Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Around seven in the evening, Richard and Masako set off on a hastily planned adventure, traveling by the Keio Line and later by bus out to Tama City on the outskirts of Tokyo. On the trip they talked about Yamaguchi San and his dedication to soup. Brautigan explained how Mr. Yamaguchi had been a chef at the embassy. As a joke, Kano teased him about writing two poems for the soup master while he’d never written a single line for her.

  Richard and Masako’s destination was Tama Dōbutsukōen, a 128.5-acre zoological park at the foot of Mount Takao. When it had opened in 1958, as a branch of the much smaller Uneo Zoo near central Tokyo, Tama was intended to display wild animals in a more natural setting, running free behind moats separating them from the spectators. Brautigan had wanted to go to the more local zoo in Uneo Park, but it was much too small for what they planned.

  Tama Zoo closed to the general public at 5:00 pm. Richard and Masako arrived sometime after eight. They came prepared for their clandestine expedition with a flashlight. Giggling with exhilaration, they climbed the chain-link fence near the entrance some distance from the kosha (guard building). The two lovers felt like mischievous children. Kano went first. Brautigan boosted her up, and her tiny feet fit easily into the wire mesh. Richard followed, climbing without too much effort. Masako worried his weight might “shake down” the gate.

  Laughing all the while, they ran into the darkness. Brautigan didn’t want to follow the well-lit path toward the lion park. Like kids playing hide-and-seek, “pretending to hide behind the bushes,” they made it to the insectarium, where bugs and butterflies of every exotic sort were housed. Along the way, they stopped to buy juice from a coin-operated machine but found they had spent all their pocket change on the bus. The insectarium was locked. Richard and Masako sat on a bench outside, staring up at the stars and constellations spangling the blue-black sky overhead. In the distance, they heard the flapping wings of hawks and eagles flying under the giant dome of the raptor enclosure.

  Stargazing brought poetry to mind. Kano had always liked the “sky and star images” in Brautigan’s poems. Richard pulled out his pocket notebook. He asked Masako to hold the flashlight while he wrote. When he finished, Brautigan tore out the page and handed it to her.

  When the Star Stops Counting the Sky

  In all the space between nothing

  Where a kingdom could have existed

  a thing bird

  flies around

  the moment

  of her wings

  In the beginning of oblivion.

  Kano read the poem over and over, learning it by heart on the spot. Brautigan took it back and signed the page, returning it to Masako. “You keep this,” Richard said in a distant voice, the Puma nodding like a mountain cat, “and you will make a lot of money someday.”

  Masako was furious. She tore the poem into pieces and recited it back to Brautigan from memory. “Now, this poem is only for me,” she said. “Nobody else. This is only for me to remember.”

  In truth, Masako saved the torn pieces, throwing them away only after she returned home that night and typed a copy of the poem. She had no interest in selling it. Richard’s words were private. Masako kept them in her heart ever after. He told her that the “thing bird” was meant to be her, evoked by the flapping wings of a falcon in the distant darkness. “A beautiful poem,” Kano recalled. “Perhaps a hint of sadness.” She could not imagine how preoccupied her beloved Puma had become with thoughts of his own impending death.

  Mr. Yamaguchi’s soup seemed to breathe life back into Brautigan. He became obsessed with the subject, scribbling many poems about soup on his Keio Plaza notepad over the next couple weeks. “Soup Mountain Sunrise” went through several drafts and began, “I almost remember in dreams / soup, / the size and image of mountains / with slopes of fresh vegetables.” Richard wrote “Chasing Soup,” in twin columns, one mirroring the other: “This morning / I have been chasing / soup to catch / and put it / in a poem, but / the soup soon ran / away from my words.” Another poem, “Strawberry Gratitude,” said the strawberry “gently shows its gratitude / when in the company / of the soup.” Of all his never-published soup poetry, Brautigan liked one well enough that he wrote out several copies. Mr. Yamaguchi received one. He gave another to Masako Kano.

  Waiting Potatoes

  Potatoes wait like edible shadows

  under the ground. They wait in

  their darkness for the light of the soup.

  These simple lines held a hidden image of Richard’s despair. He felt he dwelled in darkness like the lowly potato. In Mr. Yamaguchi’s soup restaurant, Brautigan had tasted the vitality of life once again. Haunted by the downward turn his career had taken and burdened by growing debt, Richard made the nourishment of soup into a metaphor embracing hope and renewal.

  Yet even soup enhancement didn’t keep Brautigan away from morbid thoughts for long during his final weeks in Japan. Most nights found him at the bar in The Cradle. One evening early in July, he scratched out a poem as he sat drinking with Takako.

  The Accidental, Unintentional Color of Your Death

  Nobody knows how

  they will die.

  Their color will find

  them.

  At the bottom of the page, Richard added, “P.S. For Shiina Takako. Everything I write is for you. My sister in this journey to oblivion.”

  A continuing search for West German models often led Richard far from his soul sister’s watering hole. One evening Richard found his way to a place called Key West. Everything in the joint was white. Walls, floor and ceiling, tables, chairs, countertops, even the bar itself was painted white. A huge white model of a Zeppelin airship hung from the ceiling. Brautigan didn’t see the humor inherent in the situation. This miniature dirigible was the closest thing to a German model he could find. Richard took note of the shining black hair of the Japanese women in the Key West, standing out dramatically against the white background like ermine tail tips on a snowfield.

  The only fault Brautigan could find with Masako Kano was that she was always late. Being a punctual person, and not understanding the demands of an executive position at a high-powered firm like Motorola, Richard had no patience with those who didn’t show up at the appointed hour. Masako always assumed she could make a seven o’clock date and be there on time. Sometimes things came up, business matters incomprehensible to a poet like Brautigan, and she’d have to work overtime. Richard hated “all that electrical waiting that made eternity seem like a drop in the bucket.”

  One July night, Masako had arranged to meet Richard at 7:00 pm at a favorite sidewalk café before going on for dinner. The original plan had been to get together at the place at eight, but Kano assured Brautigan she’d make it earlier. When she didn’t show up, Richard sat seething at the café for more than an hour, “emotionally wrung out like a dish rag.” Masako was “very, very embarrassed” when she finally arrived, not attempting to make excuses for her lateness.

  Much later, after dinner and lovemaking, Brautigan sat naked on the couch, “blank with frustration,” watching Kano dress prior to catching her homebound train. He told her that they shouldn’t see each other on the coming weekend, “not until the end of next week.” His words hit her hard. An expression “of great weariness and sadness” masked her pretty young face.

  “Are you sure?” Masako asked in a low and painful whisper.

  “Yes,” Richard said, using the word like a knife.

  “All right.” Deeply wounded, her reply was almost inaudible.

  When Kano finished dressing, she “walked like a very old woman to the door.” Brautigan watched her dispassionately.

  “Please lock it,” he said.

  While Kano “disappeared ghost-like . . . into the Tokyo night,” Richard reached for the notepad and pencil on the table, scratching down a quick poem in a cold fury.

  Spare Me

  I want day to become night,

  and night to become day, so that I

  will nev
er love again.

  BRAUTIGAN DREW A circle around his title, stared at it for several minutes, and crossed it out.

  Richard believed Masako Kano used “every pleasure possible” in an effort “to bring about a permanent union” between them. It spooked him. “Maybe I was in love,” Brautigan reflected. “But it can’t be. Somewhere in all the pressure in maze-like kisses we lost the future.” From his mother to Linda Webster to Ginny and Akiko, Brautigan had learned to turn away from love. “I’ve been married twice and divorced twice,” Richard observed. “I don’t want to depress [Masako] and all the delights of being married.” Brautigan felt his West German model project, with its connection to Kano, led him “into emptiness.” He wrote these words at twilight while stone-cold sober.

  A couple days later, “a very nice French artist” Richard had met at The Cradle phoned with an invitation to a gallery opening for a show of his work later in the week. The artist told him the French embassy was donating “some good wine” for the event. Sunk in depression, Brautigan felt in no mood for art gallery crowds. When the afternoon in question rolled around, he decided to go. “Maybe a couple of glasses of French wine would be of some help in this fucking nightmare I find myself in,” he wrote in his notebook.

  During his final weeks in Tokyo, Richard received a couple invitations to visit Europe. The first came from the sponsors of the One World Poetry Festival, asking him to travel to Amsterdam in October. The other, from the United States Information Service, arrived about the same time, inviting Brautigan to give a series of programs in Germany that coming December. This came as really good news. Paychecks were forthcoming. Brautigan summed up his thoughts in his notebook. “Why did I seek such an exotic gothic idea to interview a West German model in Tokyo?” he wrote. “The logical place to interview a German model would be in Germany. I’ll be there in three months. I’m going to Amsterdam in the middle of October and from there take a hop over to Munich.”

  The first week in August, Richard went to a Japanese theater festival he called Twilight in the Mountains. His notes provided minimalist descriptions—“buildings with ancient straw roof illuminating ancient growth”—like haiku snapshots. He got into a discussion with a young American writer about the nature of the color blue. Brautigan made no comment on any of the plays being performed, all in Japanese and meaningless to him. Before leaving for the night, the young writer gave him several pages torn from a tan memo pad, containing a brief discourse about blue: “Blue is the color of my shirt. Blue is the color of my shorts when I wash them in hot water with my shirt [. . . Etc. Etc.]” It wasn’t much help to Richard, but he saved the pages, another bit of found art.

  The next night Brautigan returned to the theater festival. “I’m still trying to describe something that remembers the color blue,” he wrote in his notebook. After watching the first of the evening’s plays, Richard wrote, “Is the basis of Japanese theater fazism [sic]!” As the night wore on, he became less interested in the productions and more focused on the audience. “I think some of these people are ‘American,’” he wrote, “and I am totally disgusted and will leave Japan very soon because the Americans are not like these assholes. I do not want to be thought of as an American in Japan. We, the Americans, also have dignity.”

  It was “a very complicated day” for Richard. He felt the Americans in the audience never stopped being humiliated. Disgusted by them, Brautigan left the theater festival. “I ain’t perfect,” he noted, “but I ain’t them.”

  Brautigan’s final couple days in Tokyo verged into the surreal. He wrote in his notebook about a return visit to Café Endless, after describing his first visit in 1979 following a trip to the Sea of Japan. He and Takako had caught a cab at the train station and were soon snared in a massive bumper-to-bumper traffic jam. Both badly wanting a drink, they had gotten out and walked. Along the way, they had passed a place called Café Endless. “Perhaps we should have stopped there and had something to drink,” Richard noted after two meandering pages about being stuck in Tokyo traffic.

  Brautigan and Shiina never had that drink in 1979. They parted company and went their separate ways. Four years later, Richard wrote about his next-to-last day in Tokyo and mentioned going to a “second Café Endless.” This turned out not to be the mysterious place he and Takako had walked past in their search for a drink but his favorite café with the brick waterfall in Mitsui Plaza. Japan had always been a fantasy for Richard. Now even the fantastic Shangri-la of his imagination folded in upon itself, a dream turned inside out.

  Brautigan suspected his return to America would provide nothing “to be certain of,” but he had no doubts about what he had accomplished in Tokyo. “This four-month trip to Japan is either in the top ten disasters of my life,” Richard wrote, “or it has been an adventure of ultimate worth allowing me to arrive at nothing.”

  Brautigan stopped only briefly in San Francisco when he returned from Tokyo. Financial considerations remained a primary concern. Needing to cut down on expenses, Richard should have left his little office above Vesuvio Café. Over the past year, he’d often been behind on his rent. Henri Lenoir sent several postcards reminding Brautigan about his late payments. One suggested he was “paying rent for what amounts to no more than storage.” This had become an expensive proposition. The rent for the single room had risen to $150 per month. Loath to admit his dwindling literary status (and subsequent decrease in income), Richard made no move to economize. His office looking out at City Lights was his last tangible connection to North Beach and he was not about to give it up.

  Brautigan maintained a long-established schedule while in the city, arriving early at Enrico’s to greet the day. “It was the unwritten rule. I’d meet Richard here at ten o’clock,” Richard Breen recalled. “Then would start the day off by making enemies.” Brautigan usually got there first, waiting at the bar, “staring out of those marvelous, know-nothing eyes of his, just like a blind child,” until Breen showed up. Their favorite victim in the search for potential enemies was a close friend. “I have to fuck over Tony,” Brautigan muttered, looking around for Dingman.

  “What are you going to do to him today?” Breen asked.

  “I don’t know but I will.”

  Breen reasoned that if Brautigan didn’t have Tony Dingman around “to rat-fuck” he’d “have no reason to live.”

  Dingman, who always playfully referred to Brautigan as “the field marshal” or “the German drinking machine,” was off in New York working on The Cotton Club. Richard scanned the bar for another scapegoat when Breen walked in one morning wearing a cap from The Arctic Bar in Ketchikan, Alaska. The logo featured “two bears fucking” and offended everyone not in on the joke. A DJ visiting Sam McCullough from Alaska had given him the cap.

  “Ketchikan!” Brautigan shouted, spotting the amorous ursine logo. Assuming Breen had been to the First City, he asked, “Have you seen the cat?”

  “What are you talking about, Richard?”

  “The cat in the airport at Ketchikan.”

  “I’ve never been to Ketchikan,” Breen said.

  “Then why are you wearing that hat?”

  Breen told him it came from McCullough and Brautigan related his tale of Pedro, the feline “that runs the airport.” It suddenly became a matter of the utmost importance to go and see the cat. Brautigan borrowed a credit card from Bob the bartender. “Come on,” he insisted, dragging Breen out of Enrico’s and hailing a cab to SFO.

  Breen and Brautigan flew to Ketchikan early in the afternoon. It was still daylight when they touched down at Gravina Island airport. “Richard couldn’t find this cat,” Breen recalled. They walked over to the ticket counter in the terminal.

  “Where is the cat?” Brautigan demanded.

  “Oh, Pedro?” replied the woman behind the counter. “Pedro took the day off.”

  Brautigan looked at Breen. “Bad idea,” he said.

  An hour later, the two Richards were back on the same plane on a return flight to Sa
n Francisco. They went straight from the airport to Enrico’s. It was late and they were the only ones at the bar. “The place was dead empty,” Breen remembered, except for a woman sitting in a side booth stroking a cat. “Wait a minute,” Brautigan said as Bob set up their drinks. He walked over to the strange woman’s table, speaking not to her but the cat.

  “What did you say?” Breen asked, once Brautigan returned and sat down on his stool.

  “I told Pedro he was a bad boy.”

  Back in Montana early in September, Richard reunited with his Bozeman pals at the Eagles. Keeler, Cassaday, Donovan, Scoop, and Schrieber all welcomed him home, not knowing Brautigan could no longer comprehend such a happy thought. Home had always been an illusive concept for the kid who had grown up in cheap motels, unaware when the next unexpected move might come. Neither of his houses in Bolinas and Montana was homelike in any way. At some essential level, they remained little more than crash pads.

  The place in Pine Creek, purged of any residual domestic touches remaining from Akiko or Masako, no longer felt like home. The moment he arrived, Brautigan longed to leave. Whatever magic Montana once possessed had vanished. Worst of all, Richard felt he couldn’t work there. Across the creek, his friend Marian Hjortsberg was living with Dan Manyluk, a sometime cartoonist Brautigan despised. This animosity went back a year to when both had lived at the Range Hotel in Bozeman. Richard referred to Manyluk as Captain Topanga. Marian hadn’t followed his advice about checking out the living quarters of potential boyfriends.

  Financial problems continued nipping at Richard’s heels like a disobedient mongrel who’d once licked his hand. Joel Shawn did his best to calm the rabid beast. He arranged for a $100 monthly payment plan to settle Richard’s debt with Sandra Musser and looked for financing to cover needed repairs on the Bolinas house. Shawn also fielded lowball offers for the film rights to In Watermelon Sugar. Having a lawyer as a literary agent wasn’t good business. Shawn charged by the hour instead of taking a commission on the final sale.