le Gare du Nord, either on the Metro or by taxi. He caught an early morning connection to Amsterdam, arriving at Central Station in time for breakfast. From Amsterdam Hotels, a 1982 compilation of local hostelries, he selected the Owl Hotel (“three stars, very comfortable [. . .] 61 beds/34 baths”), situated on a quiet street close by the Leidseplein and Vondelpark, quite lovely in the summertime but a frozen wasteland in January.
Utterly exhausted, Richard checked into room 47 on the top floor of the Owl, a charming boutique hotel composed of two formerly private nineteenth-century residences. The little blue-decorated chamber had everything he required: a built-in desk, a telephone, and a green-tiled bathtub, where he soaked his travel-weary bones. Brautigan felt safe here in spite of his “totally mad” start to 1984. “I could not bypass the Orwell novel at this time,” he wrote soon after his arrival in Amsterdam. “His vision of a totalitarian anti-human society for the year 1984 was certainly far different from the actuality of my just-beginning 1984.”
Brautigan’s first purchases on his third trip to Amsterdam were several spiral-bound notebooks at a stationery store. Back in his room, Richard began writing again after three months of ricocheting back and forth across Europe, setting to work in a four-by-six notebook on “Owl Days,” a long narrative prose piece chronicling the details of his train trip from Barcelona and a series of misadventures during the next five and a half weeks in Amsterdam.
In another pocket notebook, Brautigan compiled his most curious list in a lifetime of compulsive enumeration. Richard listed every item in the hotel, a long column of mundane objects, starting with “lobby: 1 elevator / 1 large color photograph of a snowy owl / 1 telex machine / 1 bell on the front desk / to ring for the clerk if nobody is on / the desk / 1 cash register, etc. etc.” Richard even detailed the contents of his bathroom. His tally had a curious precision. “1 holder of paper bags on the wall. They are for sanitary napkins. 1 white round metal container to put used sanitary napkins in with a foot lever to raise and lower the lid with. 1 small metal hook on the wall to hang clothes from.” A sense of solitude pervades this singular list, each item isolated by empty space. Scratching away in his notebook, Brautigan created an unintentional poem about loneliness.
On January 5, Richard resumed his interrupted correspondence, writing longhand on Owl Hotel stationery to Masako Kano, his first letter in months. He was not entirely candid about his recent travels, which he called “a remarkable time.” Brautigan described his itinerary accurately but made it all sound like a business trip, “lecturing, on the move, meeting, meeting, meeting people and like that.” He signed himself, “E.T. in Europe,” referring to a peculiar ritual Richard concocted with Masako. Based on his affection for the Steven Spielberg film, Brautigan and Kano would touch their forefingers together in public places, replicating the movie scene, both simultaneously saying “E.T.”
“Can you believe?” Years later, Masako remained incredulous at the memory of this “childish gesture.” Brautigan enjoyed enacting his extraterrestrial finger touching with “real little boys” in Japanese restaurants and public places. “Everybody just stared at us,” Kano recalled. “Richard sometimes became oblivious that he looked so different from the general public in Tokyo.”
Brautigan lived mostly a sober life during his final stay in Amsterdam. He went early to bed and arose early. After shaving and brushing his teeth, Richard headed down to the dining room, which opened onto a garden and looked “pleasant, clean, attractive.” He called it the Owl Room. Breakfast was served at 7:30 by a motherly, cheerful woman. It was always the same. Coffee, a slice of Swiss cheese and a piece of ham on one plate; four slices of bread on another; two cubes of butter and a small pot of jam on a third; and a soft-boiled brown egg perched in an egg cup. Brautigan had never eaten soft-boiled eggs before. Richard liked his eggs fried sunny-side up, scrambled, or hard-boiled but served hot. He ate them soft-boiled in the Owl Room because the hotel served eggs no other way, and he thought it was “a nutritionally sound idea [. . .] to eat an egg for breakfast.”
After his morning meal, Brautigan returned to room 47, opened the curtains, and wrote for several hours. In the afternoons, he walked about the city. The first full blast of winter had not yet arrived, although the sky remained dark and overcast. Richard returned to his favorite hot mussel sandwich shack next to the Singelgracht. The owner recognized him. “Back in Amsterdam again?” he said.
“Yes,” Brautigan replied. “It’s my third trip.”
The man looked up from preparing his sandwich. “You come for the mussels.”
“Yes.” Richard thought this was as good a reason as any to explain his return to the city. He wrote a story about the moment and called it “Mussels.”
Other afternoon strolls took Brautigan to the Rijksmuseum, a short walk from the Owl. He
went to see Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, the Dutch master’s enormous (eleven feet plus by fourteen feet plus) 1642 group portrait of Frans Banning Cocq’s company of arquebusiers. At some point in 1715, the painting was cut down on all four sides to fit between two columns in the Amsterdam Town Hall. Brautigan spent an hour looking at Rembrandt’s huge masterpiece. He knew “a section of the painting had been chopped off” and looked at “the section of [the painting] that was missing.” The largest excised segment was a couple feet lopped off the left-hand side, eliminating two members of the illustrious military company. “A lot of people came and went and looked at the painting that was there,” Richard wrote later in the year. “They were satisfied with what they saw while I was looking at what was gone.”
Hungry after his hour-long excursion into conceptual art, Brautigan found his way back to the real world and the little wooden shack by the canal for another hot mussel sandwich under the oppressive leaden sky. “Often during the day I wished I was in Japan,” Richard wrote around this time. “Things would be better there. The streets are lively with people.”
Hoping to make his wish come true, Brautigan rented a typewriter and set to work on his Japanese entrance visa application. On the standard form, Richard stated that he was self-employed, listing his “principal former positions” as “Lecturer. University of Notre Dame, Stanford University.” He asked to stay for a period of six months, saying he planned to enter Japan in “January 1984.”
On a separate statement of “Personal History,” Richard compiled a list of the American universities where he’d lectured over the years. He made no mention of his recent appearances in Amsterdam, Zurich, and Germany, suggesting that he suspected any inquiry would yield an unsatisfactory assessment. Brautigan mentioned that he was profiled in Who’s Who in America and concluded, “At the age of seventeen, I came in contact with Japanese culture and it has had a profound influence on my life. Japan has been my teacher. I wish to continue my education.”
Jubilee Hitchhiker Page 147
