Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Montana poet Greg Keeler tried to leave a message. Ditto journalist Toby Thompson, calling from Cabin John, Maryland. Richard’s attorney in Livingston phoned three times the following week. Jonathan Dolger, his New York literary agent, made several calls. He had good news regarding the possible sale of the film rights to Dreaming of Babylon to Warner Brothers. They all got the answering machine with its disconcerting click.

  At some point early in October, one of the neighbors came over, annoyed by the blasting radio. Because the stairs to the upper deck had rotted and been removed, whoever it was knocked on the door of the true first floor, a nearly empty spare bedroom and storage area. No answer. Brautigan had departed on one of his lengthy journeys without having the decency to turn off the damned radio. Wanting to silence the round-the-clock radio playing, the irate neighbor found the central power breaker by the meter and switched off all the electricity to the house.

  Upstairs, all was quiet now, except for the metallic drone of the flies. There were many, many flies, a nightmare population of blowflies, houseflies, bluetails, and greenbottles swarming everywhere in the melancholy twilight of the shaded main room. They clustered densely about Brautigan’s corpse. Thickening blood and the enormous head wound provided powerful attractions for these rapacious insects. The inexorable process of decay began the moment his body hit the floor a couple weeks before.

  With the power switched off, the automatic timer failed to trigger the lights that night and the house remained shrouded in darkness. The Zenos next door thought nothing of it. Richard was always coming and going mysteriously. He had his own peculiar reasons for the way he did things. He had mentioned that he might leave for a hunting trip to Montana in early October. Maybe he decided not to leave the light-timer on. When the phone in Brautigan’s office/bedroom rang, the answering machine, running now on internal batteries, continued to pick up and deliver the same noncommittal message. It was a perfect vanishing act. The dead poet had managed to completely disappear.

  The long, hot California fall days merged into weeks. Heat accelerated the process of decomposition and the eager swarming flies, finding easy access through the massive cranial damage, deposited thousands of their eggs inside Brautigan’s body. When they hatched, the cadaver teemed with maggots, the rice-sized larvae writhing in his decaying flesh. At the same time, the batteries in the answering machine began wearing down and the recorded message grew distorted, the words slurred, like a man underwater. Even this final echo of the poet’s voice began to die.

  If no one in Bolinas seemed to care that Richard Brautigan had disappeared (either they were no longer talking to him and just didn’t give a damn or else he had told them he was leaving on an extended journey), others among his closest friends began to grow concerned. At one point, Klyde Young, a housepainter and friend of Brautigan’s who had done odd jobs for the writer off and on for the past dozen years, ran into Jim Zeno in Stinson Beach. Young was alarmed to hear that no one had been to Richard’s house in more than two weeks.

  Soon after, Young talked with Tony Dingman, saying if he got authorization from Ianthe he would get into the house, break a small window, and check things out. Dingman had also been worried. The last time he spoke with Richard on the phone, the day before he died, Brautigan said he’d swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills the previous night but that they’d had no effect. Knowing his buddy once made a similar halfhearted suicide attempt after the breakup of his second marriage, Dingman didn’t take this latest pill episode too seriously. But weeks without any word caused concern, and Dingman had several conversations with Richard Breen, another Brautigan crony. They both hoped Richard had gone back to Amsterdam with a Dutch critic who had visited California earlier that summer.

  This didn’t seem right to Klyde Young. He drove to Bolinas and wandered outside the gloomy house on Terrace Avenue. Nothing looked amiss. No mail had accumulated. Klyde figured if a body was inside he would smell it. There was no odor. The front porch steps were gone, yet, for inexplicable reasons, he couldn’t bring himself to attempt the interior entryway stairs. Young looked through the windows. The blinds were drawn all the way around. He couldn’t see a thing. No one remembered Brautigan being in town lately. Klyde Young assumed that he had taken off for the start of bird season in Montana, and headed back to Tiburon. Doubts remained, but he didn’t want to take any drastic action on his own. How would he explain it to Richard when he returned?

  On October 4, Jonathan Dolger sent a Mailgram to Brautigan’s address in Bolinas reading: “Have been unable to reach you these past three weeks. Stop. Please call to discuss two new book and movie offers.” This was exactly the sort of good news Richard had been waiting for. Receiving the message might not have saved his life but almost certainly would have prolonged it.

  Up in Montana, things felt very bad. Where was Richard? He had missed the opening of the upland bird season and wasn’t answering his calls. Becky Fonda felt particularly troubled by the garbled message on Brautigan’s machine at the Bolinas number. Even when drunk, Richard didn’t sound like that. She made several calls and discovered no one, including his agent, had heard from him in over a month. Joseph Swindlehurst, Brautigan’s Montana lawyer who handled his accounts in Livingston, told her that Richard hadn’t written or cashed a single check in all that time. Joe said mail was being returned unclaimed. He had called Dick Hodge and Joel Shawn, the author’s former and current California attorneys, asking them to look into the matter. Something seemed terribly wrong.

  Becky and her husband, actor Peter Fonda, talked things over and determined to find out what was going on. On October 23, 1984, they phoned San Francisco private investigator David Fechheimer, protégé of the legendary Hal Lipset and a pal of Brautigan’s since the early sixties. The detective had also been worried about his friend. He told Becky Fonda that he’d been over to the Bolinas house before leaving on a business trip about three weeks earlier. He’d found the lights on and the radio playing within. The door downstairs was locked. Fechheimer made no attempt to force an entry after knocking and not getting any answer.

  He didn’t tell Becky he suspected there might have been a booby trap waiting inside. After twenty years in his peculiar business, Fechheimer figured it would be unwise to go into Richard’s empty house in Bolinas under those circumstances without thinking about “Take this, you cocksucker!” Another thing he didn’t tell Becky was that he knew the moment she informed him Brautigan hadn’t written any checks in over a month that his friend was dead.

  David Fechheimer assured the Fondas he would get to the bottom of things. He told them he’d go out to Bolinas the next day. It had been on his mind to have another look at Richard’s house later that week. Fechheimer asked Tony Dingman if he wanted to come along. Dingman declined, fearing it might turn out to be a “horror show,” but suggested an acquaintance named Dwain Cox, a big guy who’d once been photographed for People magazine hauling Brautigan around San Francisco in a rickshaw. Dwain knew some people in Bolinas. Maybe he could get them to investigate.

  Later the same day, twenty-four-year-old Ianthe Swensen called Dingman from her home in Santa Rosa. She had not spoken with her father since the previous June, but people had recently asked about him, and now she wanted to know, “Where’s my daddy?” Dingman immediately phoned Curt Gentry and told him about Fechheimer’s request. Having coauthored the best seller Helter Skelter with Vincent Bugliosi, the district attorney who prosecuted Charles Manson, Gentry was well acquainted with the appalling grotesqueries hidden behind locked doors.

  The writer had an old friend, a commercial fisherman named Bob Junsch, who lived in Stinson Beach. Curt had known him since the early days when they both worked as bartenders in San Francisco. Junsch also knew Brautigan, having accompanied him on his first adult trip to Montana. Gentry promised Tony Dingman he’d call out to Stinson right away. Bob was a stand-up guy, someone who could be counted on when the chips were down.

  Bob Junsch moored his fishing boat,
the Pacific Fin, in Morro Bay above San Luis Obispo and flew down from Marin County to make his living whenever the albacore or swordfish were running. Things were slow at the time, and Junsch was staying at home between trips when Curt Gentry called him on the evening of October 24. The next morning, Junsch and his deck hand, Jim O’Neill, made the short drive around the lagoon from Stinson Beach to Bolinas, arriving at Terrace Avenue a little after ten o’clock. They climbed out of the car and had a quick look. Everything felt still, mysteriously quiet. A dog barked somewhere in the distance. Some local mongrel with a red bandana tied around his neck. “Probably named ‘Siddhartha’ or ‘Steppenwolf,’” Richard Brautigan once joked.

  Before trying the door, Bob Junsch went around back, where the house was built up against the sloping hillside. Shading his eyes, he peered through a small uncurtained kitchen window about a foot square. He barely made out what looked to be liquid on the floor, as if something had been spilled. Junsch also glimpsed a single sneaker, “an Adidas-type shoe,” lying alone and forgotten. Somehow, it looked wrong. Junsch felt things “had a bad ring to it.” The back kitchen door was locked. He returned to the front of the old shingled house and had Jim O’Neill boost him up the corner onto the second-story deck.

  A pair of French doors opened onto the porch, unlocked but tightly closed. Junsch pulled them open with a fierce tug. He was struck by an odor of rot so overpoweringly putrid as to seem almost tangible. Clouds of flies swarmed everywhere inside. Bob Junsch followed his nose hesitantly into the twilight gloom. Hundreds of larval shells crunched underfoot. An anticipatory dread assailed him. Looking around the unmade brass bed, Junsch spotted Brautigan’s maggot-infested corpse stretched out in the corner.

  He was a shocking sight, most of the head gone and his stomach exploded. The facial features were missing, the ruined skull gaping horribly. All of his remaining skin tissue had turned black. A large quantity of blood and the fluids of decomposition contaminated the floor around the body. For a moment, Bob Junsch stood transfixed by shock. At that same instant, downstairs under the house, Jim O’Neill had been poking around. Discovering the power was turned off, he flipped the main switch back on. The radio in the kitchen blasted full volume into raucous life and the sudden unexpected clamor “scared the shit” out of Junsch. He ran down the inside stairs, unbolting the door and rushing into the clean, fresh morning air.

  Junsch blurted out what he had just seen upstairs to O’Neill. They went next door and told Karly Zeno of their grotesque discovery. “He’s in there,” Bob said, visibly shaken. “He’s like totally undescribable. You can’t recognize him at all.” Mrs. Zeno got him a beer. Junsch didn’t want to stick around. He wondered if he would ever wash the morbid taste of death from his throat. After calling Curt Gentry, Bob gave Karly Zeno his home phone number over in Stinson and he and Jim O’Neill took off.

  Here the mists of time draw a confused curtain across the memories of the participants. David Fechheimer phoned the Marin County Sheriff’s Office to report the discovery of Richard Brautigan’s body. He remembers Bob Junsch calling him with the grim news. Junsch recalls it differently. Acting on the behest of Curt Gentry, he didn’t have Fechheimer’s number. “And Curt didn’t call me to say, ‘Go check on Richard. If you find him call Fechheimer.’” After leaving Bolinas, Bob Junsch drove straight up to Petaluma and headed for a bar.

  Whoever called Fechheimer did so promptly. At about ten thirty, the dispatcher at the sheriff’s office contacted Sergeant Weldon Travis and Deputy Joseph Dentoni, directing them to 6 Terrace Avenue in Bolinas, to investigate the report of a dead body discovered at that address. Upon arrival, Deputy Dentoni, the responding officer, was met by Karly Zeno. She told him friends of Richard Brautigan had seen what they thought was his body earlier that morning. Checking the residence, Dentoni found the front door ajar, just as Bob Junsch left it during his hasty departure. After mounting the stairs, the sheriff’s deputy came upon “a decomposed male body lying on his back with the top part of his skull missing.”

  When Sergeant Travis had a look at the scene, he immediately contacted the Marin County Sheriff’s Office and requested a response from trained investigators. Due to the condition of the body and a lack of any visible identification, neither of the lawmen could be certain the remains in question were those of Richard Brautigan. The initial report referred to the event as an “unattended death.” At 12:40 PM, Deputy Dentoni phoned Bob Junsch’s number in Stinson Beach. There was no answer.

  Shortly before two o’clock, Sergeant Anthony Russo and Detective Dave Estes arrived from the sheriff’s office in San Rafael. While Sergeant Russo began gathering evidence, Detective Estes was assigned the task of photographing the surrounding area. As reporting officer, Estes also prepared a rough sketch (a floor plan) of the second level of Brautigan’s house. During Russo’s examination of “the crime scene,” he came across a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, the right frame bent and one lens missing, lying on the window ledge near the “victim’s” body. The right-hand lens was recovered from the arm of the blood-splattered, white-painted school desk.

  Sergeant Russo also discovered the bullet hole in the molding above the southwest corner window. He removed the wood around the hole and subsequently recovered a spent large-caliber slug from within the wall. Russo bagged the evidence: the eyeglasses and missing lens, a tape recorder (containing a tape) found near the body, the nickel-plated .44 caliber Smith & Wesson (serial number N 284972), the spent bullet, and numerous miscellaneous notebooks and papers.

  William Thomas, an investigator from the Marin County Coroner’s Office, arrived and conducted his investigation after being briefed by the police officers. He had never before witnessed such a gruesome scene. Thomas noted the many fly larvae shells, some found and measured as far as thirty feet away from the cadaver. A set of false teeth turned up in the kitchen and was removed as possible evidence. (It was later determined they did not belong to the victim and had been kept by Brautigan as a novelty gag.) In the bathroom just off the office area, Thomas uncovered a variety of prescription medications: two bottles of Dalmane, 30 mg.; one bottle of Tranxene, 7.5 mg.; a bottle of Halcion, .5 mg.; and tubes of Tridesilon topical ointment and Montistat Derm, 2 percent, along with three packages of Durex condoms.

  For most of the afternoon, the police were in and out of the Zenos’ house next door, using their telephone. From overheard fragments of conversation, Jim and Karly concluded some question remained as to whether it was indeed a suicide. Perhaps homicide had been committed at 6 Terrace Avenue. When Jim Zeno asked one of the officers, “Well, do you think someone might have killed him or something?” the detective replied that it was possible. Further talk concerned the bullet’s entry and exit path. They didn’t seem to align in the normal fashion of a suicide. What about the downstairs door, was it locked or unlocked? And if this guy Brautigan was supposed to be some kind of writer, how come he left no note? They had no way yet of knowing if the victim actually was Richard Brautigan. Officially, it was just the ninth unidentified male body found in Marin County so far that year.

  Zeno informed them one way to be certain was to look at his cock. Richard had told him that years of herpes had left his penis covered with knobs and ridges. Brautigan joked about his “built-in French tickler.”

  “Cock, hell,” said the cop. “We’re scooping him up with a shovel.”

  Marin County had no central morgue, so the Coroner’s Office contracted with individual mortuaries, chosen geographically on a month-to-month rotation. In October 1984, the designated morgue for the area was the Russell and Gooch Funeral Chapel of Mill Valley. The firm’s removal van arrived at 6 Terrace Avenue in Bolinas in the afternoon. Bagged and anonymous, the body identified as John Doe number 9 was loaded into the meat wagon and driven away. Soon after, the yellow tape went up and the residence was officially sealed.

  By four fifteen, Sergeant Russo, Detective Estes, and Coroner’s Investigator Thomas gathered in the preparation room at
Russell and Gooch on Miller Avenue for an examination of the body. They cut away and searched the stiffened clothing, finding no personal identification. The wadded currency was all his pockets contained. While Bill Thomas had a closer look at the extensive damage to the cranial area and noted the gold restorations in the victim’s molars, the two detectives checked out the handgun. The shiny Smith & Wesson revolver was found to be loaded with five live rounds and one spent shell in the top position of the cylinder under the hammer. The weapon was dusted for latent fingerprints and shipped for further testing, along with the bullets and spent shell, to the Department of Justice Criminalistics Laboratory in Santa Rosa.

  Bad news traveled fast. Becky Fonda heard about Richard’s death through David Fechheimer and passed the sad word along. John Fryer felt angry upon hearing from her. A Western horseman at heart, Fryer operated the unique store (Sax & Fryer’s in Livingston) his grandfather had founded in the 1880s. “Richard finally found a way to hurt all his friends at once,” Fryer said.

  As it happened, most of the Montana gang was off in New York at the time, staying at different hotels, pursuing various careers, their trajectories randomly intersecting. Tom McGuane was in town to celebrate the reissue of The Bushwhacked Piano in the new Vintage Contemporaries series, along with Jim Crumley for Dancing Bear. Russell Chatham was there to discuss a future one-man show of his paintings. William “Gatz” Hjortsberg was working on a screenplay outline with Paris-based film director Bob Swaim. Jim Harrison had come in for meetings with his agent, Bob Dattila, and his publisher, Seymour Lawrence, who had also published Brautigan for nearly fifteen years.

  Becky called from Montana and word quickly spread, from hotel room to hotel room. Tom McGuane commented that “if Richard committed suicide to punish us he did a good job.” That evening, Chatham, Harrison, Hjortsberg, Dattila, Lawrence, and others gathered for a huge Chinese feast at a restaurant on the East Side, raising a sad toast, bidding a departed friend farewell. Sam Lawrence put it best, paraphrasing literary scholar F. O. Matthiessen (his professor at Harvard, who committed suicide by jumping out of a Boston hotel window), when he said Richard “died of the Great American Loneliness.”