Asked if he’d been a customer there, Brautigan insisted he had never paid for sex in his life. Emphasizing his denial, Richard gestured in the air with his right hand, writing an invisible script. “Ink for the pen,” he said.
Brautigan told Gerber a story about traveling to Seoul, Korea, “with this mysterious woman that he was seeing.” Richard said he had to leave the country every sixty days to renew his Japanese visa, necessitating a “miserable” overnight trip to Seoul. None of this was true. Brautigan never journeyed to Korea. Not with Akiko, the mystery woman, nor anyone else. When he needed to extend his visa, Richard went to the Immigration Department and had a sixty-day extension permit stamped into his passport.
As Brautigan’s departure date approached, he tried planning for Akiko to come to America with him. Richard had given up his San Francisco apartment before leaving for Japan. Not having a permanent place to live provided additional complications. An incident late one night in Takako Shiina’s basement bar brought matters to a head. Inebriated when he wandered into The Cradle, Brautigan got increasingly more drunk. The American screenwriter Leonard Schrader sat at the bar talking in Japanese with Ryu Murakami and Kazuhiko Hasegawa, a film director.
Between 1969 and 1973, Leonard Schrader lived a double life in Japan, teaching American literature at Doshisha and Kyoto Universities during the day and hanging out with the Yamaguchi-gumi family, the preeminent Yakuza gangster clan in Kyoto, at night. Leonard used this experience to cowrite his first screenplay, The Yakuza (1975), with his younger brother, Paul, who gained international fame the next year with a script for Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver.
That night at The Cradle, Brautigan made several drunken attempts to insinuate himself into their conversation. They had no interest in talking with a boozy American who spoke no Japanese. Richard grew more insulting. He probably mixed up the two Schraders, confusing Leonard with Paul, who had treated Siew-Hwa Beh unkindly when they were film students at UCLA. Brautigan decided such behavior deserved retribution.
Stammering and repetitive, Richard grew increasingly nasty, drunkenly deriding Schrader. Kazuhiko Hasegawa had enough of hearing his friend abused by a loutish stranger. Rising suddenly, the film director flattened Brautigan’s nose with a sudden karate chop. Richard stood dumbfounded, his bleeding, broken nose mashed like roadkill. Without a word, the director then reached out and took hold of the damaged proboscis, tugging it straight with a deft twist.
Speechless, bloodied, and humiliated, anesthetized by oceans of booze, Brautigan watched in a fog of disbelief as Takako Shiina asked her bartender to fill a bucket with water. Kazuhiko Hasegawa sat on a couch, savoring his triumph. Takako poured the water over his head. It was a July night, but the director fretted he might freeze to death on his way home from The Cradle. Takako promptly brought Richard to a hospital. A sodden memorial to the event, the couch at The Cradle took a long time to dry.
Observing Richard’s broken nose a day or so later, Akiko said, “Why don’t you go back right now. That would be better and I’ll come to follow you.”
Brautigan asked if she wanted his old nose the way it was before.
“Yes,” she said. “I like your nose very much. So, please fix it.”
Knowing he needed nose reconstruction, Richard phoned Erik Weber in San Francisco before his departure. He asked if Weber had the latest pictures taken of him. Erik said yes. Richard wanted copies. “I just stopped what I was doing and ran in the darkroom,” Weber remembered. He made several prints. They got to Brautigan on time, and Erik charged him a “very minimal” fee of $3 or $4 per print.
“He was pissed off at me,” Weber said. “He thought I should have given him those prints without charging him. It was real petty. His idea of paying me back would be to take me to a $20 or $30 lunch.” After fourteen years, Weber and Brautigan’s long friendship started to unravel.
Richard Brautigan flew home to San Francisco from Tokyo on June 19. He stretched his stay to the limit, departing a day before his extension permit was due to expire. Richard called ahead, alerting Tony Dingman of his arrival time. At 9:00 am Tony and Jack Thibeau waited at SFO when Brautigan’s jet touched down. Richard traveled light, making room for two bottles of duty-free cognac in his carry-on bag.
Dingman and Thibeau drove Brautigan to the Russian Hill home of Dr. John Doss. Jack no longer remembers what was said about the broken nose. Dr. John had a look at Brautigan’s damaged snout. Margot and John believed Richard “got in a wrangle in the airport with someone about his nose and this guy evidently was a karate expert and popped him on the nose and broke it.”
“It’s OK until tomorrow,” Dr. Doss said after a quick examination. “I’m going to get you to see a specialist, and he’ll set your nose, and everything will be fine.” Tony and Jack drove Richard over to Nob Hill, where he took a room at the Fairmont Hotel. In the morning, he went to see an ear, nose, and throat guy recommended by John Doss, and everything turned out just as predicted.
Staying at the Fairmont did not turn out so happily. One morning around two, suffering from insomnia, a day or so after checking in, Brautigan phoned the Dosses. “Margot,” he pleaded, “can I come and stay in your house awhile. All I can hear are toilets flushing and people fucking.”
“I felt very sorry for him and said all right,” Margot Doss recalled.
Brautigan checked out of the Fairmont and caught a cab over to 1331 Greenwich Street. The Dosses put him up in their unfurnished guest room. John inflated a new nine-by-twelve air mattress to serve as a bed. “He was with us for a month,” Margot remembered.
“I think it was only about a week,” her husband corrected. “It just seemed like a month.”
Brautigan wasted no time before calling his old girlfriend Sherry Vetter and inviting her over. Sherry had known John and Margot Doss “from a long time back.” She had no reservations about visiting Richard in their home. They soon got it on upstairs in the guest room. Their energetic lovemaking was no secret to the Doss household. The air mattress “made all this incredible noise.”
Sherry remembers Richard lying on the bed in the Doss guest room “with his nose bandaged up.” She sat in a chair facing Brautigan while he read her the stories recently written in Japan in a funny nasal voice. Sherry’s friend Yuri Nishiyama had told her that Richard’s nose was broken at The Cradle in Tokyo when he asked a young musician, “a really lousy singer,” to knock it off and the Japanese troubadour smashed his guitar into Brautigan’s face.
Richard received the page proofs for Dreaming of Babylon at the Doss household. Sam Lawrence asked Brautigan to also send him the descriptive copy for Babylon’s inside dust jacket flaps. Richard called Don Carpenter, one of several trusted “ghost editors,” for help. “You have to write the praise about yourself,” Carpenter said. “The trick is to get a friend to do it. Then you edit it as best you can.” Don proofread every book after In Watermelon Sugar. “Which should it be, one word or two? Is it hyphenated? Is this a colon or a semicolon? He went over everything, time and time again.” Carpenter came to Brautigan’s aid again on Babylon. “The wild praise in the back of the book was written by me,” he said. “I could say all those things because I believed them.”
During his brief stay with the Dosses, Brautigan continued heading out nightly to favorite haunts in North Beach: Enrico’s, Specs’, and Vanessi’s. Specs’ (which opened in 1968) had a long, storied history. Until 1949, when the previous owner, Henri Lenoir, moved across Columbus to start Vesuvio Café, Specs’ was called 12 Adler Place. Herb Caen, Barnaby Conrad, and Kenneth Patchen all hung out there in the years after WWII. Alcohol provided Richard an introduction to total barroom strangers. One evening, after a chance meeting at Specs’, Brautigan brought his momentary new best friend back with him to 1331 Greenwich Street.
The next morning, Dr. John Doss, always the first in the family to rise, came downstairs to the kitchen to make breakfast. He was astonished on discovering Brautigan “with some Swedish poet sitt
ing at the kitchen table with two or three bottles of whiskey out there and tumblers.” The pair were still drinking and yammering at each other “in this incomprehensible language” of their own invention. To Dr. Doss, it seemed like a “mythic, shamanistic confrontation.” He had no idea “what the hell was going on.”
Deep in his heart, Richard knew such louche behavior was not conducive to lasting friendships and set about looking for a place to live. While Brautigan wandered about North Beach looking at real estate listings with Jack Thibeau and Tony Dingman, they strolled down Grant Avenue in search of refreshment. Tony “jumped out in front of Richard” without a word, and “started ripping matches one at a time out of a matchbook.” Dingman lit them and tossed each burning match into the air. “Just this little fireworks of matches,” Thibeau recalled.
“Pyrotonia,” quipped Richard.
Brautigan’s good humor stemmed from Akiko’s impending arrival. He happily told all his friends about her, describing her grace and classic beauty. “The only time I ever saw him really happy, like a kid would be happy, I mean really excited and delirious,” said Ward Dunham, the bartender at Enrico’s, “was when Aki was going to come here from Japan. That was the happiest I ever saw him.”
Effusive with joy, Richard paid a call on Marcia Clay in her spacious new apartment/studio on Stockton Street. He wasted no time before telling her about meeting Akiko. Marcia thought his first descriptions of Aki “already mythological.” Brautigan’s fiancée was not only “incredibly beautiful” but very intelligent and best of all familiar with his work. Richard told Marcia about the evening Aki first visited him at the Keio Plaza. “And, of course, I fell in love with her,” he said.
It didn’t take long for Brautigan to find a new apartment with “a sweeping view” on Telegraph Hill at 1349 Kearny, between Union and Green Streets, just a block away from where he’d lived with Valerie Estes in the late sixties and not far from his previous digs on Union. With a large overhanging bay window, Richard’s new sun-filled apartment stood on the second floor of a small two-story duplex. Brautigan’s rent was $525 a month. The convenient location provided another easy stroll down to Enrico’s, Vanessi’s and Chinatown. As soon as he was comfortably settled in, Richard sent for Akiko, who had quit her job at Sony. She arrived around the end of July and stayed a little more than three weeks. “And, he said, ‘I’ll introduce you to all my friends which is much better than me,’” Aki recalled. “And this was true.”
Among the first to visit were Ed and Jennifer Dorn, who by chance lived in an apartment directly across Kearny Street from Brautigan. Richard invited them over. Jenny observed that the couple “appeared to be very happy, and Richard was more than ever tiptoeing around and using quaint Japanese mannerisms.” Akiko struck her as “quite beautiful.” Brautigan had his new love serve tea and read them poetry in her native tongue.
Shortly after her arrival, Richard brought Aki over to 1851 Stockton Street to meet Marcia Clay. Brautigan prepared Clay for the meeting with an “avuncular” phone call. Concerned that Akiko knew no one in America, Richard asked Marcia to become her companion. She considered it “an appointed friendship: YOU WILL BE MY WIFE’S BEST FRIEND, an edict à la Richard.” Brautigan described Aki’s “friendless plight” with a touching concern bordering on pity. With this in mind, Clay “was surprised to see a buoyant, bright-eyed, sure-footed young beauty enter my place that day.” Akiko wore a pleated, patterned skirt, patent leather shoes, and white knee socks. She carried a tiny lettered Japanese handbag. “A living doll,” Marcia thought.
“Smug and smiling,” Richard sat back watching them interact, very pleased with himself. Marcia and Aki hit it off immediately, and their friendship, still strong today, lasted decades longer than Brautigan’s brief relationship with his Japanese fantasy.
Richard proudly escorted Akiko to all his favorite places, Enrico’s and Vanessi’s and “the little Japanese breakfast place on Columbus,” where friends gathered to eat and drink. Brautigan’s bride-to-be met them all. The couple enjoyed strolling through the Chinese markets on Stockton Street. “Chinatown is his favorite place to walk in the morning,” Aki said. Richard favored a small place selling barbecued pork. He’d buy a half pound or so and get them to chop it into small pieces to go, so he and Aki might enjoy an ambulatory breakfast, nibbling on bits of pork from a paper sack as they took in the sights.
While the happy pair embarked on various moveable San Francisco feasts, an unseen clock kept ticking. Before Richard and Aki could tie the knot in America, she first needed to get a divorce back in Japan. Her husband wanted assurance that Brautigan planned to marry her. To set the wheels in motion, Richard Hodge sent a telegram to Japan, a legal declaration that matrimony was indeed Brautigan’s avowed intention. Soon afterward, Akiko returned to Tokyo to fulfill the final legal residency requirements for the dissolution of her marriage.
She checked into room S-805 at the Hotel Okura in the Minato-ku. One of the finest hotels in Japan, the Okura was built on the grounds of the Okura Art Museum. The hotel boasted a traditional Japanese garden and two swimming pools, one for summertime use only. Free to take a dip in either one at her leisure, Aki truly swam laps of luxury. “I’m marrying with someone who has everything,” she said. Richard Brautigan picked up the tab. It came to almost $7,000.
Divorce remained uncommon in Japan. With their strict code of conduct, most Japanese regarded divorce as bringing shame on the family. None of this mattered very much to Akiko, who had defied convention for most of her life. Nor did it matter that in Japan, after almost every marital split-up, no alimony was ever awarded to the departing wife. “So, I give everything to my ex-husband,” Aki said, “because I was working together with him. We bought the house, apartment house. And I left my car to him.”
Akiko believed that she and Richard, with his poet’s soul, understood each other completely, united by a great shared passion. The sexy, charming, poetic letters she wrote him almost daily from the Hotel Okura reflected this belief. The very first was in itself a poem, where “one pure white ship / a grand white ship” sailed “slowly—slowly—slowly” toward her new love, her new life.
At the end of August, Aki replied to what she called “the most beautiful letter I ever had in my life!” Her brief note to Richard consisted of only three lines (“I touched you!” she enthused at the start). Her conclusion made it magic, a graphic design taking up half the page. Akiko transformed her final word, “Love,” into an undulating calligraphic wave. Numbers of iconic fish poked their startled heads from the swells, while one beautifully rendered specimen leaped high into the air, twisting with a deft sureness of line suggesting ancient Japanese shodō. Brautigan had for decades rendered crudely drawn fish as a personal hieroglyph. This graceful interpretation of his most potent symbol must surely have moved him.
With Akiko stoking the fires of his imagination, Brautigan began working on a series of short stories about his experiences during his first two trips to Japan. His workday also focused on the design and production of his two forthcoming books. Early in July, he told Helen Brann he wanted an illustration on the front dust jacket’s cover of June 30th. Richard rejected a purely typographical cover and declined using any quotations on the front of the book.
Brautigan needed immediate help with the cover for June 30th and gave Erik Weber a call. Taking the book’s title as his cue, Erik suggested using a picture of the departure stamp in Richard’s passport, a bold circle with its titular date at the exact center of page, colored red and looking like an ancient Japanese seal. Richard loved the concept. Erik took photos of the page in Richard’s passport. They worked up a dummy layout and sent it off to Sam Lawrence.
Akiko’s impending arrival gave Brautigan pause for thought. Commitment had never been his strong point, and now he awaited a new bride. “This better work,” his daughter told him sternly. “You better not screw this one up.” Prior to Aki’s arrival, Richard went for a long walk with Kitty Hughes along the bluf
fs above Agate Beach in Bolinas. He was “determined that he was going to make this one work.” At the same time, Brautigan was “really afraid that the marriage would fail.” Kitty felt that he was “girding himself up.” She also thought Richard had a fantasy image of the ideal Japanese woman.
“Wait till you see her,” he exulted. “She has classic Japanese features, like out of an old painting.”
The magic letters from Aki arrived almost daily. The last day of August, she wrote with news of Sadaharu Oh’s 755th career home run. (“BANZAI!!!”) The next day, her letter radiated pure happiness. “It’s September! It will be the most exciting month for ever.” Akiko said she’d put a handmade calendar up on the wall of her hotel room so she could check off the dates one at a time (“the days are disappearing day by day”) until the hour arrived for her to fly to America. To get things ready for his fiancée, Richard traveled up to Montana. While a hired cleaning crew freshened the Pine Creek house, Brautigan visited friends, giving away inscribed copies of his new novel.
All along, Helen Brann had been after Brautigan to get the descriptive copy for June 30th to Seymour Lawrence. Helen mailed Sam the catalog copy after Richard read it to her by phone. He called it his “most intimate book” and identified himself as “one of America’s most popular poets.” Brautigan had Helen fill in the blank when he dictated, “There are ___________ copies in print of Richard Brautigan’s three previous books of poetry.” His agent did the math: 600,022.
Brautigan received finished hardcover copies of Babylon early in September. He inscribed one (“This copy is for Ron and Kitty Loewinsohn”) while having dinner with his friends at their place in Rockridge. After their marriage, Kitty kept her own name, Hughes, but Richard always referred to her as Kitty Loewinsohn.
Akiko left for San Francisco in the last week of September. Her mother, Fusako Nishizawa, dictated a typewritten letter to Richard on the same day, having unsuccessfully attempted to phone him from the Hotel Okura that morning. “I am feeling such a sadness to lose my precious treasure,” she told her future son-in-law. She asked Richard “to be nice with my daughter” and wished them both “to be very happy together.” It was September 20 all over again for Aki when, far across the international date line, she reunited with Brautigan. The lovers were again in each other’s arms.
Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan Page 111
