Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Mina showed Brautigan his Chinaski script, hoping for some constructive input. “Garbage! Garbage!” Richard cried, hurling the manuscript out the second-floor window of Roz and Mina’s apartment, his violent criticism aimed more at Bukowski’s work than Mina’s adaptation. The next day Brautigan went shopping. Browsing through Toronto’s bookstores, he felt dismayed to find so few copies of his own books. Having sold out their initial orders, the Canadian booksellers neglected to reorder Brautigan’s titles.

  Richard returned to Slices West after buying two volumes of C. P. Cavafy’s poetry. The esteemed Greek poet had lived most of his adult life after the age of twenty-two in the ancient Hellenistic port city of Alexandria, Egypt. Cavafy had been born in Alexandria in 1863 and died there on his birthday, seventy years later. Knowing Mina was a Coptic Egyptian, Richard gave him the books, telling him he should write a new play about Constantine Cavafy.

  Mina considered Brautigan “a born storyteller.” While they worked at the deli, Roz and Mina enjoyed the tales Richard spun as he sipped from his ever-present bottle. They frequently went out with him to buy wine and liquor. At one point during Brautigan’s weeklong visit, Mina and Roz tried to organize an evening when he would read from his work, “but the alcohol started early and it did not happen.”

  What occurred instead was a brief and “bitter” love affair. The Minas introduced Richard to Barbara Gordon, an “early friend” from when they first moved back to Canada from the States and settled in Toronto. Barb was an aspiring actor, sharing her hopes and dreams with Mina Mina, further along in his quest for that same impossible goal. Brautigan remembered waking up with Gordon in her apartment the first morning after spending the night. “It’s a beautiful day here in Toronto,” Barb said, “and you’re with a nice Canadian girl.” Richard agreed on both counts.

  Gordon wanted everything to be “pleasant.” Brautigan prevented that from happening. “I fucked it up,” he wrote a year later. “It ended abruptly and badly, which was totally my fault.” Richard blamed the sudden breakup on an act of “outrageous stupidity” on his part, wishing he could “redesign the past.” His stay in Toronto came to an unhappy end. In need of traveling cash, Brautigan wrote Mina E. Mina a check for $1,000 on October 19.

  Richard checked out of his hotel the next morning. He had a couple hours to kill before catching his flight back to San Francisco and went to the movies. It was a cold day in Toronto. Brautigan chose a cheap theater catering to derelicts to see Tarzan, the Ape Man, a film made in a tropic jungle. The movie starred Bo Derek and was directed by her husband, John. Its main attraction was watching the voluptuous star take off her clothes. Even that wasn’t sufficient to warm the “sparse [. . .] misbegotten audience of transients.” The management elected not to turn up the heat, and “it was just as cold in the theater as outside on the street.”

  On his return to Frisco, Brautigan registered once again at the Kyoto Inn. His favorite hotel in Japantown remained as close to the Land of the Rising Sun as Richard would get that year. He ventured to more accessible pleasure spots: Enrico’s, Cho-Cho, Specs’, and the Albatross. Richard had no regular old lady in town. Nikki Arai had a boyfriend. Sherry Vetter was married. Eunice Kitagawa was back home in Hawaii. Missing her, Brautigan phoned Kitagawa in Honolulu. She missed him too, inviting Richard to come and spend Christmas.

  After three weeks in town, “dwindling finances” compelled Brautigan to seek new lodging. He could no longer afford the Kyoto Inn. Tony Dingman had a friend in Berkeley, a lawyer whose wife had hanged herself from a large wooden beam in the living room of their home on 17 Eucalyptus Road the previous Christmas. After the tragedy, the man had no desire to live there anymore but didn’t want to sell the place. At the attorney’s invitation, Dingman moved in, rent free.

  Richard Hodge, stuck in the middle of a divorce, also needed someplace to live. He had been sworn in as a superior court judge in March 1981. Governor Jerry Brown had appointed him more than six months earlier, but because he was in the middle of defending a big federal case against the Hells Angels, Hodge had to postpone his appointment. At the time, he moved from one borrowed apartment to the next, all his worldly possessions in twelve paper bags. Tony’s invitation to join him on Eucalyptus Road seemed the perfect solution. Hodge recalled this period of his life as a time when he poured vodka into his cornflakes for breakfast.

  Built in 1907, the house on Eucalyptus Road was a two-story, four-bedroom carpenter gothic structure brooding under the trees on a street curving into the hills above Claremont Avenue. Once Richard Brautigan learned of a free place to live with a couple old pals, he packed his few belongings and moved over to Berkeley. The morbid house fascinated Richard. After the lawyer’s wife committed suicide, he left everything untouched. Christmas cards from 1980 lined the mantel in the living room, where huge wooden ceiling beams held Brautigan’s attention. The fatal noose had dangled from one of them.

  It was a somber house filled with shadows. Wood paneling added to the pervasive darkness. High ceilings gave the shadows a place to linger. The downstairs consisted of a small office/den with a much larger living room off the front entry vestibule. A formal dining room with doors leading to the kitchen adjoined the living room. Shadow-shrouded antiques lurked against the walls. Plenty of gloomy space for lonely guys to wander around.

  Last to arrive, Brautigan slept by default in the dead woman’s bed upstairs. Dingman and Hodge had both avoided bunking there when making their sleeping arrangements. As soon as he settled in, Richard picked up the professional threads of his career. He phoned Sam Lawrence in mid-November, urging him to consider publishing Don Carpenter and complaining about the dearth of his books available for sale in Toronto. His publisher wrote back the next day (care of Joel Shawn), saying he’d “taken steps to remedy the situation.” Lawrence also promised to have a look at Don Carpenter’s work. So the Wind had gone into production. Sam reminded Richard that if he wanted a dedication page, it was time to send one.

  To simplify the telephone situation on Eucalyptus Road, Brautigan made all his calls using his Montana number. The Mountain Bell bill for November totaled $409.88. Hoping to cut down on expenses and maybe make an extra buck or two, Richard wrote to Helen Brann, questioning why she had taken a commission on the deal that moved Confederate General from Grove Press to Seymour Lawrence’s imprint. Brann was furious. “I find it incredible that I have to defend my taking a commission on any work I have done for you,” she wrote, reminding Brautigan of all of the effort she’d made on his behalf getting Grove to sell the rights to Lawrence. Helen rubbed salt in the wound, pointing out that the last royalty S&S statement for Willard “showed an unearned balance of $40,189.42.

  Earlier in the month, Sam Lawrence was out of town when a letter postmarked Paris arrived at his Boston office from Marc Chénetier, “the leading French authority on RB,” a professor of American literature at both the Sorbonne and the Université de Orléans. A deconstructionist critic, Chénetier had first gotten in touch with Helen Brann in 1975, after he’d been approached by Boise State University about writing a “longish piece” (forty-eight pages) on Brautigan for its Western Writers Series. This project didn’t pan out for Chénetier, although Boise State eventually included Richard in the series (no. 79, written by Jay Boyer) three years after his death.

  This time around, Professor Chénetier requested a meeting with Richard “sometime between now and early January.” Chénetier had written six articles on Brautigan, translated Dreaming of Babylon into French, and recently been asked by the British publisher Methuen to write a short book (to be released simultaneously in the United States) on Richard’s work. Seymour Lawrence’s office forwarded Chénetier’s letter to Helen Brann, suggesting she arrange a meeting with Brautigan.

  Richard had made several friends in the Hells Angels over the years. He enjoyed talking with Judge Hodge about his final case as a defense attorney, which resulted in the acquittal of twenty-six members in the motorcycle club. The f
eds had indicted the Angels under the RICO statute. Unable to nail them on drug dealing, the prosecution hoped to gain a conspiracy conviction. Hodge’s client was Jim Brandes, an enforcer for the outlaw bikers, charged with conspiring to sell meth and six counts of conspiracy to commit murder. At one point during jury selection, a prospective juror was asked what he knew about the Hells Angels. The man could only recall that they hosted an annual blood drive. Brandes leaned over to Hodge and whispered, “Give a little, take a little.”

  Sharing a house with a couple bachelor buddies brought back Beaver Street memories, a simpler time in Brautigan’s life, when he was always broke and didn’t worry about money because he had none. As a man who enjoyed visiting cemeteries and wrote about living above a funeral parlor in his youth, Richard derived perverse pleasure from living in a house haunted by a hanged woman, but when an invitation came from the Ketchikan Humanities Series to give a pair of readings, he booked an immediate flight to Alaska. The very name, Ketchikan, had long held potent magic for Brautigan. When his daughter was a newborn infant, he had written a poem, “The Silver Stairs of Ketchikan,” about her 2:00 am feeding. Brautigan sat aboard a plane flying north the first week in December.

  Brautigan found Ketchikan among the loveliest villages he’d ever seen. A month and a half later he wrote, “Ketchikan flows like a dream of wooden houses and buildings around the base of Deer Mountain, whose heavily wooded slopes come right down to the town, beautifully nudging it with spruce trees.” Richard didn’t enjoy this view of the “First City” for long after his plane touched down on Gravina Island airport, half a mile across the Tongass Narrows (future proposed location of “the bridge to nowhere”) from Ketchikan, a community of seven thousand spread along the shoreline of Revilla Island. Brautigan’s presentations were sponsored by KRBD-FM (assisted by a grant from the Alaska Humanities Forum). He was met by a representative from the radio station, who proposed a local scenic tour.

  After Richard checked into the Gilmore Hotel on Front Street, the fellow took him to see some totem poles. Brautigan had observed lots of totem poles in a museum on a trip to Vancouver the previous year. Ketchikan boasted the world’s largest collection of freestanding totem poles beneath the towering spruce forest. These totem poles were exposed to the weather (average annual Ketchikan rainfall: 137 inches), the real deal, not a bunch of hothouse museum-enclosed totem poles. Some of them were replicas carved by Native Americans employed by the CCC during the Roosevelt administration. Richard referred to them as “fake totem poles.”

  As they drove to see the CCC totem poles, Brautigan’s host complained about his “complicated love life.” Richard had no interest in these amorous details. The names of the local flora the man described meant even less as they walked through the woods toward a group of totem poles that Brautigan considered “very, very fake.”

  Driving back to Ketchikan, a cold December rain pelting down on the car, the one-way conversation returned to the many complications of love. Brautigan had his own disastrous love life to worry about and paid scant attention to the man’s rambling discourse, watching the reciprocating sweep of the windshield wipers as he retreated within, feeling himself growing smaller and smaller, “almost childlike.”

  At 7:30 pm on Saturday, December 5, Richard presented “An Evening’s Discussion with Richard Brautigan” in the humanities area of the Ketchikan High School. The next night, at the same time and location, he read selections from his poetry. A distinguished member of the state legislature was among Brautigan’s scattered audience on the second evening. Terry Gardiner had been born in Ketchikan in 1950. He started working as a commercial fisherman at fifteen, the perfect summer job. He went off to Western Washington University in Bellingham. He first read Richard Brautigan in college. He continued fishing professionally after he was elected to the Alaska House of Representatives at age twenty-two. The state government also conducted its business in the wintertime.

  Gardiner served as speaker of the house from 1979 to 1980. He planned to retire from politics after completing the last of five successive terms at the end of the coming winter session. He had recently started Silver Lining Seafood, a fish processing company. At Brautigan’s reading, Gardiner and a couple of his friends thought it might be fun to “invite him out for a beer. Show him the town.”

  They set off together on a bar crawl of “Ketchitown,” settling in for serious drinking at the Fireside Lounge. Richard drank whiskey. Terry Gardiner preferred tequila. The two “hit it off,” their time together short and intense. Gardiner had just ended a passionate relationship with a Japanese woman from Chicago who felt Alaska was “too hard.” Brautigan commiserated, knowing a great deal about Japanese women. He told his newfound friend that he “looked forward to arriving at a period of grace in [his] life.” Richard’s aim was to be “more realistic” and perhaps find some “tranquility.”

  During the course of their single high-powered evening, Brautigan started calling Terry the “wild legislator.” When closing time rolled around, they bought a bottle to go. Richard opted for tequila, his new friend’s beverage of choice. They staggered out into the falling snow. “Here, catch, wild legislator,” Brautigan called, tossing the tequila bottle across the street to Terry, who snagged it out of the frozen air “effortlessly.” Looking back, Richard remembered, “it was a wonderful drunken night in Alaska.”

  The next morning, Brautigan awoke with an enormous hangover. He lurched from his fifty-four-year-old hotel, bought a hot dog with mustard and relish for breakfast, and found his way across the street to the boat dock. Richard sat, staring up at a moored Panamanian freighter, surrounded by a small murder of crows. Halfway into his tube steak, a wave of nausea overcame him. Brautigan threw the remainder of his fast food to the crows. Richard had an appointment for an interview with Bill Green, a reporter from the Ketchikan Daily News, a couple hours before departing for Anchorage. He didn’t want to begin their discussion by vomiting.

  Brautigan met the reporter at a nearby restaurant. Benumbed by his hangover, Richard felt an unaccustomed loss for words. Wanting “to break the ice, loosen up, and put the interview on a casual footing,” he launched into the story of feeding his leftover hot dog and bun to the dockside crows. Brautigan became “very animated” telling this pointless tale, getting up from the table and waving his arms in an insane crow-like manner.

  Waiting to board his plane at the Gravina Island airport, Richard had time to befriend Pedro, a fat, friendly resident cat, who had free run of the terminal. On his flight up to Anchorage, which seemed to take forever, Brautigan wondered what the Ketchikan reporter would write about him. As it turned out, not a single word. Green had already assembled a file piece the previous Friday for the Daily News weekly art section (incorrectly claiming Richard had no phone in Montana). He had learned nothing new from Brautigan’s incoherent interview.

  Richard took off for Hawaii early on December 8, after spending the night in Anchorage. He made no new friends in the hotel bar and went to bed sober. Brautigan called flying with a hangover one of the “Top 40 of terrible things to do in my life.” Eunice Kitagawa met Richard at the Honolulu International Airport and drove him to her home through the snarl of Honolulu traffic, “the worst case of ‘Los Angeles’ automobile cultural damage” he’d ever seen. A singular object caught Brautigan’s attention. It was a brand-new man’s brown shoe lying alone at the center of an intersection remarkable for its quietness. There was no sign of an accident. The solitary brogue did not appear to be part of a pair. Richard thought the lone shoe seemed “almost haunting,” exactly the sort of odd urban detritus he always found fascinating.

  In many ways, Richard Brautigan was better suited for a vacation in Ketchikan than Oahu. His fair skin didn’t tolerate the sun. He preferred a cool, rainy Alaskan climate to the heat and beaches of Hawaii. Richard didn’t drive. A small seaport town had everything within walking distance. In Honolulu, an automobile was a necessity. One rainy day, weather suiting Brautigan�
�s sensitivities, he ventured out to a downtown restaurant with Kitagawa. The place had a sidewalk café, deserted due to the rain. As a devoted pedestrian watcher, Richard noted it would be a good place to sit and observe people in fair weather.

  “You used the wrong word,” Eunice said.

  Brautigan asked what she meant.

  “Cars,” Kitagawa told him. “You watch cars, not people.”

  Mostly, Richard watched TV. “He got into this sluggish mood,” Eunice recalled. “He just didn’t want to move.” Wanting to pick up Brautigan’s spirits, Kitagawa gave him a silk-screened T-shirt made by a friend. It depicted a rooster riding in the turret of a tank above the words “Fighting chickens.” Richard wanted his picture taken with a chicken while wearing it. Eunice had to work at the Pottery Steak House but asked her friend George Bennett to handle the photo session.

  A big storm blew in that night, and it rained “on and off” all morning. It looked like the photo shoot might be off. When the weather cleared, Bennett phoned to say he’d located a chicken. They set off into the mountains above the city. Brautigan found the change of scenery “lush and provocative like an airplane ad.” Richard and George encountered numbers of free-ranging chickens at the farm. A docile rooster was quickly captured. Brautigan knelt before the camera, holding the bewildered bird. Bennett took several snapshots. Richard thought he might have the picture framed and hung in his Montana home. This never happened. Later, Brautigan convinced Greg Keeler that the photograph showed him with a genuine “fighting cock.”