Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Late in October, Takako Shiina flew to America. She was on her way to visit her young lover, Ryu Murakami, a twenty-four-year-old Japanese writer who published his first short novel, Almost Transparent Blue, earlier that year. Blue, written while Murakami was still a student, dealt with youthful promiscuity and drug use, and although some critics denounced the book as “decadent,” it went on to sell over a million copies and win both the newcomer’s prize for literature and the Akutagawa Prize (a pocket watch and 1 million yen) in 1976. Murakami was staying in Manhattan at the Waldorf-Astoria, covering the New York City Marathon, then in its sixth year, for a leading Japanese periodical.

  Takako stopped off in Los Angeles, en route to New York. Brautigan was there at the airport to meet her plane, accompanied by Don Carpenter and Melissa Mathison. (Mathison had worked as an assistant on both Apocalypse Now and The Godfather II, as well as serving as Francis and Eleanor Coppola’s babysitter. She later wrote the screenplays for The Black Stallion and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.) They all went to dinner at Lucy’s El Adobe Café, a small, dark Mexican restaurant located on Melrose Avenue directly across the street from Paramount Studios. Much beloved by actors and musicians, Lucy’s was the place where Linda Ronstadt was introduced to California governor Jerry Brown, launching their much-publicized romance. Richard ordered “a big pitcher of Margaritas” to wash down the typical campesino fare.

  Afterward, Brautigan escorted Takako to their separate rooms at the secluded Sunset Marquis Hotel in West Hollywood. Situated on a tree-lined cul-de-sac a half block south of Sunset Boulevard, the Marquis was another trendy celebrity hangout, redolent of privilege, the low buildings clustered around a central pool. The next day, after sleeping off her jet lag, Takako felt ready for a more vibrant night on the town. She and Richard joined Harry Dean Stanton for dinner at The Palm on Santa Monica Boulevard. The pricy steakhouse was the West Hollywood branch of the New York restaurant much beloved by Brautigan.

  After eating, the trio ventured further west along Santa Monica to the Troubadour, where Waylon Jennings performed that night. Founded in 1957 by Doug Weston (whose proprietary credit was emblazoned on the sign above the entrance), the Troub became a hotbed of emerging talent from its very start. Lenny Bruce was busted there for obscenity the year the club opened. The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Joni Mitchell, the Pointer Sisters, Neil Young, and Elton John (in the United States) all had their debuts at the Troubadour. Cheech & Chong and Tom Waits were discovered during the Troub’s famed Monday night open mic amateur “hootenannies.” Waylon Jennings had played at the Troubadour several times previously, and the large crowd milling on the sidewalk outside the box office testified to his recent full-blown stardom as an “outlaw” country singer. The place was sold out, but Harry Dean knew the management and snuck his friends around to the back door. They went in through the office and quickly found good seats out front for the show.

  When the music ended, Richard, Takako, and Harry Dean walked two doors down the block to Dan Tana’s, an unpretentious Italian restaurant that, in the twelve years since its opening, had become a popular hangout for actors, studio execs, professional athletes, and mob wise guys. With red-checkered tablecloths, roomy booths, and chianti bottles hanging from the ceiling beams where strands of Christmas lights glowed year-round, Tana’s looked more like a New York or Chicago joint than a Hollywood in-spot. Not having room for another big steak, Brautigan and his pals enjoyed a couple of copious cocktails before heading back to the Sunset Marquis, where they sat drinking around the pool until dawn. Takako stayed in L.A. for only two days before flying on to New York. Richard had arranged for a room at the Gotham Hotel and bought theater tickets for her and Ryu Murakami to see A Chorus Line and Equus.

  Takako Shiina stopped off in San Francisco on her way back to Japan. Brautigan met her at the airport, and they traveled by taxi to his apartment on Union Street, where he made her comfortable in his office, converted into a guest room for the occasion. During her short stay, Richard brought Takako over to Bruce Conner’s house. The artist presented her with signed copies of his books. Brautigan also arranged for a party in Shiina’s honor at the Page Street law offices of Richard Hodge. She knew almost no one among the ten or so guests, but Don Carpenter provided a familiar face.

  Before Takako left for Tokyo, Richard took her to Bolinas. Margot and John Doss were heading to their house downtown and provided a convenient ride. Brautigan’s place had the cold look of unoccupied emptiness. Richard wasted no time before escorting Takako up the road to Bob and Bobbie Creeley’s old farmhouse. The Creeleys were congenial and articulate hosts. Takako recalled great bunches of drying marijuana hanging from the rafters. When the first joints were rolled, Richard declined, but insisted that his friend from Japan, who didn’t smoke, should give it a try. Takako took the first hit of pot in her life that night. It made her sleepy. When they all drove downtown to eat at a local restaurant, she dozed off in the car and missed out on dinner.

  A discotheque called Dance Your Ass Off became one of Richard’s favorite playgrounds in San Francisco. Located near the intersection of Taylor and Columbus, the place started up in the midseventies, featuring a logo of a girl dancing, a surprised expression on her face as she looked down to see her butt splitting off from her body. Don Carpenter described it as “a pickup joint. You’d go there to dance and meet chicks.” He, Brautigan, and Curt Gentry started showing up at Dance Your Ass Off not long after the disco opened for business.

  Richard Brautigan was not a dancer. His fame trumped fancy footwork when it came to picking up chicks. Carpenter recalled that Richard liked Dance Your Ass Off because “the guy who ran the place gave [him] a lot of special privileges.” Every time he came in, the manager called Herb Caen. Brautigan got his own designated table with drinks, “many of them free,” doubles coming on the double. Around this time, Don remembered, Richard first mentioned his attraction to “Oriental women.”

  Drunk on a Wednesday night, Richard sat at the Dance Your Ass Off bar, “humped over” his glass of bourbon when Jude Acers, the disco’s resident chess player, whose name was inscribed on the club wall, approached, escorting a beautiful young woman wearing a clinging low-cut black dress. Acers, small, pale, brilliant, pockmarked, introduced Richard to Marcia Clay, a twenty-three-year-old painter, who had recently moved back to San Francisco after a peripatetic life in France and Japan. For about six months, Clay lived in an apartment right behind Dance Your Ass Off. The loud soul music kept her awake every night until three. Fed up one evening, she went to the club, cut to the head of the line, and complained to the bouncer.

  “Come on in, lady,” the big guy said, and Marcia Clay found herself a regular customer. The club was the hangout of writers and hip blacks. Clay showed up often and danced all night long. “It was very sexy,” she recalled. Dr. Che, the friendly two-hundred-pound black bouncer, who looked like a classic genie out of a bottle, all solid muscle with a shaved head and gold earring (“a very sweet guy actually”), made sure she got safely home every night. During the summertime, Dr. Che worked as a rattlesnake killer on Mount St. Helena in Robert Louis Stevenson State Park. He and Jude Acers were among the “funny entourage” Marcia got to know at Dance Your Ass Off. The “crazy,” celebrity-fancying “chess genius” liked bringing her glasses of 7UP.

  This Wednesday night, Acers didn’t offer Clay a soft drink. “I want to do you the biggest favor that anybody has ever done for you,” he said.

  “What’s that, Jude?” Marcia asked.

  “I’m going to introduce you to Richard Brautigan.”

  “Oh yeah, okay, sure, fine,” she said. Secretly, the proposition excited her. She’d never been much of a reader as a kid but Brautigan was the first writer, other than J. D. Salinger, whose books Clay actually picked up and read in high school. At fourteen, a flower child who didn’t do drugs, she had been very impressed with Brautigan’s book The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster. Along with several of the poems it contained,
it had been dedicated to a woman also named Marcia. “That struck me as being significant,” she recalled.

  “Is that Richard Brautigan?” Marcia Clay thought nine years later, staring at the tall drunken man slumped over his whiskey. Marcia didn’t drink. She liked to dance. “Well, what are you sitting there for?” she said, her inner flower child challenging the famous writer. “Why don’t you come dance with me?”

  Richard hated to dance. Marcia lured him off his stool and dragged him out onto the disco floor. “What is this?” he mumbled, never at his best in situations over which he had no control. In spite of his awkward, embarrassed movements, she danced with him under the strobe lights, talking all the while, saying “whatever came to mind,” to keep his self-consciousness from getting the upper hand. Richard looked at his vivacious young partner “with this already obsessive stare.” Clay was fascinated with Brautigan.

  Marcia kept throwing questions at Richard as they danced. Brautigan had a puzzled look on his face. “You’re very intelligent,” he said at last.

  “Yeah, well what else is new?” Clay thought.

  Between dances, their heated conversation continued almost without a stop. Once again, intelligence in a woman provided a powerful aphrodisiac. Encountering someone as gorgeous and smart as Marcia Clay hit Richard like a double whammy. Whiskey consumption caused him to grow repetitive. On three separate occasions during the evening he told Clay, “What concerns me the most is that we live and die here.”

  They became friends. Clay went to visit Brautigan at his Union Street apartment the very next conversation. Soon, she started seeing him every night. They were never physically lovers. She slept with him “many, many nights, but we never had sex.” Clay meant she’d never had intercourse with Brautigan, although they made out like bandits. One time it got so close, they had an absurd argument at three in the morning over whether it had actually happened. “We had a curious relationship,” Clay recalled. “I was never attracted to him to be his girlfriend, but he was really infatuated with me. I was a female counterpart that was not a lover but was a lover.”

  The real glue holding their semiplatonic relationship together was always enlightened, lively talk. From the start, Brautigan remained as fascinated with Marcia Clay’s mind as with her obvious physical attributes. The first night she visited his apartment, Marcia regaled Richard with tales of her exotic life. It sounded even more interesting because of its brevity. Clay was born in Kansas City, Missouri. Her mother, Anita Clay Kornfeld, was a Southern writer who published an autobiographical novel, In a Bluebird’s Eye. Their big house in K.C. hosted frequent parties packed with writers, artists, and jazz musicians. Miles Davis and J. J. Johnson “and all kinds of wonderful black musicians used to come and perform at the house.” Miles was the first man ten-year-old Marcia ever saw naked. He’d spent the night and wandered out into the hall past the room where Clay and her sister played an early Saturday morning game of Monopoly. “Just this shadow of a man,” she recalled.

  Marcia began painting at thirteen, first exhibiting in major galleries four years later. She dropped out of high school and moved to Paris. For a time, Clay “hopscotched” between France and the United States. Fluent in French, Marcia became involved with a Frenchman, “off and on,” for three years. To maintain her independence, she’d head for Japan. Clay would sell a painting to buy a ticket to Tokyo, where she lived “much like a sponge” off the good graces of her affluent friends. “I was not an ordinary person,” she said, “I was just odd.”

  Brautigan spent time with Marcia Clay almost every day before he left for Japan. They lived only a few blocks apart in North Beach. “We just started having a wonderful time,” Clay remembered. Marcia had never been a drinker. After she started keeping company with Richard, she was drunk every night. One evening, Marcia became so inebriated she had difficulty navigating the steep hillside streets down to Enrico’s from Brautigan’s place at the intersection of Union and Montgomery. Richard hauled her up onto his shoulders and carried her piggyback, “clump, clump, clump” down the precipitous Kearny Street stairs. “I mean, I could have been dead,” Marcia recalled. “It was crazy, and I loved that kind of craziness.”

  Clay also loved Brautigan’s extravagance, recalling how they often took a cab from North Beach “all the way over” to Japantown to eat dinner in a restaurant he liked. He always took her into a Japanese bookstore and bought “five or six books at a time.”

  “I need somebody to talk about Japanese literature with,” Brautigan told her, “and so you have to read this so I can talk to you about it.”

  “I saw him like some kind of father figure,” Marcia said years later, “because he was older and he loved me, protected me. He was also kind of strict. I just sort of felt like a little girl.” Richard treated Marcia like she was special. He bought her presents and planned special things for them to do. For some reason, she didn’t see herself yet as a grown woman. “I was very comfortable feeling like somebody’s little girl,” Clay said. “And he liked me being a little girl.”

  Marcia Clay especially appreciated Brautigan’s acute sensitivity. In spite of her extraordinary beauty, Clay possessed an underlying shyness, the result of having been born with cerebral palsy. Her left arm remained a little shorter than her right. “It changed my psychology somehow,” Marcia admitted. Her slight handicap made her “an overachiever.” Richard recognized “that fighting position of wanting to strive to get something.”

  Brautigan noticed how Clay attempted to deflect attention from her cramped left hand by wearing her watch and all her rings on her right hand. One day, with the formal ceremony Richard so often adopted, he took both of Marcia’s hands in his and said very sincerely, “This right hand is very beautiful; it doesn’t need any jewelry. Put your jewelry on your other hand; it needs all the help it can get.”

  Most of Clay’s women friends couldn’t put up with Brautigan. “Why do you want to waste your time with a guy like that who is always drunk?” they told her. Marcia felt otherwise. “For me, it fit,” she said. “It fit. Some kind of intellectual, personal thing.” She didn’t view Richard as just a drunk. Clay saw him as “so alive, so intense, so strange, so bright, and such a deviant.”

  All these attributes came into play one night while having dinner at Vanessi’s. Marcia got an obstinate bit of food stuck in her teeth. She complained about it, and Brautigan jumped to his feet, rushing out of the restaurant. When he returned, he handed her a brand-new toothbrush. It felt like magic, being caught up in his imagination. “If I went somewhere with Richard,” Clay said, “I was with Richard Brautigan. It didn’t matter about the rest of the world because I was with somebody who was fantastic and the world knew it.”

  Around this same time, Ron Loewinsohn and Kitty Hughes invited Richard over to dinner at their rented house in the upscale Rockridge District of Oakland. Earlier that day, a friend of theirs, a PhD professor in the Berkeley English Department who had just broken up with her academic boyfriend, called Kitty and said she was feeling lonely. Could they fix her up with someone? As Brautigan was already coming over, Kitty invited her friend. The lady professor had a flamboyant manner and “came on pretty strong.” She said she was “feeling cuddly” and began “making rather overt gestures” directed at Richard, who was “turned off by her” and immediately backed away.

  Kitty Hughes felt that Brautigan was “looking for a vulnerable spot.” When the professor mentioned that she had done her PhD thesis on Samuel Beckett, Richard went on the attack. He insisted Beckett’s characters were like “comic book figures,” mere caricatures. “He really started letting her have it,” Hughes recalled. Brautigan bore down on the startled professor. “How can Beckett be taken seriously as an author?” he demanded, reducing her to tears as he repeated his “caricature” insult over and over.

  Kitty thought Richard “totally undermined this enterprise” her friend had worked on for a good part of her life. The professor was crying, “quite upset by this tre
atment.” Brautigan showed no remorse, Hughes observed. “In fact, I think he felt almost good about it. I think he felt he’d fended her off, too.” It was the only time Kitty ever remembered seeing Richard, who was “usually good humored about his goading of people,” attack someone quite so viciously.

  Before leaving the country, Brautigan wanted to complete the preparation of his will. Richard’s main concern was that his daughter not dispose of his literary works in the case of his death. Richard Hodge engaged the San Francisco firm of Ferguson, Hoffman, Henn & Mandel to prepare the document. William Mandel sent Hodge two copies of a preliminary draft for his review. Previously, Mandel’s firm had advised Brautigan that his estate as “presently constituted” did not have sufficient liquidity to cover any attendant inheritance and estate taxes. Brautigan’s taxable estate, including literary rights, cash, and realty holdings, was conservatively estimated to value between $500,000 and $750,000. The combined projected taxes on this amount were calculated at $100,000 to $200,000. Mandel advised Brautigan to buy term life insurance to provide the needed liquidity and suggested putting Brautigan’s literary works into a trust. To satisfy Richard’s desire not to have them sold piecemeal, he included this idea in the preliminary draft of the will.

  Brautigan took off for Japan on February 18, arriving at Haneda on February 20, again losing a day in travel due to the international date line. It was cold and snowing in Tokyo. Richard checked into the Keio Plaza Hotel, taking a suite on the thirty-fifth floor. Late at night, he made a beeline for The Cradle, his friendship with Takako Shiina undiminished after an eight-month hiatus. During the day, he wandered the city with his notebook, often spending the afternoons at a café in Mitsui Plaza he had visited often the previous year.