Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Richard said he’d be right over. He carried the watermelon down the road to the Hjortsbergs’. Gatz had moved with Sharon to the Big Island of Hawaii in January, and his kids were visiting him for the summer. Marian seemed strangely agitated when she greeted Brautigan in her kitchen. He’d interrupted a romantic moment with her new boyfriend. She’d been too embarrassed to say anything about it on the phone. He wanted to tell her about Nikki Arai’s death but felt uncomfortable. The watermelon had been “just some kind of funny excuse to talk about my grief.” Brautigan apologized and went back to his place.

  To avoid solitude, Richard started calling his friends. Nobody was home. He got lucky when John Barber picked up. “My friend just died,” Brautigan said. “Why don’t you come over. Bring a bottle of whiskey.”

  Barber knew about Richard’s sick friend. He thought the woman was dying of cancer in Japan. He got to Pine Creek an hour later, Dickel in hand, and found Brautigan sitting alone in the coal shed he’d converted into his sleeping room. Richard proudly pointed out a metallic plastic roller blind he’d bought for the only window. Those inside could look out while remaining invisible to prying eyes. “You can lie here in bed with people all around in the backyard and make love,” he said. “No one can see in, no one knows what you are doing.”

  Brautigan and Barber drank whiskey on the back porch. Richard sat in his favorite spot, legs stretched along the porch rail, facing south, his back supported by a pillar. John occupied “a spindly wooden lawn chair.” No one spoke. They watched the cottonwood fluff drift past like summertime snow as thunderheads massed over the Bridger Mountains to the west. Twilight enhanced their silence as “ghost deer” wandered at the edge of darkness.

  “She’s gone now,” Richard said, breaking their long meditation. “It’s all done.”

  “She’s gone but not forgotten.” Barber felt stupid for mouthing an easy banality.

  “I have no pictures of her, none of her letters, nothing. She’s gone.”

  “But you have memories,” John said, “and you can write them down and preserve them.”

  “I don’t write for therapy, or to eulogize,” Brautigan replied, getting up and going inside the house. When he returned he showed Barber a poem he’d written on a scrap of paper.

  Rendezvous

  Where you are now

  I will join you.

  Richard set his ephemeral poetry on the green wooden table. It fluttered among puffs of drifting cottonwood snow. “Come inside,” he said. “Hunger has visited us. Let’s eat.”

  They prepared noodles with smoked oysters, peas, and green onions gathered from the weed-choked garden. Eating with chopsticks, Brautigan taught Barber how to properly slurp his noodles in the Japanese manner. After their meal, they talked until the whiskey was gone and drove to Livingston for another bottle. They drank half of it on the way back to Rancho Brautigan.

  “My friend was Japanese,” Richard said after they returned. “She was a Buddhist. The Buddhists believed that one can send things to the dead by burning them. I have two books of hers and the poem. I will burn them and you can help if you don’t think it’s too heavy.”

  They gathered the items, along with lighter fluid and kitchen matches. “She loved white wine,” Brautigan said, pouring a “delicate tulip-shaped glass” full to the brim. “We will burn this also.”

  They wove through waist-high backyard grass and placed the offerings on a pile of rocks. Richard gathered a handful of wildflowers, adding them to the impromptu bier. Barber soaked the offerings in lighter fluid and struck a match. “She always had great style,” Brautigan said as the little shrine burst into flames.

  Richard and John stood, arms over each other’s shoulders, watching everything burn. The stem of the wine glass snapped and the shattered glass fell into the ashes. “She’s gone,” Brautigan whispered. “It’s done.”

  Greg Keeler remembered how Arai’s death “devastated [Richard], and he became drawn and gaunt, staring off his back porch for hours.” Five days after she died, Brautigan wrote a letter to Nikki Arai (he called her N). He described getting the telephone call about her death and bringing a watermelon over to his “close neighbor M [. . .] when I interrupted her lovemaking.” Richard wanted to phone N and tell her what had occurred “because you have the perfect sense of humor to understand. It’s just the kind of story you would have enjoyed.” Brautigan signed off, “Love, R.” He later used this fictional correspondence as the introduction to An Unfortunate Woman.

  The next day, after completing nearly thirty-five pages, Richard Brautigan stopped working on “American Hotels.” He concluded with a description of Sherry Vetter telling him years later how bored she had been during their many fishing trips to northern California. “‘Then why did you go along with it?’ I said.

  “‘Because I liked the fucking part of it,’ she said.” At this point, Brautigan put down his pen. Memories of happier times nagged him like ghosts from the past.

  Marian Hjortsberg’s boyfriend, Todd, “a berserko alcoholic,” ran amok in Bozeman. Richard came over with the dire news. “This looks really bad,” he told her. “He’s just gone berserk in Bozeman, and there’s no telling if he’s coming over here. I’m sleeping in the guestroom tonight.” Brautigan arrived in the evening with “his Magnum-type handgun.” He went to Marian’s barn and brought in all the mallets, mauls, axes, and steel wedges, every conceivable weapon, hiding them under the guest room bed. After locking all the doors, Richard slept with his loaded pistol beneath the pillow.

  Todd’s rage ended in Brad Donovan’s trailer. Word arrived in the morning. Brautigan had Marian drive them over to Forest Park. Richard liked Todd and his “zany sense of humor” but told Marian she had to break things off with him. “You have to meet with Todd,” he instructed on the trip over the Bozeman Pass. “You have to tell him you never want to see him again because that’s the way it works.” She found it “very painful,” telling Todd she never wanted to speak to him or see him again, just as Brautigan had outlined it for her. “It was just awful,” Marian recalled. Richard waited in Brad’s trailer until their private meeting was over.

  Heading back over the hill, Brautigan observed that Marian had a “tendency to get involved with men who aren’t altogether sound.” After their brief romance in 1980, they had “just sort of been having parallel lives ever since,” he explained, laying out some instructions regarding matters of the heart. “I don’t necessarily follow them myself,” Richard said, “but I’m going to give you some rules about your future boyfriends. First of all, you have to check their apartments. If they have one!”

  Marian expressed an interest. Brautigan asked, “Did you look at Todd’s apartment when you first met him?

  “Yes?”

  “Was it neat?”

  “No.”

  “Was it a total pigsty?”

  “Yes.”

  Richard smiled. “Well, that should have told you right from the start that you didn’t want to get involved with this person.”

  At 9:48 am Tokyo time on July 16, Masako Kano wrote Richard Brautigan a one-line note: “Aujourd’hui Papa est mort.” Masamichi Kano was only fifty-six at the time of his death. Brautigan wasn’t home to receive her letter. Unable to tolerate being alone, he moved back over to Bozeman before it arrived. Richard did not take a room the Range. Georgia Donovan’s sister, Mary, was away for the summer, and her trailer at Forest Park sat unoccupied. Brad invited Brautigan to use it whenever he needed a place to stay. He moved right in. A trailer park was familiar territory. Richard had grown up in sleazy motor courts. Forest Park seemed like the Ritz. Greg Keeler enjoyed visiting Brautigan there because the trailers sat right beside the Gallatin River. He could rig a baited rod on the bank and keep an eye on it while they drank and shot the shit inside. Richard was delighted. He considered this sort of angling “a typical tawdry example” of Keeler’s Okie upbringing.

  Late-night gunplay during the Dorns’ visit was but one ricocheting epis
ode in a long summer of back porch shooting at Rancho Brautigan. One summer Sunday morning, suffering from a massive hangover after a hard night’s partying, Marian Hjortsberg got a phone call from Richard. Dave Schrieber had arrived from Bozeman with his firearm collection. “I want you to come over, and I want you to try some of Schrieber’s guns.”

  “Richard, I just can’t come over,” she said, “I have this terrible hangover. The last thing in the world I want to do is shoot guns.”

  “But, my dear,” Brautigan said, “you must understand, it’s the best thing in the world for a hangover.”

  Marian walked down the road and joined the firing squad. They shot all through the morning. “It was so much fun,” she recalled. “I actually shot really well.” At one point Richard dragged out a pachinko machine that had been a Christmas gift from Aki. They shot it to smithereens. Schrieber hauled the bullet-punctured remnants home with him to Bozeman as a souvenir. The next time they shot together, a television set became the target.

  When Richard read Masako’s note about her father’s death, he sent her a telegram on July 30 (“TODAY SOMEBODY IS BORN”), before moving back to Forest Park. After an afternoon at the Eagles, Brad Donovan and Brautigan went to see Cat People, playing a couple blocks up the street at the Ellen Theater. Released early in April, the movie had only then reached Bozeman. Directed by Paul Schrader (Siew-Hwa Beh’s old grad school nemesis) and starring Nastassja Kinski, known as Nasty to her intimate friends, the picture was a remake of the classic Jacques Tourneur 1942 horror film.

  When the show was over, Richard and Brad sat in the lobby of the Baxter Hotel with drinks from the Robin, “talking about all the ways the movie had fallen short.” They both found it “grotesque” and agreed “it should have been done as a comedy.” This led to inventing mock comic scenes for Cat People and a discussion of “slapstick comedy in general.” The more they talked, the more Brautigan and Donovan kept returning to the Marx Brothers movies. They were attracted to anarchy.

  A couple days later, Richard and Brad wandered around Forest Park. “Life here is really weird,” Brautigan observed. “Once you move to a trailer park, you have no more illusions about your life.” Richard was captivated by the absurd reality of people living in metal boxes. They hit upon a notion of writing a comic script about the “different silly little things” in a trailer park. Brautigan called their screenplay “a goofy blueprint for a house that will probably never be built.”

  “Why don’t we just have fun with this one?” Richard told Donovan. They planned on putting anything and everything in at random, “and then [they’d] worry about it later.” Greg Keeler came by Forest Park at the start of the project. Keeler noted that Brautigan “tended to let himself go” when he stayed out at the trailer settlement. Richard “smelled pretty funky” and hadn’t shaved for several days.

  In a story called “The Nightly Rounds,” Brautigan confessed, “I don’t bathe as often as I should here in Montana, but I never really liked to bathe anyway. I don’t like the feeling of water on my body, and frankly, I don’t understand people who do.” Richard confessed that only women kept him clean. “They don’t like to sleep with you when you smell like something that Boris Karloff just dragged in after making his nightly rounds of all the local cemeteries.”

  “You look just like a Bowery bum,” Greg said.

  “I’m on vacation,” Brautigan replied.

  “No you’re not,” Brad interjected. “You’re working. I’m working.”

  “Yes, I can tell.” Keeler suppressed a smile. “The whole trailer is atremble with the bustle of industry.”

  “Tell him about the screenplay,” Georgia Donovan said.

  Richard and Brad sat Greg down at the kitchen table and described their work in progress, at that point still in the bullshitting stage. They had a working title, “Trailer,” an homage to/rip-off of the film Airplane, along with an assortment of goofy characters, including a dwarf bird trainer, a Vietnam vet with a bowl of mechanical fish, a Nazi landlady driving a bulldozer painted with a swastika, the Borrower (a guy who always borrows things), and an old couple wrapped in tinfoil waiting for aliens. Keeler thought it sounded a lot like life in Forest Park.

  After the initial sessions in the Donovans’ trailer, work shifted to Brautigan’s Pine Creek place. There was no implied hierarchy. Richard didn’t pull rank on Brad. Both men worked as equal collaborators. “The rule was that anything we wrote was okay,” Donovan recalled. Brad came over to Rancho Brautigan for two- or three-day sprints. Brautigan wrote in his barn loft office. Donovan had the use of Richard’s separate outside bedroom (“the little guest house”) for his studio. Brautigan now slept in a bedroom inside his home.

  Shooting the breeze, the two men sat around for a couple hours in the morning, coming up with ten new scenes. After that they divided the scenes (“You want to write this one?”) before heading for separate work quarters. At the end of the day, they swapped drafts, adding “lines or description or layers of detail to what the other person did.” They both worked in longhand, Brautigan scribbling on yellow legal pads; Donovan on scraps of blank paper. They cobbled together “a thirty-page kind of treatment and showed it to Jeff Bridges and Peter Fonda, who both offered encouragement.

  Proud of his ability to “crank it up,” Brautigan never failed to deliver his daily quota in spite of drinking and hangovers. In less than a month, three weeks at most, Brad and Richard produced a rough one-hundred-page first draft. “Just going over the top,” Donovan recalled. Greg Keeler remembered them working frantically. The project “seemed to have a life and death urgency about it.” At the same time, Brautigan dealt with the ongoing business details for his forthcoming novel, reviewing jacket and ad copy, scrutinizing the contracts for Jonathan Cape’s British edition.

  As Brad and Richard wrapped up their gonzo screenplay, an offer of a $15,000 advance arrived from Seymour Lawrence for Brautigan’s new book proposal. Richard was stunned. It was $30,000 below his previous advance, and he immediately declined. Helen Brann wrote Lawrence on the first day of September, turning down the Delacorte offer. Sam was severing his own connection with Dell, forming a new imprint (Dutton/Seymour Lawrence) with E. P. Dutton & Co. Lawrence made an identical offer for Brautigan’s book on behalf of his new publishing house, which Richard also turned down flat.

  This was a depressing turn of events. Publishers vote with their wallets. Having his last advance reduced by two-thirds was not a vote of confidence. Richard took it in stride, searching for fun at the Eagles with Greg, Scoop, Brad, and the usual suspects. One weekend Brautigan and Keeler sat drinking the night away. A band in the dance hall above cranked out two-steps, and elderly lodge members escorted their white-haired wives up the stairs to trip the light fantastic. The more they drank, the better these old ladies started looking to Richard and Greg. “Boy, wouldn’t you like that?” they remarked. “Yeah, get a load of that one.”

  “I’ve got an idea,” Brautigan said. “Why don’t we just go into the women’s room and hang our tongues over the toilet paper roll?”

  The bartender overheard this remark. The next day, when Richard and Greg came into the Eagles for some hair of the dog, a sign had been posted. It stated that the management would now charge a patron twenty-five cents every time he used a swear word. Brautigan promptly marched up to the bar and dropped a sawbuck into the collection jar. “I’ll buy a few,” he said. “Give me ten bucks’ worth.”

  Summertime meant frequent picnics, barbecues, and parties in Montana. At a gathering in the Bozeman home of MSU art professor Fran Noel, Richard was accosted by an obnoxious fan. “Are you really Brautigan,” he demanded.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you really him?”

  “Do you want to see my ID?” Richard asked, turning around and dropping his pants to moon the persistent stranger.

  Mooning became a favorite gesture of Brautigan’s. When Greg Keeler drove with him to the airport on his final departure from Montana a ye
ar later, Richard handed Greg a snapshot of him baring his ass for the camera. “Something to remember me by,” he said.

  Not all nervous strangers got the same treatment as the pushy fan at Fran Noel’s. At a dinner party in the Livingston home of Dennis Noteboom, Brautigan stood listening to David Stein, son of author and state senator Ben Stein, play the piano. By Stein’s own admission, he was “pretty good at noodling out a tune.” Richard sat down beside him on the piano bench, saying he thought his playing was “very good.”

  Stein replied that it made him nervous to perform next to “a famous person.”

  “Don’t worry,” Brautigan assured him, “famous people are just like everyone else.”

  Toward the end of summer, the Bozeman poets staged another group reading at Chico Hot Springs. Greg Keeler remained in the lineup. Once again he invited Richard to participate. This time around, Brautigan agreed. At the reading, Richard got into a snit when he saw Greg sitting with Paul Ferlazzo, his department head. “I guess you know which side your bread’s buttered on,” he jibed. After Brautigan read, the place erupted into an enthusiastic ovation.

  Keeler’s reading drew only “a polite scattering of applause.” Greg, just back from a summer in England, read a poem “about a British trash fish called a tench.” Brautigan leaned toward Keeler. “That was pretty pre-tench-ous,” he said. “You need a muse injection, big boy.”

  So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away was published in hardcover by Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence on September 10, 1982. One of the 17,500 copies printed was hand delivered to Richard in Pine Creek by Dink Bruce at the personal request of the publisher. Sam Lawrence also sent along a quart of George Dickel sour mash and a short, hand-printed note: “You’re the tops / You’re the Eiffel Tower / You outshine General Eisenhower.” Finding no one home, Dink left a brief note of his own. The whiskey got delivered a couple days later.