Richard Brautigan spent much of his free time with Bob Junsch during his last two weeks of life. On the eighth of September, he was over at the Junsches’ house in Stinson and gave Bob and Shallen a number of signed books. He included a copy of The Galilee Hitch-Hiker, among the rarest of Brautigan’s early books. He inscribed it: “‘wishing and concerned one more week. Let’s see what happens. Why not?’ (happiness + happiness).” Richard signed his name in full, his tiny signature pinched and cramped like engraving on the head of a pin.
“These are going to be worth a lot of money someday,” Richard said when he gave the couple his books. Brautigan had never played the role of a literary big shot around Bob, but Junsch thought it an “awfully pompous thing to say.”
A week later, the Junsches gave Richard a ride into the city in Shallen’s new Peugeot. “He called for some reason,” Bob recalled. “He had to go over.” Junsch was on his way to the airport to fly down to Morro Bay. On the drive, Brautigan talked a lot about Japan. He also asked about Kevin Clancy, a bartender at the Washbag that he liked. Clancy was a friend of Bob’s. Junsch told Richard that Clancy was a good guy, “but you have to watch him if you’re out and about. He kind of likes his fisticuffs.”
The Junsches dropped Brautigan off at Kearny and Broadway, in front of Enrico’s. They were in a hurry and didn’t have time to stop for a cup of coffee. The next time Bob saw his friend, Richard had been dead for six weeks.
On a previous trip to San Francisco, Brautigan had stopped by City Lights. The bookshop featured a window display of Walt Whitman’s books along with dried grass from the poet’s grave. Lawrence Ferlinghetti spotted his old acquaintance and went outside to ask what Richard thought of the little exhibit.
“That sure gives a good argument for cremation,” Brautigan said.
Richard did not go to City Lights on his last visit to Frisco, heading straight into Enrico’s for a drink. He had no way of knowing that his ex-wife Akiko was also in town for the day. She had come up from Los Angeles to work on an assignment with a photographer. When the job was finished, they had plenty of time before their return flight and stopped for coffee at a North Beach café. Afterward, the photographer wanted to buy a pack of cigarettes. They went into an adult bookstore on Broadway to look for some smokes.
Inside Enrico’s, Brautigan polished off the last of several drinks. He’d struck up a conversation with a strange woman and invited her to get something to eat with him next door at Vanessi’s. They stepped out onto Broadway at the same moment Aki and the photographer left the adult bookstore down the block. Even from the rear and at some distance, Akiko recognized her former husband immediately. “That’s Richard Brautigan,” she told her companion, following after the familiar form.
Richard and the woman went inside Vanessi’s. Two glass doors, one on either side of a small vestibule, separated the restaurant’s interior from the street. Aki entered the first door and through the second watched Brautigan talk with the familiar maître d’. Richard turned and looked straight at Akiko, seeing her for the first time in four years. He grew pale “like he saw a ghost.” Without saying a word, Brautigan walked away, toward the bar.
Aki knew in her heart she should not have attempted this surprise encounter with Richard. Feeling “so sad,” she hurried back down Broadway, “crying all the way to Los Angeles in the airplane.”
Richard lost his appetite but still ordered something to eat. Afterward, Brautigan parted company with the woman he’d just met and returned to Enrico’s alone. In a coincidence like something invented in Hollywood, Marcia Clay decided to look for Richard, whom she’d also not seen in four years. Loading her baby into his carriage, she wheeled him over to Enrico’s, hoping to find Brautigan there. Disappointed at not seeing him, she asked the bartender when Richard had last been in. “Oh, he’s here now,” he told her. “He just went to the bathroom.”
Marcia waited for him. When he came out of the men’s room, “he looked like he’d seen a spook.”
“What are you doing here?” he asked, sounding startled.
“I’m looking for you, Richard.”
“I don’t believe this,” Brautigan said. “My whole life has just happened in one day.”
Marcia thought Richard was “already drunk,” but she sat down to have a cocktail with him. Brautigan said, “I want to come to your house, and I want you to cook for me. I want to spend the night at your house.”
Clay felt her friend didn’t understand reality. “I have a husband,” she said.
“All right.” Richard steepled his hands together and did his little formal trademark bow. Their conversation continued, and Brautigan told her about the book he was writing. He asked Marcia to read it.
“Richard, I don’t know if I should read your book,” Marcia said. “What if I don’t like it? I may say things that are honest.”
Brautigan accepted this. He told her his new book was “a place I’ve been to and that nobody’s ever been to.” He said “it was about all the horrible things he’d seen in all of his travels. His visit in Germany, the camps. Seeing things that were devastating to him about the dark side of nature.” Richard leaned over and whispered the title in Marcia’s ear, swearing her to secrecy. “Don’t ever tell anyone,” he said.
The book’s title was “The Complete Absence of Twilight.” In telling Clay about it, Brautigan made things up as he went along, inventing the novel he hoped to write, not the few typewritten pages lying at home on his worktable in Bolinas. Very gently, Richard placed his hand on Marcia’s leg. “I love you,” he said. Clay thought it was strange. He’d never said anything like that to her before, staring deeply at her with “kind of sick eyes.”
Soon it was time to go. Marcia had a baby son and a husband at home. Her days of hanging out in bars with Richard at all hours had long passed. “I want you to call me,” Brautigan said. Clay thought he sounded “almost like a surgeon.” Brautigan wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to her. “This is my number,” he said. “Be sure to call me.”
She took his phone number. “Yes, I’ll call you,” she said. Marcia kissed Richard on the cheek and left, wheeling her carriage off down Broadway. Not wanting to hang out at Enrico’s with no friends around, Brautigan stalked out into the early evening. He headed down to Cho-Cho. Jim Sakata stood behind the bar. He also thought Richard looked like a ghost. “You know who I just met?” Brautigan stammered. “I just saw Akiko on Broadway. She smiled at me and wanted to talk.” Over several more drinks, Brautigan repeated the story again and again, telling Sakata “he just walked away.”
Richard lurched out into the night, searching for friends, all the while knowing no one alive on earth could erase his terrible enduring pain. From time to time since returning from Japan, Brautigan had hung out with Lou Marcelli, his bar owner pal from the sixties. Lou tended to avoid Richard when he was drunk. “But if he was in a good humor, then he’d be the greatest guy to talk to. He had more stories! We’d laugh and talk . . . but when he was drunk, I had nothing to do with him.”
That night, sitting at a North Beach coffee shop on Columbus, Marcelli spotted Brautigan “walking by with some guy.” Lou didn’t like what he saw. Richard “was so drunk he was glowing. I mean, he was polluted! I kind of just sat there. He walked by me.” Marcelli watched Brautigan stagger past and go into Gino & Carlo’s. “That was the last time I saw him,” he said.
Richard’s companion became just another boozing buddy lost forever in time. Brautigan was alone when he stepped into the seedy saloon on Green Street. Curt Gentry sat at the bar in Gino & Carlo’s, talking to a young woman named Mary Jane. Richard put his hand on Curt’s shoulder. “He obviously wanted to tell me something,” Gentry recalled, “and I couldn’t understand him. Nothing made sense, he was so drunk.” Curt wanted to hear the end of Mary Jane’s story. Brautigan squeezed his shoulder affectionately. “Just a minute,” Gentry said to Richard, “and she’ll be finished.” When he turned around, his old friend was
gone.
No telling how many bars Richard hit after leaving Gino & Carlo’s, but somehow he found his way to the Washbag. Kevin Clancy drove Brautigan home to Bolinas that night after his shift ended. Clancy dropped Brautigan off on Terrace Avenue around 10:30. He declined an invitation to come in for a nightcap and headed back for the city. Richard staggered down to Smiley’s and found Andy Cole at the bar. Cole listened to Brautigan’s story about running into Akiko earlier in the day. Richard claimed she said she wanted to remain friends, but he acted “totally cold towards her.” This was another drunken fabrication, as there had been no interaction between Brautigan and his former wife. Andy thought his old friend seemed very depressed. He advised Richard to go home and sleep it off.
Back in his gloomy house, Brautigan wandered about, inconsolable in the darkness. Sleep seemed impossible. He determined to kill himself, washing down handfuls of pills with whiskey and collapsing onto his unmade bed. In the morning Richard woke up with an all-too-familiar hangover, made even more miserable by finding himself still alive. The weather was cold and foggy. Around one in the afternoon, Brautigan wandered over to Andy Cole’s house, repeating his tale of woe, tracking on the agony of seeing Akiko unexpectedly at Vanessi’s, confessing his inept failed suicide attempt. Andy told him it was only depression and advised some rest. “You have to get off the booze,” he told Richard.
Brautigan headed back toward Terrace Avenue, stopping in the general store to buy a steak for dinner. Turning the corner at Wharf Road, Richard encountered Margot Patterson Doss, getting her house at 9 Brighton Avenue ready for new tenants. Someone had knocked her gate off its hinges, and she struggled to set it right. “Margot, can I help you with that?” Richard wrestled the gate back into place.
“You want to have dinner with us?” Margot asked.
“I’ve got my dinner here in my pocket,” Brautigan replied, pulling the wrapped meat out of his peacoat.
“The latchkey is always out, Richard. We’re here for the weekend. If you want to come and have dinner with us, just let us know.”
“Thank you, Margot,” he said, “but I have to go back to Montana tomorrow.”
“Well, we’ll miss you,” she told him. Brautigan walked away down the street.
Ironically, at almost the same time, Marcia Clay was across the lagoon at Stinson Beach, playing in the waves with her husband and baby son. Later that night, around 11:00, when Sasha was asleep, Marcia kept her promise and dialed Richard’s number in Bolinas. “Oh, you’re calling,” he said when he heard her voice.
“How are you?” Clay asked. She thought he sounded drunk.
“Fucked up.” Brautigan paused. “Marcia, I want to read you some of my new work.”
“Okay.”
“Just a minute,” Richard said, “I have to go get it. Call me back in ten minutes.”
Marcia said she would and hung up. “I’ll call back because we are friends,” she wrote in her diary, “and considering the many things that don’t work and never will, something with us does work and always will.” Clay waited twelve minutes and called Brautigan again. No answer. Marcia got Richard’s recorded message. “He was so crazy,” she said later. “I thought maybe I missed it by one minute and he put me on the answering machine.”
Richard Brautigan woke up late on the morning of Sunday, September 16, suffering from the last hangover of his life. It was nearly noon. He’d slept in his shorts and socks. After pulling on yesterday’s corduroy trousers and a T-shirt, he brewed a pot of coffee. The java was dark and bitter. There was a darkness growing, eating away inside him. The corrosion of pain and disappointment consumed the very last of Richard’s dwindling supply of hope. He neatly arranged the stacks of poems and stories on his worktable. There would be no writing today. Brautigan had a more important task awaiting him.
Richard padded around in his stocking feet, double-checking the timer controlling his lights, making sure it was set to switch on and off at the proper times. He felt calm and at peace. All his rage and anger seemed very far away, like some stranger shouting at him from the bottom of a mine shaft. Brautigan enjoyed a profound sense of satisfaction. He’d set out to become a great American writer and believed he had achieved his goal. Having controlled every aspect of his career and public image, Richard knew he’d made the right decision. Almost as an afterthought, he set down his coffee cup, picked up the telephone receiver, and dialed Don Carpenter’s number over in Mill Valley.
In the middle of watching a football game on television, Don felt pissed at being interrupted by Brautigan. Richard had an uncanny ability to call at inconvenient moments. Expecting the usually litany of vindictive complaint, Carpenter was surprised to hear his friend talking without rancor in a general, amiable way. Brautigan called him “honey,” which he did all the time but only when drunk. At the end of their short conversation, Richard said two things Don had never heard him utter before. “I love you,” he said. Then, before Carpenter had time to reply, he said “goodbye” and hung up.
Brautigan walked soundlessly into his kitchen and turned up the volume on the radio. Returning to the living area, he picked Jim Sakata’s heavy nickel-plated revolver off the table and checked the cylinder. Every chamber was loaded. Richard snapped it shut and stepped to the window. The pistol felt comfortable, fitting easily into his right hand. He stared out at the trees blocking his view of the vast Pacific Ocean. Japan lay somewhere far beyond the horizon he couldn’t see. Loud music echoed from another planet. Brautigan thumbed back the hammer, cocking the big Smith & Wesson. No one will ever know his final thoughts. Raising the .44 Magnum and placing the cold steel barrel in his mouth, Richard Brautigan tasted the peculiar sweetness of gun oil.
MAYONNAISE
bibliography
Note: All works consulted were First Editions.
seven handwritten notebooks by richard brautigan
Portions of these notebooks were published in Richard Brautigan/The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings, Houghton Mifflin, Boston/New York, 1999. This edition did not follow the author’s intentions regarding layout and chapter breaks, matters of supreme creative importance to Brautigan. Richard gave these notebooks to Edna Webster when he left Eugene, Oregon in 1956. She kept them in a safe deposit box. By 1991, the key had been lost. I paid for a locksmith to open the box and the material saw the light of day for the first time in years. Edna Webster gave me permission to photocopy the original notebooks.
i love You, Unpublished, Eugene, Oregon, 1955.
There’s Always Somebody Who Is Enchanted, Eugene, Oregon, 1956.
A Love Letter From State Insane Asylum, Eugene, Oregon, 1956.
Rock Around the Clock, Eugene, Oregon 1956.
Would You Like to Saddle Up a Couple of Goldfish and Swim to Alaska?, Eugene, Oregon. 1956
I Watched the World Glide Effortlessly Bye, Eugene, Oregon, 1956.
Poems for Edna, Eugene, Oregon, internal evidence suggests this was work done at the Bartons in the Spring of 1956.
published prose by richard brautigan
The Return of the Rivers, Inferno Press, n.p. San Francisco, 1957.
Four New Poets, Inferno Press, San Francisco, 1957.
The Galilee Hitchhiker, White Rabbit Press, San Francisco, 1958.
Lay the Marble Tea, Carp Press, San Francisco, 1959.
The Octopus Frontier, Carp Press, San Francisco, 1960.
A Confederate General from Big Sur, Grove Press, New York, 1964.
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Communication Company, San Francisco, 1967.
Trout Fishing in America, Four Seasons Foundation, San Francisco, 1967.
Please Plant This Book, Graham Mackintosh, San Francisco or Santa Barbara, 1968.
The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, Four Seasons Foundation, San Francisco, 1968.
The San Francisco Public Library: A Publishing House, Created by Victor Moscoso, Jack Thibeau and Richard Brautigan, San Francisco, December 5, 1968.
Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar, (Three books in the manner of their original editions.), Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, New York, 1969.
Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt, Delacorte Press, New York, 1970.
The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1971.
Revenge of the Lawn, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1971.
The Hawkline Monster, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1974.
Willard and His Bowling Trophies, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1975.
Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1976.
Sombrero Fallout, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1976.
Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942, Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, n.p. New York, 1977.
June 30, June 30, Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, New York, 1978.
The Tokyo-Montana Express, Targ Editions, New York, 1979.
So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away, Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, New York, 1982.
Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan Page 152
