Staying home alone at Eunice’s place meant Richard spent hours on the phone (charging the calls to his Mountain Bell account). Back in November, Sam Lawrence had told Brautigan to get in touch with Tom Condon, assistant managing editor of Delacorte Press, if he wanted a dedication page for So the Wind. In mid-December, Richard sent him his dedication: “This Book is for Portia Crockett and Marian Renken.” Brautigan coyly used his friends’ maiden names for the printed inscription. Portia was Becky Forida’s actual given name.
Money problems nagged at the edges of Richard’s mind. He called Greg Keeler at 1:00 am (Montana time), asking if there was any possibility of getting a teaching job at MSU the next spring. Brautigan’s employment chances were enhanced by the recent appointment of Paul Ferlazzo, bright, young, and optimistic, as the new English Department head. After a number of late-night strategy sessions with Keeler, Brautigan called Ferlazzo with some trepidation and the “wheels started turning.” If things worked out, Brautigan would be appointed a visiting professor for the spring term of 1982. He needed the work. Helen Brann sent a Form 1099 listing 1981 miscellaneous income of $58,275.67, but at the end of December, the balance remaining in Richard’s checking account totaled $600.17.
Brautigan and Kitagawa left Oahu only once during his monthlong visit. They flew over to Maui on a day trip. Eunice remembered finding a now-defunct airline that charged only $13 each way. “Richard’s kind of deal,” she said. Kitagawa, born and raised on Maui, knew every corner of the beautiful island. Brautigan had no interest in visiting the old whaling port of Lahaina, or exploring the Hana coast, or driving to the crest of Haleakalâ, Maui’s dormant volcano. A self-confessed fan of cemeteries, Richard most wanted to see a graveyard, so Eunice took him to the churchyard where several of her relatives were buried. A Buddhist shrine with peeling paint stood beside the cemetery.
Brautigan and Kitagawa went separate ways inside the graveyard. She paid her respects to deceased family members, wondering why her boyfriend would rather be here instead of enjoying one of Maui’s beautiful beaches. Richard wandered around on his own, observing the mundane details that always fascinated him. He stared at a pile of discarded tombstones and rows of fallen light poles entwined in rotting electrical wire. This seemed logical. Who needs lights in a boneyard?
Spotting an old Japanese couple fussing about the untended graves, Brautigan pointed them out to Kitagawa, and she went over to ask why they were there. “They are very unhappy with the condition of this cemetery,” Eunice reported back. Richard felt sympathetic with their impossible task. He wondered about the pile of abandoned tombstones. Kitagawa explained that they were all from graves that surviving family members didn’t want to maintain. The remains were disinterred and cremated, and the ashes stored away in the shrine. This made no sense to Brautigan. Why bother to bury the dead in the first place if their graves would not be their final resting place?
Eunice didn’t really care. She wanted to catch the 2:00 pm flight to Honolulu so she’d get back in time for a nap before going to work that night. If they left right away they could drive to her mother’s restaurant, Tokyo Tei, for lunch before departing. “My mother makes good tempura,” Kitagawa told him. Richard thought the Japanese graveyard was the most interesting thing he had seen on Maui. He knew he’d never return. Brautigan “had used [Maui] up.”
Richard didn’t realize it at the time, but he’d used up the entire Hawaiian archipelago. After returning to San Francisco in mid-January, Brautigan never went back to the Aloha State. Eunice Kitagawa’s next Bay Area visitors were Nikki Arai and her black boyfriend, George Bowles. Richard moved again into the dead woman’s room at 17 Eucalyptus Road. He had enjoyed a rent-free month in Honolulu and his current finances demanded more of the same.
A letter from Dennis Lynch, who had chaired the MLA “Zen and Poetry” panel discussion a couple years before, brightened Brautigan’s financial prospects. Lynch, a graduate student and English instructor at Northern Illinois University, invited Richard to give a presentation there in February. This was not a promissory note. Lynch’s invitation came authorized by James M. Mellard, chairman of the English Department, and Jerome Klinkowitz, a rising lit/crit star.
Accustomed to living with a ghost in his gloomy Bolinas house, Richard felt no trepidation at sharing a bed with the spirit of a woman who had hanged herself downstairs. What he did feel was curiosity. Brautigan explored the spacious Berkeley home, roaming from one shadowed room to the next, trying to imagine the details of the tragedy. He wondered if the phone rang at the moment the woman hanged herself. Perhaps, barely alive, her last breath choking from her dangling body, she heard the telephone’s insistent briiing . . . briiing . . . briiing. Maybe it was good news. She would never know. Whoever called got no answer. No one home anymore.
Brautigan knew he wanted to write about this. He decided to give himself a birthday present, an uninterrupted week at the Kyoto Inn. On Saturday morning, January 30, Richard rode the BART train under the Bay to the City, fighting an urge to tell the stranger sitting next to him, “Today is my birthday. I’m forty-seven.” Before checking into his favorite San Francisco hotel, Brautigan paid $2.50 for a 160-page notebook at the Kinokuniya bookstore, a branch of an international Japanese book and stationery chain, in Japantown.
Later in the day, armed with a brand-new Pilot ballpoint pen, Richard began work in the notebook on his next novel. Financial circumstances demanded prudence, playing it safe once again in familiar Brautigan territory, but artistic impulses ran too deep, and Richard set out to explore the outer uncharted edges of experimental fiction. He arbitrarily decided that his novel would run no longer than the notebook in which he composed it. Once Brautigan reached page 160, the book was over. He also resolved not to reread any of his work until he finished the novel. No going back to revise along the way. Richard planned on flying blind into the vast unknown emptiness of the blank page.
“I saw a brand-new man’s shoe lying in the middle of a quiet Honolulu intersection,” Brautigan wrote on the first line of the first page in his Japanese notebook. “It was a brown shoe that sparkled like a leather diamond.” Richard set out on a circuitous examination of the impact that staying in a house where a woman had hanged herself made on his life, retracing his travels over the past three months, weaving in and out of 17 Eucalyptus Road. Because he determined not to reread his material as he went along, the lone shoe spotted in Hawaii remained masculine until Glenise Sibbern typed Brautigan’s handwritten manuscript. Richard altered the opening line and changed the gender of the abandoned footwear to better fit his theme. The shoe became a woman’s. Deliberately haphazard, Brautigan did very little revising when he edited the typescript. Like a jazz solo, the novel flowed from him in a fluid improvisation.
By the end of a long day of writing, Richard had completed a dozen or more pages in his new notebook. He dated each day’s entry, adding the word “Finished” when he was done. It had been Brautigan’s intention to stay at the Kyoto Inn until he’d completed his short novel. After a week, when the plum trees in Japantown (just budding when he moved in) were in full bloom, Richard’s funds ran low again. He went back to Berkeley the next day. Over the previous seven days, Brautigan had filled eighty pages, half of his notebook, with writing. He stood at the midpoint of his journey, the literary peregrinations meandering through Buffalo, Toronto, Ketchikan, and Honolulu, including a 1964 stopover in Mendocino.
Richard returned to 17 Eucalyptus Road on February 6. He had planned on staying in the Kyoto Inn to finish his book before going to Illinois for the university gig. He never wanted to return to the house on Eucalyptus. “It would no longer be a part of my life.” Once he was back, sleeping again in the dead woman’s bed, Brautigan felt he needed more time to experience “the atmosphere of the house.”
Richard did no further work on his novel for nine days. In mid-February, he sat in the small den off the living room and began writing in the notebook again. He datelined this section “Febr
uary 6, 1982,” nine days earlier. A cold rain fell outside. The lurking shadows in the room grew darker. Imbued with morbidity, Brautigan spent the next several pages describing the interior of 17 Eucalyptus Road.
Two days later, Richard Brautigan sat in a San Francisco coffee shop, writing the next segment of his novel. He would fly to Chicago in the morning. Brautigan’s spring term teaching appointment at Montana State had been approved. His brief stint at Northern Illinois University would serve as a dress rehearsal for the real thing. Richard wrote about having no love life during his return to Berkeley. He was awakened each morning at dawn by the “soft animal moaning” of a woman enjoying sex. The sounds came from a house nearby. Upon reflection, Brautigan guessed they were “pretty loud.” Loud enough to wake him up. For reasons of his own, Richard dated this passage February 15, 1982, off by forty-eight hours.
On the eighteenth, Dennis Lynch met Brautigan at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. The weather was very cold, and dirty snow covered ground. They drove about fifty miles northwest to DeKalb. Richard was hungry. They stopped along the way at a McDonald’s so he could eat a fish sandwich and drink a cup of coffee. Lynch took them to his one-bedroom apartment in what Brautigan described as “a student ghetto.” They stayed up until 4:00 am, drinking and shooting the shit. When Dennis gave Richard his bedroom, offering to sleep on the couch, Brautigan was too tired to refuse, a decision he later regretted when Lynch’s cuckoo clock sang its mechanical song every fifteen minutes through the night.
The next afternoon Richard taught Dennis Lynch’s English 105 class. When it ended, Brautigan scribbled signatures at an autograph party “that lasted almost three hours.” Later in the evening, Brautigan gave a formal reading at the NIU English Department. Afterward, James Mellard, chairman of the department, hosted a reception for Richard at his home. Mellard’s book The Exploded Form: The Modernist Novel in America (1980) included a chapter on Trout Fishing. He was a fan and welcomed Brautigan along with a crowd of student and faculty admirers. “They drank up all the beer and wine,” he recalled, “then proceeded on to our modest supply of liquor, leaving not a drop undrunk.”
Mellard remembered Richard sitting on the living room floor, telling stories. Discussing his critics, Brautigan said “he would like to line [them] up and shoot them.” Richard made a gesture of raising his hand like a gun “and shooting each one, complete with sound effects.” It grew late. Mellard and his wife needed to get some sleep and headed upstairs, telling the rowdy group, “Y’all stay here; we’re going to bed.” After the Mellards’ “modest” booze stash was consumed, the crowd didn’t stick around much longer. They headed over to Dennis Lynch’s apartment, where the party roared on until 4:00 am.
That should have been the end of it. During his book tour, Brautigan would have been on the morning flight out of town. This time he didn’t leave, hanging around DeKalb for another ten days, enduring the nocturnal mechanical call of Lynch’s cuckoo clock while his host tossed on the couch in the other room. For two straight days, Richard and Dennis ate nothing but franchise takeout, what Brautigan called “sub-generic” food. Slovenly bachelors, they tossed their Styrofoam containers, wax paper wrappers, and cardboard cups onto the floor, turning the small apartment into the aftermath of “a confused picnic.” The final straw came when one of Lynch’s students “nonchalantly” threw the packaging from his to-go hamburger onto the surrounding trash heap.
Richard and Dennis cleaned up the mess and aired the apartment, hauling the trash away. It felt like an exorcism. After their garbage epiphany, they ate out, accepting occasional invitations and seeking restaurants more gastronomically inclined than fast-food joints. One establishment offered Trout á la Brautigan on its menu. On another night, a student took Richard home to his parents’ house for some “real” home cooking. At a faculty dinner party, Brautigan sat next to a young woman who sold Tupperware, a product Richard had never heard of before.
Brautigan attended many of Lynch’s classes. Mainly he enjoyed horsing around with Dennis and the “stewbums,” Lynch’s gang of “wacky” faculty pals. The most outrageous of the bunch was a guy known as Danimal. One afternoon Dennis drove Richard past the DeKalb home of Joseph F. Glidden, a man who got rich in the 1870s as one of the inventors of barbed wire. They did not go inside. It was Brautigan’s only “sight-seeing” trip while in Illinois. Richard proved a perfect fit with Lynch’s bar-hopping mob. He greatly enjoyed his ten-day stay in the Midwest, finding its people “surrealistically fascinating.”
Brautigan flew back to San Francisco on February 27, arriving late that Saturday night. He checked into the Kyoto Inn, spending all day Sunday in bed recovering from jet lag. Even the two-hour time difference between Chicago and California upset Richard’s internal time clock. The morning of March 1 found Brautigan seated at a small wooden table outside a café in an enclosed mall within the Japanese Trade Center, at work once again on his notebook novel. Richard thought it was “a quiet place to work.” He dated the current entry February 16, 1982, calling his narrative “chronologically mischievous.” Brautigan had planned to end the little book when he left for Chicago but started back by writing about the trip to Illinois.
The next day, seated at the same café table, Richard described his time in DeKalb without mentioning any names. Having established the creative dictum of never rereading what he had written previously, Brautigan moved on with the narrative he called “a calendar map,” seemingly unaware of time lapses and apparently pointless digressions.
Like life itself, the little novel was filled with contradiction and uncertainty. It functioned like memory, in disconnected bits and pieces, where trivial moments take on the same emotional importance as powerful events. The photograph of a Hawaiian chicken and a suicide by hanging, annoyance with Dennis Lynch’s cuckoo clock (Richard spelled it “coocoo” in his manuscript), watching a crow eat a hot dog bun, an unknown rapist and a broken heart: all were given equal weight. The “Rosebud syndrome” became Orson Welles’s gift to the world. Much as we pretend this is not so, seeking dignity and drama in otherwise mundane lives, in the end it all comes out the same, the memories of a philosopher count no higher than those of a fool.
Brautigan had gone to Enrico’s the night before, walking through Chinatown after leaving the bar to catch a bus on California Street back to his hotel. Along the way, Richard paused to look at the lobby cards outside a Chinese movie theater. This too went into the novel, digressing from DeKalb to describing an old woman standing beside him, frightened by the image of a ghost on a movie poster. After a passage about gorging on junk food with Dennis Lynch, Brautigan put another total stranger into the “story,” a Japanese man eating pastry at a nearby table. The literary diversion was completely unintentional, part of his compositional method in the little notebook. The second of March was the last day Richard worked on his novel for more than three months.
Brautigan and photographer Roger Ressmeyer had formed “a very close relationship” since meeting almost exactly a year earlier for the People magazine shoot. Richard asked Roger to take the photograph for the cover of So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away. They got together and Roger bounced some ideas off Richard, who wanted a picture evoking the life of the “pond people” he’d described in the novel. He also requested a new author photo, one showing water in the background. Their creative energies meshed perfectly. Brautigan okayed the project.
About this time, French publisher Christian Bourgois purchased the rights to So the Wind and hired Marc Chénetier as the translator. He also approached Helen Brann about bringing Richard to Paris to promote the book’s publication. The first week of March, Brautigan met with Ressmeyer and his assistant at the marina waterfront. Roger snapped head-and-shoulder shots of Brautigan posed beside the water. They moved on to the fountain pools in the Presidio for more portraits with an aquatic backdrop. From his earliest sessions with Erik Weber, Richard always micromanaged the photography for his book covers. This time around, Brau
tigan trusted Ressmeyer to get things right, giving him “total control” over the project.
Roger and his employee drove across the Golden Gate Bridge to the Novato reservoir in northern Marin County, towing a U-Haul full of used furniture. In the afternoon, they arranged the secondhand furnishings on a narrow peninsula. When everything looked right, they waited for dusk, and once darkness enveloped them, Roger started the generator and lit a small fire in his prop cookstove. The lamps in his impromptu stage set burned ordinary light bulbs. Ressmeyer, experienced in celestial photography galaxies away from his celebrity mug shots, set the camera for a long exposure, “probably a second or two,” and took several pictures. The bridge lamp gleamed like a star gone nova. Once the images were developed, Roger picked the best and worked up the layout for a wraparound cover photograph, including textual elements, and presented the finished product to Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence. Ressmeyer did all the work, but the publisher credited Susan Lee Weiss, an in-house designer, with the jacket design.
Brautigan had plenty to occupy his time once he set his novel aside. Students wishing to participate in his upcoming writing class had been asked to submit samples of their work to the MSU English Department. Faculty members picked the best of the crop. Paul Ferlazzo sent these off to Richard for final selection. Busy days didn’t mean lonely nights for Richard in Japantown. He had his last sheet-tearing rendezvous with Sherry Vetter. Eunice Kitagawa “flew up to SFO a few times while he was at the Kyoto Inn.” Specific dates are lost in the fog of ancient memories. Eunice found these visits “disturbing.” Richard clearly seemed to be “spiraling down.” Back in Hawaii, Kitagawa called some guys she’d gotten to know at the front desk to check on Brautigan when he wouldn’t answer his phone for long stretches. She worried about him. “Richard was already threatening to hurt himself.”
Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan Page 133
