Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Richard and Aki began their lives together in the apartment on Kearny Street. Fond of the view, Akiko loved living there. Whenever Brautigan went out, he brought back some small gift for his bride-to-be. Once, he gave her a stuffed cloth turtle. Aki called it “Tootsie,” Richard’s private nickname for her. “He called me Tootsie,” she said, “and I thought this is a tootsie.” Each little offering had its own delicate ceremony, “spiritual or sacred.” When Brautigan bought a bouquet of white daisies, he made sure to place a vivid blue iris at the center. “He was enchanted,” Akiko recalled.

  Kitty Hughes met Aki for the first time a couple days after her arrival. “She seemed very shy and retreating,” Kitty recalled. “This sort of submissive Japanese female.” Hughes thought she was a fantasy for Richard, an “image” he had created in his mind. “It became quickly apparent that Aki was in fact quite a strong woman,” Kitty said. “She was very aware of American culture and wanted to come here. She was more complicated than Richard thought.”

  Early in September, Brautigan asked Erik Weber to come over to Kearny Street and take some photographs for June 30th, June 30th. Akiko had gone out for the afternoon. Erik shot more than a dozen pictures of Richard wearing jeans and a rumpled denim work shirt, some in the apartment, others up on the roof of the building. Combed back off his forehead, Brautigan’s shoulder-length hair was obviously receding. In almost every frame, he appeared in tremendous pain, a puzzled, stricken look on his face. Richard grew angry when he looked at the pictures for the first time. “These are terrible,” he said. “I don’t want anyone to see these.” Brautigan used no photograph on the cover of June 30th. These pictures were the last Erik Weber ever took of Richard Brautigan. Weber mailed Sam Lawrence an invoice for his work on the front cover design for June 30th. Before receiving it, Lawrence wrote to Brautigan, “The design for JUNE 30th, JUNE 30th is fabulous. My gratitude to you and to Erik Weber.”

  In the weeks before Aki’s arrival, Brautigan discussed revisions to his will with attorney Bill Mandel. A revised copy from the law firm was ready to be mailed. Mandel called Richard, and he went to his office on Columbus Avenue to read the new draft firsthand. The changes added Akiko Yoshimura as a beneficiary. In the updated document, Brautigan’s personal effects went first to Aki, next to Ianthe, should the recently divorced Mrs. Yoshimura not survive him. His real estate holdings (Bolinas and Montana), were to be divided “by agreement,” between his daughter and Akiko. If they could not agree, the property was to be sold with the proceeds divided between them.

  The will’s provisions for a trust remained as originally written. Lifetime income from Brautigan’s literary estate was to be split equally, one half going to Ianthe, the other to Aki. Richard Hodge, Ron Loewinsohn, and Helen Brann were named as trustees, his agent appointed as a de facto literary executor. The will specified Brautigan’s remains be cremated without any funeral or memorial services. Richard signed the document in the presence of Mandel and another member of the firm, who acted as witnesses. When Brautigan returned to the Kearny Street apartment later in the day, he “very seriously” told Akiko, “I just changed my will.”

  This announcement had a special resonance for his future wife. Richard often told her he would end his life before he turned fifty. Brautigan never specifically used the word “suicide,” but Aki knew what he meant. “I didn’t take it that serious,” she said, “but always he was like a play. He was saying, ‘My life has to be [over] before fifty. He worshipped the way that Hemingway died.” Richard also told Akiko what he wanted done with his body after death. “Please cremate me,” he said, “and flush the ashes in the toilet bowl.”

  “Wow!” Aki replied, not knowing if he was kidding. “Your body is so big I’m afraid that flush going to be stuck.”

  Richard “wanted to marry right away,” but didn’t want the ceremony to take place in San Francisco, fearing his local celebrity might transform the occasion into media-mania. Around the end of September, Brautigan called Tony Dingman, asking him to come to Montana when he left with Aki. The idea was to get married in some quiet courthouse in the middle of nowhere. “He wanted to marry somewhere in Montana,” Akiko recalled. “It’s such a beautiful place.” With Tony at the wheel of the Plymouth Fury, they drove across the wide reaches of Montana. “Richard wanted to show me how grand the state was,” Aki said. Whenever they crossed the Missouri River in “White Acre,” Brautigan started singing “Oh, Shenandoah,” at the top of his lungs. “One of the happiest time for us.”

  While making plans for their wedding, Richard went fishing. This involved a trip to Dan Bailey’s Fly Shop to buy a license and a new supply of flies and leaders. Brautigan loved poking around in fishing tackle stores. He thought of them as “cathedrals of childhood romance.” As a poor kid in Oregon he could only afford the most minimal fishing gear and spent “thousands of hours worshipping the possibilities of rods and reels.” Now he could buy anything his heart desired.

  At the same time, Richard resumed his writing life, working on short stories, this time about his life in Montana, all possessing his signature oblique poetic point of view. One concerned spiders seeking shelter in his house from the cold. Another, “Autumn Trout Gathering,” was about Richard’s preparations for his first day of fall fishing, and Aki reminding him to bring some Kleenex along on his trip to the spring creek. “Cat Cantaloupe” told of luring the Hjortsbergs’ cats over “with extravagant promises of cat delicacies.”

  Not being year-round residents, Richard and Akiko had no cats of their own. They did have plenty of mice and welcomed regular visits from Pandora or Queever. One night, the couple ate not-quite-ripe cantaloupe with their dinner. Dissatisfied, they set their plates on the floor and were astonished to see the visiting cat make a meal of their leftover melon. This formed the basis of his story, Brautigan again coaxing something amusing from the mundane.

  Back before meeting Akiko, when Richard lived alone at Pine Creek, he had a way of cadging special treats from the Hjortsbergs, often showing up in his neighbors’ kitchen at breakfast time, coffee cup in hand, looking for “a hot cup of joe.” Gatz and Marian raised their own pigs, and Brautigan developed a special fondness for the bacon they produced. “He was always trying to weasel a rasher of bacon,” Marian remembered. “He’d come over weaseling and wheedling.”

  “Hmmm. Do I smell bacon?” Richard would say. “Have you been cooking bacon recently? I’ll bring you quart of real maple syrup if you cook me breakfast with your real bacon.”

  One day Richard got wind that Gatz was going grouse hunting. “And he shuffled over with those long, black, funny boot shoes he used to wear,” Marian recalled, “and he started rubbing his hands together like Uriah Heep.”

  “If you get enough grouse,” Brautigan said, “I have a nice bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé. If you were to invite me over.”

  In those days, the Hjortsbergs made their own wine and could never afford anything as extravagant as imported Pouilly-Fuissé. This was a tempting offer. But Gatz bagged only a brace of grouse that afternoon, just enough for two. The next morning, the birds plucked and cool in the fridge, Marian stood washing the breakfast dishes, looking out the long kitchen window, when she spotted Queever dragging a freshly killed grouse across the front lawn. “I ran out in my bathrobe and grabbed the grouse,” she said. “The extra grouse for Richard.” Marian roasted the game birds. Brautigan came over for dinner, bringing along two bottles of Pouilly-Fuissé. “We had a very fine dinner,” she remembered, “and I don’t think we ever told him it was caught by the cat.”

  Problems started for Richard and Aki when they applied for a marriage license. A blood test was required, and the application asked for information regarding race and religion. This greatly angered Richard. Things went from bad to worse. At a subsequent interview, Brautigan was asked to produce his birth certificate. “He was upset because they asked about his father,” Akiko said. “All of a sudden his face changed.” Richard flushed with rage, “and he turn
ed around and was gone.”

  “I don’t want to marry here,” he told Aki. She knew it was because he did not want to discuss his family roots with anyone. “For some people it’s not that big matter,” she said, “but for him I think it was.”

  Brautigan and his bride-to-be returned to San Francisco. Tony Dingman stayed on alone at Pine Creek. Richard said he’d be back in a week or so. “And then it became October and then November and then it became December,” Dingman recalled. “And they kept saying ‘We’ll come, we’ll come.’” Each week, Brautigan phoned Dingman to say, “I’ll be up. We’ll be up.” Tony remembered spending most of the winter alone in Richard’s Montana place. “It was kind of neat,” he said. “I wrote a whole bunch of stuff.”

  That fall, Margot Patterson Doss was introduced to Akiko Yoshimura at a party hosted by Don Allen. “I thought: Here’s this poor young woman from Japan who has no friends here.” Margot wasted little time remedying the situation. A Japanese couple, Fumio and Mieko Wada, lived immediately across Greenwich Street from the Dosses’ house on Russian Hill. Margot brought Akiko over to meet them. “They entertained Richard and Aki many times,” Doss recalled. “We spent a number of wonderful evenings at Mieko’s and Fumio’s.”

  By the end of September, negative reaction to Dreaming of Babylon began its ugly critical yawp, newspaper reviewers across the country rushing in for the kill. The bad reviews depressed Brautigan. Casting about for a lifeline, he began asking friends what they thought of the book. Bruce Conner was among those cornered. “It was the first time he had asked me anything like that,” Conner said, “and I don’t talk about other people’s work. I just don’t do it. I think it’s inappropriate.”

  Bruce didn’t like Richard’s novel. “I didn’t want to tell him that I didn’t like the book.” The only thing Conner could think to say concerned a reference to a seventy-five-watt lightbulb in the first chapter. It felt wrong to him. “The book was supposed to be a period piece, which I think was in the 1940s. People didn’t have a lot of bright lights in their homes.” Conner had worked in a grocery store as a kid in Wichita, Kansas, and remembered all the bulbs there being forty-watters.

  “I don’t think seventy-five-watt bulbs were popular,” Bruce told Richard. “This upset him a great deal because the only thing I could talk to him about was a seventy-five-watt bulb, about his whole novel, and ‘Yes,’ he’d researched it, and ‘yes,’ there were seventy-five-watt bulbs in the 1940s.” This composed the “sum total” of Bruce Conner’s criticism of Richard Brautigan’s work.

  In November, Brautigan phoned his lawyer, Richard Hodge, and asked for his help. He and Aki yearned to get married, but Richard didn’t want the ceremony to take place in San Francisco because he feared his fame would be a “big story” and he and Akiko would be hounded by the press. Hodge came to the rescue. He had a friend, Contra Costa Superior Court Judge Patricia Herron, whom he had known since his two-year stint as a deputy district attorney in Richmond when he first arrived in the Bay Area.

  Pat Herron agreed to marry the eager couple, in “complete anonymity,” in her home on Point Richmond. The wedding day, December 1, 1977, was warm and clear. Judge Herron lived in a spacious New England–style home overlooking San Francisco Bay. Other than the bride and groom, only the witnesses, Richard and Nancy Hodge, and the presiding judge were in attendance. It was the first time the Hodges ever met Akiko. They thought she was “charming.” Aki wore a soft blue-green dress she had brought from Tokyo. Richard dressed in jeans as usual, adding a jacket for the occasion, along with a dressy pair of cream and gray two-tone lizard cowboy boots for a touch of class.

  The ceremony took place out on the deck. A bright sun glinted off the wave-tossed bay. Brautigan hated convention and asked Judge Herron to keep the official proceedings as brief and simple as possible. Richard Hodge served as best man. Aki brought Tootsie, her stuffed toy turtle. In Japanese and Chinese legend, turtles symbolize long life. She didn’t carry a bridal bouquet or flowers of any kind, thinking this “quite nice” because it was “not ordinary.” It was all over in a matter of moments. As Judge Herron pronounced them man and wife, Richard picked a strand of parsley and wound it around her ring finger. “This is your wedding band, dear,” he said, laughing with loud satisfaction.

  A champagne toast followed the no-frills ceremony. Akiko remembered the “beautiful curved crystal, special wine goblets.” Afterward, the wedding party went out for a late afternoon lunch at a fine local neighborhood restaurant. An aura of happiness surrounded the occasion. For the moment, it seemed the good times might last forever.

  forty-eight: rattrap roulette

  OTHER THAN HIS two-month daybook experiment in 1975, Richard Brautigan did not keep a journal. There have been times when I’ve regretted that I didn’t either. Had I even guessed (way back when Richard was my pal and next-door neighbor) that someday I’d be his biographer, I’d have been a proper little Boswell, jotting down every overheard witticism, scribbling away after each shared adventure, keeping the record straight. Without a written chronicle of times gone by, I have to rely on memory, so often an unreliable instrument.

  Perhaps my most serious blackout occurred in the fall of 1977. Gary Snyder had a weeklong residency at Montana State University and came over one afternoon to visit Richard. Not that I’ve forgotten Gary Snyder. I’d admired his writing since college and was thrilled when Richard and Aki invited me and Marian to dinner so we could meet him. I remember that evening very well, not so much the food, but the conversation.

  Snyder seemed laid-back and affable, although every word revealed an accumulated wisdom underlying his regular-guy persona. Aki told me that he spoke the best Japanese of any gaijin she’d ever met. She had not yet perfected her own English, but her eyes sparkled with a keen intelligence as she went on in her sing-song accent. “Funny thing about Gary,” she said, merriment dancing in her topaz gaze, “in America he all time wear his Buddha robes, but in Tokyo, he only wear cowboy hat.” I said I knew just what she meant.

  Later that same week, Marian and I reciprocated by hosting a dinner of our own. This is the evening I don’t remember, an omission that seems all the more incredible as the following events all transpired under my own roof. My mind remains a blank slate, but fortunately I have the detailed testimony of one of our invited friends supplementing what I have inexplicably forgotten. The guest list included Richard and Akiko; Gary Snyder; Peter and Becky Fonda; poet/novelist Dan Gerber; his wife, Ginny; and Bob Watkins (who later ran a trading post near Taos) and his girlfriend, Sandy.

  Having eleven seated at dinner meant breaking out the monogrammed silver and cut-crystal wineglasses, our finest embroidered Irish linen tablecloth spread across the dining room table. There would have been candlelight and a centerpiece of autumn leaves and flowers (aster, phlox, orange Japanese lanterns). Marian was a superb cook. The multicourse meal would have been exquisite, climaxing in coffee, brandy, and a pie made with apples picked from the hundred-year-old tree growing in our front yard. (The secret to the flakiest crust anyone had ever tasted was lard, rendered from the pigs we sent to slaughter every fall.) After dinner, everyone repaired to a spacious living room, heated against the chill night by a barrel-shaped antique wood stove. I remember none of this, evidence of the quantity of red wine I had consumed with dinner.

  With elaborate tact and courtesy, like a trained diplomat, Richard had arranged for Gary Snyder to read his poetry that evening. Everyone gathered around as Snyder thumbed through paperback editions of his work, giving voice to lines hewed with a woodsman’s skill and shaped by the wisdom of a true sage. “Gary read this lovely poem,” Dan Gerber recalled. (The lament of the brain-dead: Japhy Ryder reading in my living room and I can’t remember a damn thing.)

  Afterward, there was “a lot of heavy drinking going on.” The party mingled in shifting conversational groups of twos and threes. At one point, Richard wandered off, perhaps to the kitchen to refresh his whiskey glass. At that time, Marian
and I had a rodent problem. I’d set a rattrap in the pantry, where we kept the bags of dog food the big ones favored. These gadgets looked like an ordinary wooden mousetrap only much larger, a comic book exaggeration of the commonplace. When Richard returned to the living room, he carried the cocked rattrap in his hands.

  He proposed a bizarre entertainment. The idea was to toss the trap around the room from person to person. The object: not to have the infernal thing go off and get your fingers snapped. “Well, Snyder was, I mean, he was just kind of like, shhh, these people are crazy,” Dan Gerber told me, describing the mock horror on the face of the guest of honor. But Gary played the game with backwoods gusto, catching the rattrap as if he’d done it all his life, flipping the thing across the room to another potential victim. It was thrown from hand to hand three or four times and never went off.

  Disappointed by the lack of action, Richard balanced the rattrap, still cocked, on top of a door frame. He jumped up, banging the trap with his head to spring the mechanism. The rectangular metal bow snapped shut, cutting a large gash in his forehead. Richard’s delighted laughter broke the stunned silence. He refused all offers to tend the wound and went around “very proudly” for the remainder of the evening with blood dripping from his brow. I don’t remember any of this.

  forty-nine: banned in the boondocks

  AFTER THEIR WEDDING, Richard and Akiko planned to travel to the East Coast. Helen Brann’s office made hotel reservations for them in New York. Brautigan hadn’t had much contact from his agent for several weeks, and the lack of attention troubled him. Richard depended upon Helen for much more than deal-making. He considered her a friend and expected undivided loyalty from his friends. Brautigan brooded on the matter until he could no longer stand it. After a long night of drinking, he phoned Helen Brann at 1:30 am. It was past four in the morning in Manhattan.