Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Helen Brann helped resolve this difficulty, proposing Richard get together with Jonathan Dolger. “I suggested that he call Jonathan,” she said, “which he did.” By way of thanks, Brautigan sent Brann a signed copy of Marc Chénetier’s book-length critical study. She was happy to receive it. “All praise richly deserved,” Helen wrote to Richard. “I’m proud of our professional association and of you—and so glad to call you one of my dearest friends.”

  Brautigan told Dolger about “American Hotels” and his West German model project but had no work ready for submission. Jonathan convinced Richard that shelving An Unfortunate Woman for the moment would be their best marketing ploy. Dolger felt it was “a very downbeat, very depressed, very self-pitying book.” He suggested they “try and think of different ways.” Publish something more cheerful first. “If he needed money,” Dolger said, “we should try and work the movie side of it.” Hawkline was still in development at Universal, and there was word of film interest in Babylon and other Brautigan titles, all cause for hope.

  Hope doesn’t pay the bills. Brautigan’s only income at the time came from his three rental properties in Livingston, barely enough to cover expenses. Richard’s line of credit at the First Security Bank was nearly maxed out. He decided to list Rancho Brautigan on the real estate market. His asking price was $500,000 at a time when forty acres in Pine Creek was worth barely half that much. When his friends pointed this out to Richard, he retorted, “The Japs will buy it. They’ll pay anything for it.”

  Another pipe dream, like the pot of Hollywood gold waiting at the end of an ephemeral rainbow. Richard already had another option, the ultimate solution, a final way out of all his problems. Brautigan often spoke obliquely about suicide with his friends. Brad Donovan remembered hearing several times about how when Jack London decided to end it all, “next to his bed was a notepad where he worked out the morphine prescription that put him under.” Richard emphasized London “didn’t want to get it wrong.”

  Greg Keeler recalled how Brautigan “knew when, how, why and with what kind of weapon Hemingway killed himself.” Brautigan had also spoken to Tom McGuane about suicide. “He told me there had been a lot of cancer in his family,” Tom remembered. “He said he would get it and when he was told he would kill himself. No evidence somebody told him that he had cancer, and no evidence that anyone in his family had it. Given Richard’s mind, speculatively, maybe he confected this context for suicide in case he should find it handy.”

  Trying to sum things up, Sean Cassaday referred to an idea expressed by Doris Lessing, “People who want to commit suicide rehearse in their minds constantly how they will do it.” In Japan hara-kiri was considered an honorable act, even a noble one. Richard believed this. Miracles might happen and solve all his problems, but if things continued to get worse, death always remained an option. This decision eased Brautigan’s mind and gave him an approximation of peace. Knowing the end in advance provided a measure of consolation. Whenever the time seemed appropriate, Richard was ready to die.

  At times Greg Keeler needed “a break from the alcohol and death talk,” leaving Brautigan “to stew on his own.” Keeler felt guilty about this. He knew if Richard couldn’t find other company, “he’d spiral into a physical and psychological oblivion.” By mid-September, alone in his Pine Creek house, Brautigan had grown “hugely depressed.” He moved into the Murray Hotel in Livingston. At the far end of a long narrow hallway, room 211 was a dreary ten-by-twelve corner cell with drab yellow walls and no toilet. The single window with a pull-string shade looked down past the hall fire escape onto a collection of garbage cans in the back alley. There was a plain wooden chair and a one-drawer desk supporting a tiny black-and-white TV “full of fuzz and static.” The iron bedstead had been painted orange, its cot-like mattress covered with an orange chenille spread. Like his sad lodgings at the Hotel Jessie, number 211 was a room where a man could easily go mad.

  One evening at the hotel, Brautigan encountered film director Sam Peckinpah, who rented a suite on the third floor. They knew one another casually from brief encounters at parties hosted by the Fondas and the McGuanes. Richard invited Sam to drop by his room the following night for a drink. A lifelong fan of Westerns (with one of his own in development), Brautigan had a lot to talk about with the man who made Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch. Knowing Sam to be a brandy drinker, Richard bought a bottle from the Murray Bar downstairs the next evening, putting the price on his tab and asking for a couple clean glasses.

  When Peckinpah arrived at room 211, Brautigan’s .357 Magnum handgun sat on the desktop next to the Courvoisier. Richard poured them both a drink. Sam asked him about the heavy artillery. “Protection,” Brautigan replied.

  Peckinpah understood, familiar with Brautigan’s personal paranoia. He offered to fetch his own pistol and “liven the place up.” Sam returned in a couple minutes with his .38 Colt. Looking out Brautigan’s open window, Peckinpah spotted an alley cat sitting on top of a garbage can and fired a shot. He missed the cat. The pistol’s report echoed among the surrounding buildings.

  “My turn,” Richard said, firing two loud rounds. The twice-punctured garbage can rang like a gong.

  “What in the hell do you two think you’re doing?” Ralph White, the hotel’s crusty manager, glowered in the doorway, wearing striped pajamas and carrying the office club reserved for troublemakers. This was a lengthy speech for White, notoriously taciturn, a “yup and nope” guy at heart. He lived in room 212, right next door, and had appeared instantly, as if by magic.

  “Target practice,” Brautigan said.

  Sam, the permanent resident, sounded more apologetic. Like Richard at Rancho Brautigan, Peckinpah had also gained a dubious reputation for shooting off weapons inside his rooms upstairs. Not wanting any trouble, Sam promised Ralph he’d “hang it up for tonight.” White nodded and wandered grumbling back to his room. Peckinpah and Brautigan put their firearms away. What they did next, if anything, was anybody’s guess.

  Richard rented room 211 by the month. It was worth $100 to know a cheap room awaited him in town whenever the solitude out in Pine Creek grew unbearable. Brautigan fought his depression by having friends over in the afternoon to drink and shoot guns off the back porch. Dave Schrieber, Scoop, Greg Keeler, and Sean Cassaday all took turns blasting away on various occasions. Keeler remembered one time when Richard hauled a wooden chair, part of a set of expensive furniture Akiko had purchased, out into the firing line. “Take things that bother you and shoot them,” Greg said.

  Marian Hjortsberg was no longer included among the shooters at Brautigan’s place. Richard’s animosity toward her current boyfriend foreclosed on any possible invitation. “The guy was a total jackass,” Karen Datko observed. “He purported to be a great artist. There’s no question that Richard could not stand Dan Manyluk.” The death of a pony brought all of Brautigan’s bad feelings out into the open.

  King didn’t even belong to Marian. She’d pastured the feisty pony for years at no cost as a favor to elderly neighbors who’d once owned a Wyoming ranch but no longer had any room for livestock. King’s loss was not mourned by anyone in the Hjortsberg family. He’d been quick to bite, impossible for a child to ride, and too small for an adult. Like Dan Manyluk, King was the classic freeloader, growing fat and sassy off the land without ever having to provide any work in return.

  Brautigan felt offended because Marian chose not to bury the dead pony. Perhaps the odor of decay drifting up from the woods became too powerful a reminder of his death option. The carcass lay down under the trees, out of sight and far away. Marian explained to Richard that she couldn’t afford to hire a backhoe to dig a hole big enough. Let the coyotes, ravens, and maggots do their work. By spring King would be a small pile of bleached bones. If Brautigan still wished some sort of ceremony, they could gather on the banks of Pine Creek and toss the pony’s remains into the rushing snowmelt runoff.

  This proposal didn’t satisfy Richard. He started harping on th
e subject, repeatedly “tracking” over and over again about the immorality of leaving King unburied. Brautigan’s behavior struck Marian as particularly curious. At a party at her house shortly before the pony died, Richard got very drunk and grew nostalgic, “tracking” in a different vein. “I wish we could have been able to make it together,” he told her again and again. “I wish we could have been able to make it together.” Once an idea became fixed in Brautigan’s mind, whether about love or death, he was unable to let it go. Scoop saw things differently. “All that had to happen,” she said, “was that Dan Manyluk had to drop his beer can and get off his ass and go out with a shovel and cover up the pony with some dirt.”

  This may have been the case, but Brautigan never confronted Manyluk directly. King still lay moldering in the woods when Toby Thompson arrived back in Montana early in October on assignment to write a magazine piece about Peter Fonda. As soon as Thompson checked into the Murray Hotel, he phoned Brautigan in Pine Creek. They hadn’t spoken in over three years. Richard said he’d like to get together, but they didn’t see each other until a couple nights later when Brautigan came back on the bus from a quick trip to Bozeman.

  Toby sat at the Livingston Bar and Grill with Dink Bruce, Tim Cahill, and Jeff Bridges. Richard came in “staggering drunk.” Brautigan “did the number of kissing [everybody] on the lips” and pulled up a stool at the bar. Thompson thought he looked “like somebody who was completely and totally vulnerable.” As if to contradict this impression, Richard turned to Cahill and said, “You know, Tim, Toby is really a much better writer than you are.”

  “Now Richard,” Tim replied in a good-natured way, “don’t start these wide-awake fights at one o’clock in the morning.”

  No one reacted further. Thompson thought “it was the sort of remark that a senile person in a nursing home might say when they’ve got nothing left to lose.”

  Oblivious to his own rude behavior, Brautigan soon asked who’d give him a ride home. Dink volunteered, as he was heading up the valley. Toby didn’t have a real conversation with Richard until a few days later when he came back to the Murray after an afternoon hike and found Brautigan sitting in the lobby. Thompson wasn’t sure if he had been waiting for him or if their meeting was a coincidence.

  Toby and Richard had a long talk, laying to rest any residual animosity from 1980. Thompson again felt Brautigan was “extraordinarily vulnerable” as they spoke openly about their feelings. Toby decided to accompany Richard on an evening’s round of bar hopping. “I just felt like getting drunk,” he recalled. An easy task with a man who “didn’t want to be seen in the Livingston Bar and Grill knocking down seven or eight shots of Dickel by himself.”

  Brautigan and Thompson ended their pub crawl at the B&G that night. Richard began tracking about Marian Hjortsberg’s dead pony. “How it was so uncivilized, and you did not leave something that you loved to decompose without proper burial.” Toby drove Brautigan back to Pine Creek. Richard ranted about King rotting in the woods all the way home. He persuaded Thompson to take him to a neighbor’s house. Brautigan pounded on the front door. Toby had no idea who lived there. Richard wanted to borrow a shovel, to wake the guy up and have him help bury the dead pony. Nobody was home. Thompson feared he would “have to go out and bury this damned horse in the middle of this cold October night,” but Brautigan let him off the hook and went to bed. “Clearly at this point he had become obsessed with death,” Toby recalled.

  On another occasion, riding a motorcycle with Peter Fonda at dusk, Thompson observed Richard trudging home from the Pine Creek store with a sack of groceries. They waved as they sped past. Toby thought of Brautigan “going to spend the night alone in his isolated house.” It was completely dark when Fonda and Thompson rode back along East River Road. Toby glanced in through Richard’s window as they drove by his house and saw Brautigan sitting all by himself at his dining room table. “I was struck by his solitude,” Thompson recalled.

  Years before, the Hjortsbergs had made the same observation when they walked past Richard’s house one moonlit night during the first summer he lived in Pine Creek. They saw him alone in front of his TV set. Gatz and Marian assumed their new neighbor must be very lonely. Not being loners at heart, they made the same mistake Toby did years later, equating solitude with loneliness. Brautigan often felt depressed but probably never felt lonely. Long familiar with a writer’s solitary isolation, Richard had immunized himself to loneliness.

  Brautigan did no new writing during his final weeks in Montana. He and Brad Donovan compiled a formal “working draft” of their screenplay “Trailer,” a process closer to the mechanical than the creative. Once again they divided up the scenes, separately typing the handwritten pages. Three different typewriters (possibly more) were used in this procedure. The typefaces and formatting styles vary considerably. All the finished pages (a total of sixty-six) were hand numbered as the completed screenplay was assembled. Seven scenes near the end existed only as brief outlines. Richard and Brad planned further work on the script and needed a clean copy from which to coordinate their efforts. They dated this draft “10/83.”

  Richard used the rest of the time he spent alone trying to plan for what little future he had left. Brautigan made notes and drafted business letters. One was to Joe Swindlehurst. “To save money on long distance calls,” he wrote, “have secretary say if you are in, ‘Mr. Swindlehurst has gone fishing and will call me back.’ If you are not in have secretary tell operator when you will be in.” Richard mentioned that he’d give the attorney a German address in Europe and will stay at “the Keio Plaza Hotel for at least a month while I am in Japan. And then take a small apartment. Future plans for Montana: Rent an apartment or buy a house in town in Bozeman.”

  Brautigan outlined a letter to Lee Schultz, his new accountant in San Francisco, an itemized wish list for possible salvation. “I could make some money this year by selling book to Sam,” began item one. “I have tons of deductions.” Richard continued, “I could make a lot of money next year, can I transfer losses of this year to next year?” The third item on his list of impossible dreams stated, “I’m going to sell the ranch, asking $500,000, may take a long time to get it but will need structure. I’ll let you know when it happens.” Brautigan wondered about making quarterly tax payments. “Too late this year.” He ended with a mix of pipe dreams and desperation. “Will get $25,000 upon starting a film, maybe in January. What about quarterly payments? Do I have to make any next year because my income was so low this year? I’m borrowing $50,000. Hodge got it. $10,500 for interest.”

  Compiling such a dismal tally would put anyone in a bad mood. Brautigan stormed over to the Hjortsberg place, drunkenly invaded Marian’s kitchen, raving about the “millenniums of civilization involved” and how burying the decaying pony was the “civilized thing to do.” He left Marian and the children in tears. She phoned Tim Cahill in town, asking him to “come out and please, please keep Richard away from the kids.” Tim’s wife, Maureen, a good friend of Marian’s, dispatched Cahill to Pine Creek. She went with him as they had an invitation to the McGuanes’ later that evening.

  When Tim and Maureen arrived at Richard’s place, not a word was said about King. They found Scoop, Schreiber, and “two or three others” hanging out and having a good time shooting handguns off the back porch. Everybody had another drink. Brautigan did not shoot. Being most sober, Cahill shot the best and “got lots of pats on the back” as he actually hit the target, unlike the others in the crowd.

  That evening, Tom and Laurie McGuane hosted a large gathering for singer-songwriter Warren Zevon (“Excitable Boy,” “Carmalita,” “Werewolves of London”), with whom Tom had been collaborating on song lyrics. Zevon flew in from L.A. with mystery writer Jim Crumley (The Last Good Kiss). Zevon and Crumley put a new spin on the concept of the “mile-high club,” getting stoned out of their gourds in the airliner’s restroom. They met up at the Livingston Bar and Grill with a couple other Missoula writers, Bill Kittredge
, who at this stage of his career had published only a single volume of short stories (The Van Gogh Field and Other Stories), and Mike Köepf, whose first novel (Save the Whale) had come out in 1978. After a couple drinks, they headed up the valley to the McGuanes’ spread.

  Gatz Hjortsberg had first encountered Crumley, a burly affable Texan, the previous April at a Los Angeles book-signing party for Dancing Bear, Crumley’s most recent Milo Milodragovich mystery. Gatz wasn’t around for the Warren Zevon festivities, exiled by remarriage in Billings, where he worked on the final revisions for The Hawkline Monster script, a project on which Brautigan pinned much of his dwindling capacity for hope.

  Karen Datko came over from Bozeman to Rancho Brautigan in the afternoon, joining Dirty Unc and several of his former MSU students, busy tying one on and blasting sixguns off the porch. The Cahills drove Richard to the party. Scoop followed, hauling the other uninvited drunks to the McGuanes’ place on Barney Creek. Tom and Laurie’s official guest list included Jeff and Sue Bridges, the Cahills, and the Fondas. McGuane was triply pissed when he saw Brautigan and his entourage arrive. “One, he brought uninvited guests. Two, he was already drunk. Three, he had a .357 magnum with him.”

  Tim Cahill had no idea Richard was packing. Tom took the big pistol from Richard, saying, “You can come, and these other people, but the gun has to go.” McGuane put the magnum in his garage. “Not a good idea to have a drunk with a gun and kids in the house.”

  Karen Datko made a fuss over the incident. “She insisted it was some kind of competitiveness or upstaging on my part,” Tom recalled. “Just because Richard was a great writer, I had no right to take it away from him. I didn’t make it an issue. The gun thing is a motif in the life of Richard Brautigan.”