Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Margaret Crosby, the ACLU attorney representing Wexner and Woods, declared the case was “without precedent regarding publishers’ rights to disseminate information free from government censorship.” The ACLU suit demanded the five banned Brautigan books be returned to the classrooms under a court order. Private practice lawyer Ann Brick volunteered for the ACLU. She stated, “By no stretch of the imagination could any of the Brautigan works be considered obscene. The school officials are trying to pick and choose so that students see only the social and cultural views of the administration.”

  Not wanting to have the matter “clouded by his presence,” Richard Brautigan left town for Montana with his wife after a $94.74 farewell binge at Vanessi’s. Before departing, Brautigan released a press statement (September 24, 1978):

  On our Apollo 17 mission to the moon in December, 1972, the astronauts named a crater after a character from one of the books that is forbidden to be taught at Anderson High School. I do not think it is the policy of the United States Government to name the geography of the moon after a character from a dirty book.

  The crater is called Shorty.

  The book is Trout Fishing in America.

  If Trout Fishing in America can get to the moon, I think it should be able to get to Anderson High School.

  Tony Dingman met Richard and Akiko at the Bozeman airport, driving them home to Pine Creek. Dingman stayed on in Montana over the summer, looking after Brautigan’s place. Their congenial country life resumed as if uninterrupted. Aki showed Richard a letter from her aunt in Japan, written in Japanese. Akiko translated for her husband. Her aunt told her not to worry about the cabbages. They would grow and do well. The aunt treated Aki’s bondage concerns in the same matter-of-fact manner. Some men have certain tastes, she wrote to her niece, it’s nothing to worry about.

  Brautigan did almost no writing in Montana that fall, although a few stories grew out of Tony Dingman’s comic automotive misadventures and other ordinary events. A $400 offer in the local paper for a cherry 1953 Oldsmobile that turned out to be only an engine block became fiction, along with a tale about buying a $30 cake at a church bake sale and another concerning the time Tony failed to drive forward from an intersection in a small Montana town with no stop signs.

  In early October, Brautigan plunked down $16,500 in cash to Maverick Realty as a down payment for two little houses on South Third Street in Livingston. Richard worried what to do with his money. Brautigan told Dick Hodge, “he didn’t want to invest it in stocks, bonds, [or] anything to do with capitalist America. He had no interest in a tax shelter or any other sort of passive investment. He thought that was kind of dishonest.” Richard went through a long list of investment possibilities. “Basically when he was done there was nothing left but real estate.”

  Brautigan told Hodge that he didn’t want to become a landlord. Tony Dingman remembered, “His legacy from his mother was ‘The rich steal from the poor.’ Period.” The two houses Richard bought, a little compound clustered on the same side of South Third, were rental properties. Numbers 107 and 107½ were housed in a single structure. Number 109, set back off the sidewalk, was an older sandstone building used early in the twentieth century as a photographer’s studio. The total purchase price for all three units came to $57,500. Their combined monthly rental income totaled $507.50.

  On October 27, Richard signed a deal at Maverick Realty to buy another property in Livingston, a $52,000 purchase of a two-story brick building built in the 1890s at 311½ West Callender Street. Once the residence of a local tailor, and commercially zoned, it currently housed the Carden Big Sky School (a day care preschool). The down payment was $26,970. Brautigan paid off the balance at the closing on November 9, before he returned to San Francisco.

  When Gary Snyder held a weeklong residency at Montana State University the previous fall, Richard phoned the MSU English Department, leaving a message inviting Snyder over to Paradise Valley. Previously, Greg Keeler, the thirty-two-year-old poet and literature professor who’d arranged for a National Endowment matching-fund grant to bring Snyder to the university, stuck a note on Brautigan’s mailbox, “asking if you ever might want to come and read in Bozeman.” Keeler never heard back. Returning from visiting Richard and Aki, Gary told Greg he had urged Brautigan “to get more involved with the Montana community.”

  A year went by. Brautigan made a second call to the secretary of the MSU English Department. Richard wanted a residency of his own at Montana State. He invited Greg Keeler and two undergraduates from the Associated Students of Montana State University (ASMSU) programs board over to his house in Pine Creek for dinner. At the bottom of the note to Greg, it said “bring wine.” When the three showed up at Brautigan’s place on a snow-covered November afternoon, Keeler clutched a half-gallon of Almaden chablis.

  Born and raised in Oklahoma, Keeler came from an academic family. His parents both taught at Oklahoma State University. Greg received his MA there and a PhD from Idaho State but was by no stretch of anybody’s imagination a stereotypical academician. When Brautigan opened the front door, Keeler observed that he and Richard both looked (“tall, blond, and pink”) and dressed (“torn work shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots”) very much alike.

  To distance himself from Keeler, Brautigan took issue with all his literary opinions. He called Flaubert a “sack of shit,” and referred to William Stafford (one of Greg’s favorite poets) as a “cunt” because Stafford had once told Brautigan that his children enjoyed reading his books. Later, Brautigan picked up Queever, the Hjortsbergs’ long-haired cat visiting from across the creek, and tossed him into Keeler’s face.

  After a bit, Richard settled down, recognizing Greg more a kindred spirit than a stuffy academic. “You’re just a sprout,” Brautigan said upon learning Keeler’s age. He was very gracious to the students and deftly blunted their initial awkward attempts to talk business. “Let’s not worry about that stuff yet,” Richard said, “you’re in the country now. Relax.” They all sat down to a “very good” spaghetti dinner. Aki, who Greg thought looked “beautiful and appropriately inscrutable,” mentioned that she was interested in finding some local Japanese friends and perhaps continuing her education in Bozeman.

  Late that night, having stuffed his guests with pasta and plied them with copious amounts of booze, Richard abruptly turned the conversation toward negotiation. “Welp, let’s have a ballpark figure,” he said.

  The two students, drowsy with drink and teetering on the edge of sleep, looked at one another in confusion. They weren’t quite prepared for this. Restricted by the limitations of their ASMSU budget, which had to cover a variety of events over the school year, they fumbled for an appropriate amount, something affordable yet not insulting. Thinking of the $100 fees offered to other speakers, one of them groggily offered “Four . . .”

  “Four thousand it is,” Brautigan shot back. To the astonishment of the bewildered students, the deal was done.

  A week later, Greg Keeler and his wife, Judy, who also taught at MSU, invited Richard and Aki to their home in Bozeman for a reciprocal dinner. Akiko, the designated driver, took them over by way of Trail Creek Road, Brautigan’s favorite graveled back route, traversing the Gallatin range from Paradise Valley and connecting with I-90 at the old coal mining town of Chestnut. Richard had insisted that Greg return home this way the previous week. He and Aki had escorted Keeler and the two sleeping students as far as the junction with Highway 89 on the east side of the Yellowstone.

  The two students were once again in attendance at the Keeler’s, watching in amazement as their $4,000 visiting author leaned so far back in his host’s “cheap wicker Kmart love seat” that he toppled over backward. They also watched Brautigan work his way through Greg and Judy’s liquor cabinet, swilling down Canadian whiskey, gin, vodka, and rum after polishing off the wine and bourbon. Richard became drunk and drunker, lapsing into “a small Oriental voice and getting very serious.” Keeler, who dubbed Brautigan “The Captain,” called “thi
s late night voice the Imperial Mode.”

  Around midnight, the students were almost asleep on the couch. “Any more liquor?” Richard demanded. Greg rustled among the empties, finding only dead soldiers. Every drop had been consumed. “Time to go,” Brautigan said. Keeler remembered neither wife being much amused by the abrupt departure. Judy took an instant dislike to Richard that evening. Aki also “didn’t seem too thrilled about the exit.” She had to drive her inebriated husband home over the Bozeman Pass. For Greg Keeler, the evening began an improbable and enduring friendship.

  The Brautigans returned to San Francisco in the middle of November. On the sixteenth, an anonymous group called “Concerned Citizens” published an eight-page newspaper under the headline “Does ACLU Push Smut?” The paper contained excerpts from The Pill, Rommel, Confederate General, The Abortion, and Trout Fishing, along with the disclaimer “We regret the necessity to print and review this material, but we feel there is no better way to inform you of this but to let you see for your self.” The excerpts were all deliberately selected to emphasize sexual content.

  The front page printed a quotation from Biographical Dictionary of the Left, by Francis X. Gannon, referring to “the Communist Character of the American Civil Liberties Union,” along with a statement directed to the “Dear moral and Christian people of Shasta County.” The piece was signed “Morton” (Morton Giesecke), and read, in part, “I have looked over these books in question, and I judge them to be vile and foul to my tastes, they are contemptible by the light of God’s Scriptures. I feel that material of this sort will lead to further moral decay and perversion of all that is good and decent in our American Society.”

  The distant buzz of Birchite gadflies greatly annoyed Brautigan. Keith Abbott recalled him spending an entire evening talking about “his current censorship problems.” Richard knew every detail of the case. He repeated them over and over, quoting the public statements of the principal and the school board. “The next step to look for is book burning,” Brautigan solemnly warned Abbott, “just like the Nazis.”

  Other literary matters distracted him. Richard had long resented how Grove Press handled A Confederate General from Big Sur. Barney Rosset continually reissued the novel in small printings while Brautigan’s other titles were selling tens of thousands of copies. Sam Lawrence dreamed of acquiring the one that got away. After protracted negotiations and with the considerable help of Helen Meyer, chair of the board of the Dell Publishing Company, Sam’s dream came true in mid-November when Dell bought the rights to Confederate General for a single payment of $15,000.

  Lawrence planned to reissue the book in September 1979, simultaneously as a hardcover edition and a Delta trade paperback. To get the ball rolling, Sam asked Richard for his new jacket art suggestions. Lawrence also needed fresh front and back flap copy from Brautigan before the end of the month. Richard mailed new dust jacket copy for Confederate General to Helen Brann, which reflected long-standing resentments. Written in 1962–1963 when he was twenty-eight years old, the novel was about the year 1957, “a preview of things to come in America.” The book “sold less than a thousand copies and was immediately forgotten,” Brautigan wrote. “It was reprinted in 1968 and identified with the hippie movement and thought to be a description of the way they lived, though the book took place eleven years before when the hippies were still in grade school.”

  “This is a new edition,” Richard concluded. When John Hartnett mailed Brautigan’s flap copy to Sam Lawrence (Helen Brann was in the hospital, recovering from an operation), he included the author’s thoughts on the jacket design. Richard wanted “a silver/gray background (not foil) with the title and his name in scarlet (not red).” On the back, Brautigan asked for “just a small confederate flag, centered.”

  Don Carpenter remembered having lunch with Richard and Aki at Vanessi’s around this time. A friend of Aki’s was visiting from Japan, and they were showing her the town. “Right in the middle of lunch, somebody said the word ‘banzai’ in some context or another,” Don recalled, “and Richard went into a furious tirade and stamped out of the restaurant and we all had to run after him.”

  Brautigan’s angry outburst came because he believed “‘banzai’ meant emperor worship and he had lost friends in World War II and didn’t want that word used in his presence.” In fact, ‘banzai’ was a victory cry meaning “a life of ten thousand years,” used as often in sporting events as on the battlefield. Carpenter and the two women spoke Japanese. To placate Brautigan, they all pretended his version was correct. “I mean, the guy had surrealism for breakfast,” Don observed.

  Richard discovered a new watering hole, the Albatross Saloon on Columbus at the intersection of Kearny and Pacific. Once the hub of the Barbary Coast, the corner joint was first called the Billy Goat Saloon and reopened a year after the 1906 fire as the Andromeda Saloon. Jack Dempsey, future heavyweight champ, worked as a bouncer there in 1913 and 1914. New owners rescued the venerable dive from oblivion in 1977, stripping layers of paint from the ancient bar, removing a false ceiling to reveal the original pressed tin, and installing a 1916 Pukka Walla vertically rotating ceiling fan. The drinks were generous and the food all priced at $2.50. The Albatross became a hip hangout. Francis Ford Coppola entertained visiting French filmmakers there.

  Richard Brautigan celebrated his forty-fourth birthday at the Albatross Saloon. He had such a good time the management asked him to write a few words celebrating their establishment for future advertising. Richard obliged them, just as he had Kendrick Rand a decade earlier. “The Albatross Saloon provides a beautiful remembrance of days long since gone in San Francisco, never to return,” he wrote. “The Albatross is like eating and drinking in the past.”

  Brautigan also spent time with Marcia Clay, savoring her beauty and keen intelligence. Once, after Richard complained about the fragile state of his marriage, the subject of obsession arose. “He was a very obsessive person,” Clay observed. Brautigan didn’t want to hear about it. What Marcia had in mind was bondage. “How can you expect her to stay interested in you when you tie her up?” Clay demanded.

  Brautigan reacted furiously, breaking off their friendship. “I’m not going to talk to you for six years,” he proclaimed and stalked out. Marcia felt devastated. “The loss of Richard in my life is one experience that has had a real effect on me,” she wrote in her diary. “The romance of his friendship was suddenly put into value [. . .] My regret with Richard was to have created a split when, deep down inside I longed for the unity. There’s the immaturity. What is gone is gone—for now at least. I continue to hope that we will again be close.”

  Another old friendship ended at Richard and Nancy Hodge’s Page Street Christmas party. Erik Weber was among the many guests. Brautigan arrived later, already drunk, in the company of people Erik didn’t know. They hadn’t spoken in a month or two. Richard walked right by without acknowledging him. Later, leaning against the office wall, Weber found himself close to Brautigan. “Richard was pissed at me,” Erik remembered. Brautigan launched into his list of complaints, and Akiko walked into the room. Weber had never met his wife before. Richard made no introductions. He looked at Aki “with this drunken sheepish grin.”

  “When men are having a discussion,” Brautigan said, “the women . . .” With a dismissive wave of his hand, he signaled for Akiko to leave. Erik found the gesture “really rude,” as if the wife was expected to always walk behind her husband. Richard went on to castigate Erik about the cover for June 30th. The hardcover edition had not sold very well, and Brautigan blamed Weber. He had insisted Delacorte go with Erik’s design. “That was it. He owed me no more,” Weber recalled. “That was it, the end.”

  As the new year of 1979 got under way, evidence began to surface that members of the John Birch Society were behind the banning of Brautigan’s books up in Shasta County. Faced with such intolerant right-wing enemies, Richard decided to help the ACLU dig up information for their case. He got back in touch with Ken Kelley, who
had passed some sort of unspoken test with his initial interview. While they were sitting around Brautigan’s office discussing the project, Richard tossed a manila file folder onto Kelley’s lap. An identification label read “First Amendment.”

  The folder contained news clippings and documents on the removal of Richard’s books from the library of the Anderson High School library in Shasta County. Brautigan had an undercover assignment for Kelley. He wanted him to go up north to Anderson and poke around, dig into the background of the individuals who opposed his books. “I want you to call Maggie Crosby first,” Richard said.

  Ken didn’t recognize the name. “Who’s Maggie Crosby?” he asked. Brautigan explained that she was an attorney with the ACLU of Northern California. This was Kelley’s final test. If he pulled it off, Richard promised an invitation out to Montana the next summer. “You’ll meet people you’ve never met before in your life,” he enthused. “You’ll see mountain ranges climbing up under the sky.” Brautigan told Ken he’d take him trout fishing and promised to sit for a formal taped interview.

  “You can be the cosmic Sherlock Holmes,” Richard said.

  Kelley contacted Maggie Crosby, and she filled him in on the details of the case. Not long after that, Richard invited them both over to his place on Lombard Street for dinner. Ken knew “conceptually” that Richard had a wife, but “it never came up in casual conversation at all,” and he was taken slightly off guard on meeting “some Japanese person wearing Japanese clothes.” Akiko prepared an Italian/Japanese dinner: teriyaki steak and pasta con pesto, in accord with Brautigan’s wishes. When they discussed the censorship case, Maggie Crosby said she had “pretty solid evidence” that several of the parties involved were members of the John Birch Society. Ken Kelley’s job was to substantiate her case. Ken recalled this in great detail. Maggie Crosby cannot remember ever meeting Kelley.