Brautigan’s reviews comprised his usual mixed bag of scornful denunciation and fawning praise. The detractors included the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle (Richard told Greg Keeler that its reviewer “was a hatchet-person brought in from the outside”), and the New York Times Book Review. On the positive side, Playboy, Booklist, the Oakland Tribune, and the Christian Science Monitor all celebrated the novel. So the Wind almost always found favor with other writers. Rick DeMarinis, the only true novelist amid the honking gaggle of newspaper hacks, called Brautigan’s book “a lyrical meditation told in a warm personal voice” in the Chicago Tribune Book World.
Sam Lawrence wrote to Richard on the twenty-fourth, sending along two favorable reviews and the news that thirteen thousand copies had been shipped. “Which ain’t bad in these recession times.” Brautigan was back in San Francisco at Japantown’s Kyoto Inn. While he was away, another film crew from Pioneer stereo showed up in Montana. Finding Richard not at home, they sought out his sidekick, Greg Keeler, interviewing him about “how their products might function in the Montana wilderness.” Greg wrote a little humorous jingle and got paid $150 in cash.
Brautigan had gone down to San Francisco for business meetings with Joel Shawn, his attorney. The Bolinas property topped the list. Richard’s primary asset, paid for in full, remained a potential income producer, either through a sale or rental. The place stood in a sorry state of disrepair. Brautigan lacked the capital required to get things back into shape. He and Shawn discussed the options open to him. Getting an estimate on repairs remained item number one. Paying for the work presented another problem. The lawyer suggested a “FannyMac” loan to cover expenses.
These discussions depressed Brautigan, each mundane detail a further reminder of his declining financial status. Debts kept piling up. Prospects for future income seemed few and far between. One bright spot came in an August letter forwarded to Shawn by Simon & Schuster from the Speakers Bureau at Stanford University, extending a “warm invitation for a winter visit to sunny California.” This meant a paycheck. Richard instructed Joel to turn the matter over to Lordly & Dame in Boston, his booking agent for the Tokyo–Montana tour.
Dick Dillof and Ed Dorn were also in Frisco at the same time. They had been invited to be part of a presentation with Tom Clark at the Intersection for the Arts. The performance space now was located at St. John’s Methodist Church at 756 Union Street in North Beach, which had closed as a place of worship due to a lack of parishioners. Over the years, the Intersection had become a showcase for music, comedy, dance, theater, and the spoken word. Its current director was Jim Hartz, a poet and friend of Thomas Merton. He had studied with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and was a practicing Vajrayana Buddhist.
During the program, Hartz tried to engage Clark and Dorn in a discussion about “the Naropa Poetry Wars,” but they resisted, preferring to read their poems instead. When Dillof’s turn came, he read a story from his book Hobo about a runaway kid hopping a freight train. Dobro followed this by getting out his banjo and singing a railroad song. He was dressed for the occasion in his “rambling clothes”: soiled cowboy hat, colorful neckerchief, vest, and watch chain. Dick augmented his music with train sounds from a hidden tape recorder, acting surprised every time that lonesome whistle blew.
Richard Brautigan stumbled into the Intersection in the middle of Dillof’s performance, dead drunk and waving a whiskey bottle, accompanied by a number of street urchins. They pushed their way to the stage, and the kids starting tugging at Dick’s shirttails and pulling on his watch chain. “Making a shambles of me,” he recalled.
Brautigan took a big swing at Dillof’s belly and missed. Thinking it was all fun, Dick grabbed hold of Richard’s cowboy boot and they hopped wildly around the stage, crashing with a wild clatter into a stack of folded chairs. Watching from the back of the house, Simone Ellis thought the fight was for real and that she had witnessed the end of a long friendship. Jim Hartz, upstairs cleaning and putting things away, didn’t see a thing.
Dillof believed he and Richard were just horsing around, but later, outside on the street, Jenny Dorn felt scared. “Richard was out of his mind drunk,” she said. He swung his whiskey bottle “aggressively” at Dick. Jenny thought that Brautigan resented Dobro hanging out with her and Ed, always treating Dillof in a mean and cruel fashion. When Dick and Richard took off together into the night, the Dorns went in another direction. They never saw Brautigan again.
Richard and Dick ended up at Enrico’s, where they ordered drinks and some calamari. As they sat talking, Brautigan took a chair and placed it on the table between them. The manager approached. “Sir, if you don’t mind,” he said, removing the chair. Brautigan said it was Dillof who wanted it up there and immediately put two chairs on the table. Again the manager took them down. “Troublemaker Richard at work,” Dick observed as Brautigan, utterly deadpan, stacked three chairs on the table, a re-creation of enclosing Erik Weber in furniture at the McGuanes’ place ten years before. “He liked the old one-two-three,” Dillof said.
They continued their conversation through the chair legs when the manager approached for a third time. As he sternly unstacked the chairs, Brautigan sighed in sympathy, apologizing for the way Dillof had been behaving. Later Richard stretched out on the floor, pretending to go to sleep under the coat rack. The manager ignored him. After a bit, Richard told Dick, “I’ll be right back” and walked out onto Broadway, never to return that night.
Back in Montana by early October, Brautigan took a room at the Baxter Hotel. The Range had closed earlier that year, and the Baxter was the last of the old downtown hotels. It was also cheap. When the Baxter opened in 1929, the seven-story art deco building was a grand place, the pride of the town. Now its five-buck-a-night rooms sported bare light bulbs dangling from cracked and flaking ceilings. Ken Nagano, one of the producers of the 1980 Pioneer stereo shoot, who Greg Keeler thought “looked like a Hollywood mover and shaker,” came looking for Richard but couldn’t find him in his cheap hideaway.
Nagano went to see Keeler. His company, Maxy Incorporated, wanted to use Brautigan in a commercial for Japanese Jim Beam. He asked Greg to contact Richard, and Keeler “stupidly agreed.”
Brautigan wasn’t pleased. “Ah, so now you’re my Japanese agent?” he taunted on the phone. When Keeler hemmed and hawed, looking for a way out of an uncomfortable situation, Richard told him what to say to Ken Nagano and the others at Maxy. “I want you to tell them to get fucked.”
“I don’t think . . .” Greg stammered.
“That’s right. You don’t think. You just tell them to get fucked.” With that, Brautigan hung up.
In a handwritten letter, Ken Nagano pleaded with Richard, “Since the crew is in the U.S., and all the plans have been made, my only recourse is to commit SEPPUKU.” To sweeten the deal, Ken promised Brautigan an interview with Japanese Playboy. Nagano called Keeler and made the same half-joking suicide threat. Greg felt awful.
“It’s his decision,” Richard said when Keeler told him. A few months later Brautigan reconsidered and accused Keeler “of losing him a huge contract and a lot of money.”
The second week in October, Richard started work again on “American Hotels.” Sitting in the lobby or up in his shabby room, he wrote very quickly, launching into memories of Fallon, Nevada, and his 1958 trip to Mexico. The Baxter had been sold to a developer, who planned to close the place and convert it into condominiums. Brautigan worked steadily, knowing the world he described was coming to an end. He filled forty-seven pages of his notebook over the next two weeks, chronicling his observations of “Muhamid [sic] Ali” at the Keio Plaza in 1976.
Just before Halloween, Richard sat with his manuscript in the lobby of the Baxter. “There have always been hotels in this town,” he wrote in the notebook. “At the end of the month the last one will close and there will be no more hotels in this town. There will be plenty of motels but you can’t easily live in a motel room
. I’m staying at that last closing hotel now, and it will figure off and on in this book.” Brautigan worked straight through the morning.
After completing four more paragraphs, he penned an enigmatic final line: “A sequence of miss matched [sic] little options and realities can set me too [sic] howling at the moon, but I can easily accept large panoramic disruptional continuity.” Richard stared at his last sentence, jotted the word “Examples” beneath it, and scrawled three more paragraphs describing his experiences during a typhoon in Tokyo. How boring it was shut up in his hotel room during the storm. About nearly being decapitated by windblown sheet metal when he finally went out to see a porno movie. Brautigan closed his notebook at this point and never wrote another word in the manuscript he called “American Hotels.”
A final irony awaited him. Not wanting to be alone at Pine Creek, Richard rented a room at the Imperial 400 Motel just across Main Street from the Baxter. So the Wind described an innocent time in the 1950s, gone forever, along with black-and-white television and segregation. His unfinished manuscript about small-town hotels recorded the demise of another cherished American institution. Brautigan’s politics always lay just beneath the surface. He sympathized with the little guy and the oppressed but was a conservative at heart, lamenting the inevitable loss of a world he cherished but knew was gone forever.
fifty-six: deathgrowth
THE APPEARANCE OF So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away in September of 1982 marked the end of Richard Brautigan’s career as a published writer. He continued working on various projects for the rest of his life, but aside from foreign editions of earlier books and a single poem and short story published together in an obscure Washington, D.C., art review the year he died, Brautigan never saw another word he wrote appear in print. Richard did not foresee this fate. That fall, he continued to hope his new novel would be a hit. Brautigan had long harbored premonitions of doom. Death had walked by his side since childhood, kept at bay first by ambition and later by success. These props no longer supported him. Without knowing it, Brautigan had begun a long spiral into the vortex of oblivion.
Good and bad news came in equal doses through the remainder of the fall. On the plus side, Lordly & Dame sent Richard the Stanford reading contract on October 20. Two weeks later the Boston booking firm followed up with another speaking engagement. The Sophomore Literary Festival Council at the University of Notre Dame invited Brautigan to read on February 23. It offered his standard fee of $1,500, the same as two months in an MSU classroom.
More welcome news arrived from Helen Brann in October. The eponymous French publishing firm Christian Bourgois made an offer to bring out a translation of So the Wind by Marc Chénetier in April. It planned a simultaneous French edition of Revenge of the Lawn. Christian Bourgois invited Brautigan to come to Paris in April “for about a week” on an expense-paid trip. Richard accepted, letting his agent take care of the details.
On the negative side of the equation, a notice from the IRS at the end of November claimed Brautigan owed $6,767.94 (including penalties and interest) on his 1981 income tax. Richard missed the first payment ($501.86) due on his 1982–1983 property taxes for the Bolinas house. Cash poor, he’d also miss the next one, due in May.
Jonathan Dolger left his job as an editor at Simon & Schuster and set up shop as a literary agent in his East Side Manhattan apartment. Brad Donovan needed professional representation for a novel he’d written. Dolger was searching for clients. Early in October Richard sent Brad’s manuscript to the Jonathan Dolger Agency. Dolger liked Donovan’s work and agreed to “try and place it.”
Greg Keeler “barely got tenure” at MSU. He asked Richard for a supporting letter. Brautigan said anything from him was “the kiss of death” and declined. Paul Ferlazzo encouraged Keeler to write an article for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. “Pretty huffy about the whole idea,” Greg fumed over drinks at the Eagles. “William Saroyan,” Brautigan exclaimed on hearing the name of the subject, “what a wonderful writer. This should be fun.”
Keeler felt dubious. Richard had once told him that fun was “an odd concept.” Brautigan put in a lot of time loaning Greg books, giving him insights and a lecture about “Saroyan’s early years and his relationship with Martha Foley at Story magazine.” Keeler’s essay became Richard’s project by proxy. Greg suspected Brautigan had an underlying motive. Someday “he would want someone to do a good job on his own entry.”
Richard also offered Marian Hjortsberg his literary expertise. She had returned to school, entering an MA program at MSU that fall. Twenty-five years away from term papers, Marian felt overwhelmed by her first assignment, an essay on The Epic of Gilgamesh. One of the earliest works of world literature, a compilation of epic Sumerian legends on twelve ancient clay tablets, Gilgamesh had survived since the seventh century bc. “I was sure I couldn’t do it,” Marian remembered.
“You can do it,” Richard said, sitting down at her kitchen table. “Get me the book.” Marian brought the text. Brautigan opened it and set to work. “Okay,” Richard explained, “this is your introduction.” Underlining as he turned the pages, Brautigan outlined Marian’s paper.
“He was a natural,” she recalled. “So patient and kind.”
Not everyone saw Richard’s generous side. Toward the end of summer, John Barber and Brautigan “had a disagreement.” Richard told him “to go away and never speak to [me] again.” Brautigan struck Barber as “someone incapable of upholding an enduring relationship with anyone.” They met on a Bozeman street not long afterward. John said he was sorry, asking to talk it through and save their friendship.
“I don’t know,” Richard said. “We’ll see. I’ll let you know.” Barber never saw Brautigan again.
Richard spent much of the fall in Bozeman, staying in room 214 at the Imperial 400 Motel. Every weekend during football season, Brautigan camped at Karen Datko’s house. Scoop ended up doing the camping. She gave Unc her “big-ass queen-size bed” upstairs and slept on the couch. Before bedtime, Richard stretched out on the couch in front of Scoop’s “big old thirty-buck color TV.” Don Carpenter maintained that Brautigan didn’t like football. Richard enjoyed Datko’s company. While she got into the game, he “lay on the couch and didn’t move for goddamn hours,” all the while regaling Scoop with tales of the old days.
Datko was not sexually attracted to Brautigan. “He was always a horny guy,” she remembered. Karen liked Richard, so she never told him. “He was like Unc,” she said. “He was like this big, tall, kind of dumb, potbellied, older guy.” Every so often, Brautigan couldn’t resist, suggesting to Scoop that they go to bed together. Getting no reply, he’d smile and say, “But why ruin a wonderful friendship?”
“You’re right,” Datko always replied.
Whenever Richard couldn’t score a ride from Pine Creek to Bozeman, he’d hitchhike into Livingston and take a bus over the hill. “I’m just a bunch of road meat” was his description of thumbing down a ride. Once when Brautigan made it to the Bozone bus station, he phoned Karen Datko. “Scoopie,” he announced, “I’m in Bozeman and you shall have the pleasure of buying me a drink. After a couple rounds, Richard pulled out a monthly rent check from one of his three Livingston properties, cashed it at the Eagles bar, and “picked up the tab for the rest of the night.”
Dirty Unc spent most of Thanksgiving with Scoop. He awoke at her place on Turkey Day morning. Datko had no breakfast sausage. She said she’d run to the store and get some. Richard wanted to go along. Scoop planned a simple trip to the corner 7-Eleven. Thick snow covered the ground. The streets were icy. Brautigan climbed into her car. “Let’s go to the IGA,” he said.
“I don’t think they’re open,” she protested.
“No, let’s go there. I’d rather go there and get sausage.”
“God knows, we drove all over the goddamn town,” Scoop recalled. They went from one supermarket to the next, skidding on the ice. The IGA was closed. So were Albertsons and Safeway. “Can we go home now
?” Datko pleaded.
“No. We have to try another store.”
They discovered Buttrey’s was the only Bozeman supermarket open on Thanksgiving Day. Inside, Scoop realized that Richard was after much more than sausage. His provisions had run low at Pine Creek, and Brautigan “went on this big shopping expedition.” As they roamed the aisles stocking up, the truth dawned on Datko. “Oh no!” she thought, “I’ve been Unced again.”
Brautigan was “really drinking hard that day.” By the time they got his groceries back to Scoop’s, it was too late for her to prepare Thanksgiving dinner. Richard went down to the Eagles, eating a miserable turkey meal with Dick Dillof and Sean Cassaday, teasing Dobro without mercy. Back at Datko’s, he accompanied Scoop to her friend’s house for “leftover stuffing and gravy.” To top it all off, Richard phoned Marian Hjortsberg. She braved the frozen pass, driving him and his load of groceries home to Pine Creek.
On Friday, December 10, Brautigan arranged for a revolving line-of-credit commercial note at the First Security Bank in Livingston. His cash flow dried to a trickle. Richard needed funds to pay the monthly bills. The bank loaned him $105,000 over a two-year period, 16.5 percent annual interest to be paid quarterly. In the past, this kind of money came from book advances. Brautigan had grown used to the lifestyle of success. He wasn’t about to give it up. Only now he had to borrow the cash to bankroll a lit star’s extravagant behavior.
Gatz Hjortsberg came back to Montana over the Christmas holidays. After his divorce was final, he and Sharon married that summer in a Buddhist ceremony at their rented house in Kapoho, Hawaii. In the fall, Legend of Darkness, a film he wrote for Ridley Scott in 1980, kicked back into life. Hjortsberg flew to London to continue working on the project, living alone in the Hotel Lancaster. His new bride moved back to her parents’ home in Billings. The Christmas trip was an effort to resurrect an already troubled marriage. Aside from his children, Gatz saw no one from Livingston before returning to England early in 1983.
Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan Page 137
