By the time Peter and Becky Fonda showed up with Toby Thompson, most of the guests slumping in the living room were stuporous with drink and drugs. On the wagon, Tom McGuane greeted the Fondas affably and led them toward the livelier kitchen crowd. “There’re some people out there who’re having trouble speaking English,” Tom said.
Jeff Bridges chatted with Warren Zevon in a far corner. Peter Fonda went downstairs to play the piano with the McGuanes’ three-year-old daughter, Annie. The music soon attracted Zevon, who took over at the keyboard, pounding out “The Overdraft,” a song he had cowritten with McGuane. About twenty people crowded in to sing along. “No one sleeps on the yellow line / No one’s that alone.” Zevon was plastered, barely able to speak let alone play the piano, yet still going full blast. “That was his style,” Tom observed, “everything cranked up to ten.” At one point McGuane advised his friend, “Take off your hat and let your brain cool down.”
William Kittredge first ran into Richard Brautigan at the Washbag around 1980. He was at the bar, talking about Montana with Mike Köepf, when Richard came in with two little guys wearing dark suits and ties. Overhearing conversation about home, Brautigan gravitated toward the other writers. “Hey, Richard,” one of the suits called out, “we’re going to dinner now.”
“Good idea,” Brautigan replied, having no intention of joining them.
Richard remained atypically demure throughout the Zevon party. He sat on the living room floor, “curled up” in front of the coffee table. “He was like a little old lady that night,” Thompson observed. “Just an exhausted, drunk, little old woman.” This didn’t prevent him from getting into an altercation with Jim Crumley, a former oil field roustabout. “You could probably beat me in fighting,” Brautigan declared, “but I might be able to kill you.”
Toby thought things looked bad. “I had to get over there through the haze of drugs,” Thompson recalled, “to keep Richard from getting the crap pounded out of him by a bunch of writers who weren’t going to take him as a role model.”
The party broke up early. Almost everyone except Brautigan headed down to the bar at Chico Hot Springs, where Warren Zevon insisted on sitting in with Players, the band on deck that night. Unable to sing, play, or even remember the words to his own songs, Zevon nevertheless loudly demanded the management pay him $1,000 for his fifteen-minute “performance.” Later he was hauled to the Livingston hospital for stitches after cutting his hand when he snapped the neck off a beer bottle, attempting to uncap it without an opener.
Staggering back to her car outside the McGuanes’ place after Brautigan retrieved his .357 Magnum from the garage, Scoop confessed to Richard that she was drunk on her ass. “Really shit faced.” Driving him back home was not even close to the realm of possibility. This turned out not to be a problem. Brautigan climbed in behind the wheel of her little manual transmission car, switched on the engine, shifted into gear, and drove the two miles or so to his house as if he’d been doing it all his life.
Karen Datko “felt honored.” She knew he never drove a car, insisting friends go out of their way to provide him with transportation. Richard told Scoop an involved story about the reason for his aversion to automobiles, swearing her to eternal secrecy. “I’ll never tell,” Datko said. She never did. Scoop also kept mum about Unc’s driving skills for as long as he lived.
Because of King, Brautigan’s friendship with Marian Hjortsberg seemed irrevocably broken. Eventually a neighboring rancher offered to cart the horse away and bury it. Why waste a good stinking rotten carcass? King got hauled into the foothills and dumped as bear bait. The rancher shot a trophy black off him when the bear came to feed. Marian knew this but never told Richard. She saw no point in getting in the last word.
The day after the McGuanes’ party, Brautigan phoned Sean Cassaday in Bozeman and said, “I’d like you to do me a favor.”
Sean thought, “Well, here it comes,” knowing Richard often made outrageous demands on his friends. “What is it?” he asked.
“I’d like you to come over and spend a couple days with me. I want to get some things packed up and get some things in order and pack my house,” Brautigan told him. “I want to make some plans when I leave, because I’m going to be gone for a while, and I want to get all this straightened out. I’d like you to come over and give me a hand doing that.”
“I’m not doing anything right now,” Cassaday said. “That would be fine.”
“And, I’ll pay you for it,” Richard added.
“Well, great! Fine.” Sean would have done it for free. He liked Brautigan and thought spending time with him sounded like a lot of fun. Cassaday drove over to Pine Creek the next morning. “We had a great time those two days,” he recalled.
They started in Richard’s one-room outside sleeping house, packing the personal items in boxes. If his property sold while he was away, Brautigan instructed Cassaday to make sure the Russell Chatham painting, originally commissioned to fill in a window and take the place of the view, was not included in the sale. Richard wanted to keep it, along with the weathered found-art tailgate he called the Harry Dean Stanton Coffee Table. He made Sean promise to guard them for him. After locking the little sleeping chamber, they headed inside the main house for a drink.
A lot of drinking fueled the conversation during Cassaday’s stay. Their next task involved a trip into town. Along the way Richard pointed up Suce Creek canyon at a narrow gorge filled by an aspen grove with leaves turned gold by fall. “I wrote about that small grove of trees,” Brautigan said. “See how it looks almost like a waterfall of color among the evergreens?” He referred to “Kyoto, Montana,” a story in The Tokyo–Montana Express.
Their main destination in Livingston was Western Drug, where Richard filled a prescription for the sleeping medication he took to combat his insomnia. This was of vital importance for his upcoming trip. “Now, don’t take these all at once,” the pharmacist quipped as he pushed several large pill bottles across the counter. Brautigan and Cassaday both got a kick out of this sort of deadpan cowboy humor. They repeated the druggist’s remark throughout the day.
“Enjoying a small moment over and over was certainly something Richard did often,” Sean recalled. “It seldom mattered if it was a good or bad moment. Such moments would become part of his amazing memory for detail.” Ianthe once told her father that his mind was “like a stainless-steel spiderweb.”
Back at Rancho Brautigan, companionship, conversation, and continued drinking took precedence over the more physical demands of packing things up. Brautigan tracked on and on about Marian Hjortsberg’s dead pony. He knew he’d made her children cry, realizing perhaps that he’d gone too far. Richard wanted to apologize but said he couldn’t do it in person. He asked Sean to do it for him after he left. Cassaday was to approach Marian and tell her, “Richard says he’s sorry he did that.” Brautigan felt concerned about tying up certain loose ends. His apology was one of the things he wanted taken care of.
Richard also had Sean make a couple phone calls. The first, to Jonathan Dolger in New York, was to inform the agent that Brautigan would be coming to town soon for a few days before leaving on an extended trip, several months at least, and would not be readily available while away in Europe and Japan. The second was an overseas call to the Netherlands. Richard’s first European stop was Amsterdam. He wanted Cassaday to ask the operator the correct local time. Brautigan had been given a pen with a little inset digital clock. Once Sean learned the correct Dutch time, Richard had him enter it into the pen. “Now I know what time it is in Amsterdam,” Brautigan said. “When I get there, I won’t have to ask anyone. I’ll have this thing.”
Later in the evening, Richard told Sean he was leaving because he could no longer write in Montana. Tokyo, on the other hand, proved conducive to writing well. Illustrating his point, Brautigan got out a recent Japanese notebook and read sections of “The Fate of a West German Model in Tokyo” to Cassaday. Sean remembered a section about “sitting in a res
taurant and looking at a beautiful woman, and he was imagining how he might have had an affair with this woman.”
The next morning after coffee, Richard and Sean got back to work, packing things in boxes. It began to look as if someone was really moving out. They worked at a leisurely pace, conversation preferable to backbreaking labor. Brautigan talked about wanting to have another child. He hoped to do a better job this time around than he thought he had with Ianthe. When she was a baby, Brautigan had almost no money. He got rich almost overnight. Richard believed his sudden fame got in the way of being a proper parent.
Later, they talked about ghosts. Brautigan told Cassaday the Pine Creek house was haunted by an Asian poltergeist. He’d never made such a claim before; owning a haunted house in Bolinas was sufficiently supernatural. Richard spoke metaphorically. The spirits of Akiko, Masako, Siew-Hwa, and Eunice lingered at Rancho Brautigan. He deserved “to be haunted.”
At one point, Richard claimed he hadn’t published anything recently because of his divorce. He told Sean his settlement was structured in a way that permitted Aki to take his future earnings. This was a deliberate falsehood. Brautigan and his lawyers had worked very hard to separate his copyrights from any division of property. Richard was not publishing because no one was buying.
Around 7:00 pm, Toby Thompson stopped in to say goodbye. He’d been put off by Brautigan’s drinking and “was afraid of getting roped into a really bad scene.” Toby found Richard “in a reflective mood,” a major move clearly under way. Thompson asked Brautigan why he was leaving the ranch.
“Its time has passed,” Richard said.
They talked about Brautigan’s plans to sell the place. Richard offered Toby 15 percent of “whatever he could get for it.” Knowing Tom Brokaw was looking for a home in Montana, Thompson gave this notion some thought.
Because of his dead pony dispute with Marian Hjortsberg, Brautigan could no longer bring his treasured sporting equipment to her house for winter storage. The McGuanes were recruited as replacements. Richard called Tom to say he was bringing his stuff by. “He saw life in moments,” McGuane recalled. “The moment when I leave—when I leave my things—when I relinquish my pistol. The moment when I first walked into your kitchen. These things are all very charged.” Tom told Richard he’d be busy for awhile, working his colts out in the riding arena but he could come up later once he’d finished. Brautigan was unhappy at having to wait but had no choice.
Sean and Richard gathered up Brautigan’s firearms (McGuane remembered it as a 30-30 rifle, a couple handguns, the treasured pump-action .22) and fishing equipment, along with his blue Smith Corona electric typewriter. Toby offered to prepare dinner, watching as Richard tied his tubed fly rods together with a black ribbon, binding in a bouquet of dead flowers to finish the arrangement. Along with the rods, a couple rifles, and the .44 Magnum, Thompson noticed a small plywood box ceremoniously wrapped in layers of tissue paper.
Toby asked what it was. Brautigan watched with a bemused expression as Thompson peeled back the tissue and opened the lid. Inside lay an austere glazed clay urn.
“I’ll be in there someday,” Richard whispered.
Toby shrugged it off as Brautigan and Cassaday hauled the stuff up to Barney Creek. It was late, and they found Tom McGuane working one of his cutting horses in a covered arena off to the side of his house. Sean hung back as Tom dismounted and walked with Richard out of the arena, across a little bridge into the front yard. McGuane found Brautigan “aloof, wounded that I didn’t stop immediately, and I sort of charmed him out of it.” Tom remembered thinking “he was carrying something really big around in his head.”
Richard gave Tom a big kiss. “Don’t worry, “he said. “I’m not really trying to kill myself.” Cassaday didn’t take part in the conversation as they lifted Brautigan’s typewriter, guns, and rods from the car, but he heard some of what they said. “It was just goodbye between two good friends.”
McGuane said something to Brautigan about his drinking. “Be careful,” he warned.
Richard promised to try, saying “he wanted to go back to Japan and was thinking very seriously about getting married again and having children.” He mentioned “a young girl that he had an affair with the year before. Perhaps marrying and having a child.”
Sean knew he wasn’t a part of this, standing back as Brautigan handed McGuane the small wooden box. “I’ll send for this when I need it,” Richard said.
They kissed farewell like brothers, and Cassaday drove Brautigan back to the home he was about to leave forever. Tom and Richard never saw each other again.
Down in Pine Creek, Toby Thompson found almost no food in Brautigan’s kitchen. He threw together an improvised meal, “scrambled eggs, sautéed hot dogs, some peppers, and a can of Dinty Moore beef stew.” When Richard and Sean returned, they gathered for this simple fare, washed down with tumblers of George Dickel. “It was a real sacramental kind of meal.” Brautigan seemed “tremendously touched” that Thompson had cooked his dinner. He kept saying thank you, glancing over at Toby, who thought he looked “so ethereal.” Thompson felt deep sympathy for Richard “because the phone didn’t ring that night. Nobody came to see him that night—his last night in Montana.”
After rinsing their dishes in the sink, the trio headed through the darkness to Brautigan’s studio out in the barn. They climbed the bare wooden stairs angling from landing to landing up to the rafters, a single bare bulb lighting their way from above. Toby asked Brautigan how many books he’d written. Richard thought for a second or two. “Ten,” he answered.
They set to work in Brautigan’s small boxlike writing studio, the spectacular mountain view shrouded by night. Richard sorted through his papers, making stacks of thirty or forty pages at a time on the simple white wooden slab desk. “Taxes,” he’d say, separating the documents he wanted to save into a new file folder and tossing the discards onto the floor. Brautigan reorganized all his files in this manner, putting what he wanted to keep into boxes (correspondence, legal matters, manuscripts), throwing the rest onto the growing trash heap at his feet.
A man who previously had preserved every scrap of paper however insignificant, Richard now ruthlessly discarded everything he once would have treasured. Letters from Masako and Takako Shiina, early drafts of unpublished poetry, fan notes, correspondence with other writers, Mr. Yamaguchi’s autographed soup recipe book—all went onto the floor, along with financial statements, tax returns, canceled checks, uncorrected galley proofs for So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away, assorted snapshots, birthday cards from his daughter, and an assortment of junk (foosball tournament posters, a menu from the Old Norris School House Café, a 1978 program for the District 10-C basketball tournament in Livingston, a calendar from Van’s IGA, numerous contracting and plumbing receipts, and the operating instructions for a Maytag Model DE407 washing machine).
Toby Thompson stood back watching. Behind him a soft cloth sculpture of several three-foot-long trout hung on the wall. In a way, it felt like witnessing a man destroy every trace of his recent emotional past. “[Richard] was talking about death,” Toby recalled. “Death was in the air.” Like a potlatch, Brautigan gave Thompson his personal things throughout the night: a pen from the Wrangler (“The Most Literary Bar in the USA”), copies of his work (a second edition of Galilee Hitchhiker, foreign translations of his novels), inscribing each in an evolving narrative of letting go.
Richard came across copies of recent work. “Here’s one for Montana,” he said and read “The Lost Tree,” a story of vanished love, about revisiting the tree where he and Masako had so often consummated their passion.
“This one’s for Japan,” Brautigan said, reading the poem “Night Flowing River.” Proud of the work, he mentioned it had been printed in Japanese and posted on newspaper kiosks all over Tokyo.
“Has that ever been published?” Toby asked.
“Well, no. Not in English,” Brautigan said. “This is the only English version of it.”
&
nbsp; “Can I have those?”
“Sure.”
Thompson told Richard he was connected to the Washington Review of the Arts in D.C. He thought he might be able to get the two pieces published. After finishing in the studio, Brautigan, Cassaday, and Thompson returned to the main house for another drink. Once again, just like five months earlier in Tokyo, Richard had misplaced the manuscript of “The Fate of a West German Model in Tokyo.” He started poking around among the packing boxes.
“Look for a little green notebook,” he calmly instructed Toby. “Kind of important.”
“What’s in it?”
“The new novel.”
Thompson was shocked. Holy shit! he thought. The house was full of junk. Richard didn’t seem all that concerned. Toby knew he’d be going out of his mind if his book had been lost. After a search, they found the notebook under the sofa around 1:00 pm. Toby was heading back to Livingston. He planned on staying another week in Montana to finish the Peter Fonda story. Brautigan told him he’d rented a room at the Murray for the month. Thompson was welcome to use it and save some money. They embraced at the door. “It was quite touching,” Toby thought, heading back toward town.
Richard and Sean got little if any sleep that night. Early the next morning, Cassaday drove Brautigan into Livingston. Their first stop was the Mint Bar, where Richard bought a pint of whiskey. After a couple snorts, Brautigan felt ready to conduct his business. A visit to his real estate agent topped the agenda. For inexplicable reasons, Richard brought his telephone into town and left it with the Realtor. Next they headed for the First Security Bank. Sean waited outside in the car while Richard went in to finesse the rough edges of his dwindling line-of-credit loan.
Brautigan went to see Bruce Erickson, the bank’s president, who had signed off on his loan. Bruce liked Richard, having had long experience with his eccentricities. Once, Brautigan came to see him and said, “I’ve really got to show you something.” He led Erickson out of the bank’s back door into the alley and they turned right, walking half a block to Callender Street. Another right turn and a half-block stroll took them to the corner of Second Street, where they turned right again and walked to the front entrance of First Security. Nothing happened. No interesting new sights were seen. Just another ordinary day in Livingston. Brautigan wanted to share his fascination with the mundane.
Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan Page 145
