At quarter to three in the afternoon, Russo telephoned Becky Fonda at Indian Hill Ranch, her home in Paradise Valley, south of Livingston. Their conversation was brief. She told the sergeant she’d last spoken with Brautigan on the third of September, when he talked about coming up to Montana for the bird-hunting season. She tried calling him two weeks before but was unable to reach him. Brautigan’s answering machine appeared not to be working. Alarmed by this, she contacted David Fechheimer, asking him to look for their friend. Mrs. Fonda mentioned Brautigan’s fondness for guns, adding that he was an avid hunter and an excellent shot. Asked about the writer’s death, she said that she would suspect suicide before foul play.
Sgt. Russo phoned Marcia Clay in San Francisco at 3:00 PM. It was his last call on this case for the day. There wasn’t much to tell. Marcia Clay had seen Richard Brautigan only once in the past four years, when she encountered him somewhat accidentally at Enrico’s Sidewalk Café on Friday, September 14, 1984. She described their meeting and a subsequent phone conversation, shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of the fifteenth. Clay said Brautigan wanted to read her a new piece of his writing and asked her to call back in five minutes. When she did, he didn’t answer. After that, she tried calling several times but was unable to reach him. Marcia Clay said that during her last conversation with Richard he “seemed to be saying his goodbyes.”
Tuesday, October 30, 1984, was the final day Sgt. Russo spent interviewing friends of the late Richard Brautigan. He made only two calls, the first at “1440 hours” to William Brown, a novelist who operated a landscape gardening business from his home on Brighton Avenue in Bolinas. Bill Brown had known Brautigan since the fifties but had not seen him recently. Pressed for particulars, Brown said as far as he could remember he thought he might have encountered Brautigan in Bolinas four or five weeks ago, just before his death.
Bill Brown stated that Brautigan was given to intense depression, especially when drinking. He referred to Richard as “a heavy drinker,” adding that his personality “seemed to go downhill when he was drinking.” He’d been particularly depressed during the last few months. Money was possibly at the root of the problem. Brown also mentioned Brautigan’s admiration for Ernest Hemingway, saying they had talked some about Hemingway’s suicide, although the subject of Brautigan actually taking his own life had never come up.
At 3:00 PM, Sgt. Russo made his last call, to Andy Cole, who refused to give his address. Living at the time in Bolinas, Cole said that he first met Brautigan in San Francisco approximately twenty years before. In his opinion, the author appeared industrious recently and happy with his current work. His only problem was that “because Bolinas had a small-town atmosphere, he was not able to cut loose as he could in the big city.”
Cole rambled on to Sgt. Russo, relating a secondhand story of a recent unexpected and unpleasant meeting in San Francisco between Brautigan and his ex-wife Akiko. However, he got his dates badly jumbled, talking about both April and October. Cole said Brautigan told him he planned on returning to Montana soon to sell his “ranch,” indicating that he was no longer interested in the place. When Cole didn’t see him around, he assumed he had gone.
Andy Cole telephoned Richard Brautigan on Sunday, September 16, but only got the answering machine. He said he called three days in a row and became upset on the fourth because he knew that Richard had a beeper and could access his messages even when away from home. Confined to a wheelchair, Cole asked a friend to go over to the house on Terrace Avenue. He claimed his friend knocked on Brautigan’s door and got no answer. Cole stated that Brautigan “never used drugs,” and “was not constantly drunk as some others portrayed him.”
That night, an impromptu wake for Richard Brautigan was held at Enrico’s on Broadway in San Francisco. Established in 1959 by Enrico Banducci, a prominent figure in North Beach since the days when he took over the hungry i from its founder, Eric “Big Daddy” Nord, the sidewalk café had been a watering hole for the city’s literary scene from the moment it opened. In his newspaper column, Herb Caen compared the place to the Algonquin Round Table. When Ted Koppel, in town earlier in July to cover the Democratic National Convention for ABC News, asked in an interview, “What kind of place are you running?” Enrico replied, “It’s where sables and sandals meet.” Brautigan had been hanging out there for two decades. Whenever he was in town, he came in every day.
No formal invitations were issued. By word of mouth, news of the event spread over the telephone, one old friend calling another. Curt Gentry was there along with Michael McClure, Don Carpenter, Tony Dingman, Donald Allen, Keith Abbott, David Fechheimer, Jeremy Larner, Judge Richard Hodge, and Peter Berg, one of the original Diggers. The artist Bruce Conner was in attendance, as were film directors Frances Ford Coppola and Phil Kaufman. Many of the more colorful members on the local scene were present, including restaurateur Magnolia Thunderpussy and Margo St. James, founder of COYOTE, the prostitutes’ union. Marcia Clay wandered through, feeling that, had such an assembly occurred while Richard was still alive, she “would have been at his side, a closest companion, a mate to his soul as we were once.”
The mood was very low-key. Enrico Banducci found it “grim.” When someone asked Don Allen, who had first published Trout Fishing in America in the sixties, if he expected a suicide, Allen replied, “I wasn’t surprised.” Many of Brautigan’s friends agreed. While Enrico thought Richard’s death might have been a drunken accident (“he played Russian roulette with life”), Keith Abbott felt Brautigan “planned his suicide.” David Fechheimer was of a like mind. “I think he’d decided to do it [at least a year before],” the detective said. “He was more at peace during the summer, like he’d passed a hurdle.”
Everybody sat around, quietly talking, smoking, drinking to Brautigan. Glasses of Calvados, Richard’s favorite drink, were raised. He used to call it “jet fuel.” Enrico stocked this exotic French apple brandy especially for him. No one else ever ordered it, and when what was left behind the bar was gone, Banducci knew he would not carry it anymore.
Enrico told a story about the time Brautigan poured half a bottle of Calvados into his boot. “I said, ‘What are you doing? Killing the bugs in your boot?’ And he says, ‘No, I’m going to drink it.’ I said, ‘Oh, okay, go ahead.’ And he took the boot and drank it. It was running down his face.” Every so often, someone else tried to tell another funny story about Brautigan, but nobody laughed. It was grim.
Jimmy Sakata did not attend the wake at Enrico’s. He worried about how Brautigan’s daughter and friends might react to his presence. Curt Gentry observed that Jim “was very concerned at how [Ianthe] might feel.” After the gathering dwindled, Curt and Tony Dingman took Ianthe down to Cho-Cho. “Jim was nervous about talking to her,” Gentry said. Sakata acted with wonderful grace, telling stories, showing them drawings and Richard’s letters from Japan. Ianthe, at her loveliest, “wanted to reassure him that she didn’t blame him for anything.”
At one point, she excused herself to go to the bathroom. When Ianthe was out of earshot, Sakata leaned over the bar and asked, “I don’t suppose this is the time to ask when I can get my gun back?”
On November 2, 1984, Dr. Laverine filed his final Dental Reporting Form with the coroner’s office in Marin County. He officially identified John Doe number 9 as the author Richard Brautigan. In the days and weeks that followed, newspaper and magazine stories appeared sporadically. The “Transition” section of Time carried the news of Brautigan’s death on November 5. William Hamilton, the New Yorker cartoonist known for deftly skewering the fatuous small-talk of the filthy rich, had an unsigned lead piece in “The Talk of the Town,” saying that his late friend Richard “had a penchant for absurdity akin to the jolly-serious outrages cooked up by the young Dadaists of Paris in the early nineteen-twenties.” Even People ran a remarkably balanced and sensitive article, wishing Brautigan “So long, sensei. Arigato, pardner.”
Seymour Lawrence issued “An American Original, a
n official statement,” in which he said, “Richard was a joy to publish.” Sam concluded: “Richard was a consummate craftsman not only in his use of language but in his choice of typography, design, jacket art, advertising copy. He was deeply involved in every detail and aspect of his books. He had an unerring eye and we gave him autonomy and latitude few authors enjoy. In Hollywood, it’s called ‘final cut.’ He was an American original in the tradition of Mark Twain and he deserved the best. He never let us down except to die.”
Longer investigations were yet to come. Lawrence Wright arrived in San Francisco, asking questions for a lengthy article commissioned by Rolling Stone, where Richard Brautigan had published his short stories and poetry in the sixties. Vanity Fair hired Michael McClure and East Coast writer Peter Manso, who had a book due out on Norman Mailer, to assemble a spoken-word examination of Brautigan’s life and death. McClure later wrote, “Perhaps Richard killed himself because he’d made his point and used himself up like a butterfly uses itself up in the process.”
McClure had been best friends with Brautigan in the early sixties. They had grown apart in recent years, but he still wished to protect his old white-port-drinking buddy’s reputation when Peter Manso arrived from New York, eager to go for the jugular. Manso, a small, intense man, considered Brautigan’s work “to be of very dubious significance,” his death “the price paid for overnight literary fame in a decade of media hype and narcissistic self-congratulation.”
Given Manso’s preconceptions, Michael McClure did his best to rein in his new partner’s killer instincts. At one point, they drove out to Bolinas to check out Brautigan’s house. Approaching 6 Terrace Avenue on foot, Manso wanted to break in and snoop around. McClure dissuaded him. The place was still under seal by the police. They climbed up onto the second-floor deck and had a look in through the window. McClure clearly saw the death shadow of Richard Brautigan’s body etched into the floorboards where his corpse had lain undiscovered for many long weeks. Brautigan’s body fat had liquefied, what coroners call a “lipid breakdown,” and had seeped into the wood, leaving behind a phantom image.
McClure saw just where his friend stood when he raised the revolver to his mouth. Turning, he took in Brautigan’s final view. More than a decade later, when McClure recounted this event, slowly lifting his hand with the forefinger extended like a pistol barrel, tears welled in his eyes. Like a photographic ghost, Richard Brautigan’s impression might have remained forever to haunt the old shingled house. The new owners tried scrubbing it free, but no solvents or detergent would do the trick. In the end, they had to rent a belt sander to erase the final tangible memory of the poet Ken Kesey called an American Bashō. “Five hundred years from now,” Kesey observed, “when the rest of us are forgotten, they’ll still be reading Brautigan.”
two: honor thy father
A PIRANDELLIAN PARADOX ARISES when an author turns out to be a character in the story he’s writing. Aspiring to truth only adds another layer of mystery, a further dimension to the puzzle. This is the tale of Richard Brautigan’s life. Gatz Hjortsberg is only a peripheral thread in a rich and complex tapestry. For narrative purposes, I plan on referring to myself in the third person. But, quick as a three-card monte dealer, I’ve slipped the first-person singular in under the reader’s nose even when promising otherwise. Verbal sleight of hand. Nothing is quicker than the I.
Richard Brautigan was my friend, my neighbor for seven years, and a writer whose work I admired long before we met. In small, unexpected ways, my own investigative journey became entwined with Richard’s story. While wishing to remain concealed behind a third-person identity, from time to time, I must step out of the shadows and into a personal pronoun.
Richard Brautigan knew nothing of his paternal lineage. A sequence of nearly anonymous stepfathers recycled through his young life. His true father’s identity remained a mystery. In researching Brautigan’s life, I spent more time with his father than he ever did. Richard rarely spoke of his impoverished childhood in the Pacific Northwest. One memory often retold involved a youthful search through downtown Tacoma for a man he’d been told was his father. His kid odyssey ended in a barber shop, the talc-scented bastion of 1940s masculinity. Richard approached the man he’d been told was his father. When he identified himself, the stranger steered Richard outside, handed him a big shiny silver dollar, and told him to go to the movies.
In her touching memoir, You Can’t Catch Death, Ianthe Brautigan wrote: “When he was about four, Mary Lou had pushed him into a room with his father. My father watched him shave without saying a word and then his father handed him a dollar.” A second meeting occurred when Richard was about seven, outside the restaurant where his mother worked as cashier. His father happened along and stopped where he was playing on the sidewalk. Just enough time to say hello and give the kid fifty cents. Then, he was gone forever, a memory lost in a dream.
Bernard Frederick Brautigan, the man later identified as Richard’s father, also knew very little of his own paternal genealogy. He was born on July 29, 1908, in Winlock, Washington, an isolated logging town in rural Lewis County. His father, Frederic “Fritz” Brautigam, born on January 12, 1878, in Hirschberg, Westfalen, Prussia, emigrated to the United States, sailing from Antwerp on the SS Kensington and arriving in New York on September 12, 1899, to follow the path of his uncle Ferdinand, who had come over twelve years earlier.
The original spelling of the family name, “Brautigam,” so carefully rendered by Fritz in his fine Prussian copperplate hand on numerous courthouse documents, only gradually evolved into “Brautigan.” In the 1910 census and the birth registration of his last child, Fritz spelled his surname with an “m.” At that time, his uncle Ferd was already known everywhere as Brautigan.
Fritz quickly learned English and became a naturalized citizen, moving to the state of Washington at the beginning of a brand-new century. On June 14, 1906, Fritz Brautigam married twenty-three-year-old Rebecca Kingston, in a simple Catholic ceremony. Rebecca was born in Oakland, California, to George Kingston and Hanorah Hayes, both Irish immigrants. By 1900, the Kingston family moved to Lewis County and bought a farm. Fritz Brautigam died on July 1, 1910, three weeks before his wife gave birth to their third child. At the time, Bernard was not yet two years old.
Rebecca Brautigan remarried a cook named William Morisette who had also come west from Wisconsin. Bernard Brautigan grew up next to the oldest in a mixed brood of eight kids. According to Mary Lou Folston, two of them died suicides, another drank herself to death at age twenty-four, and one succumbed to an infection from a self-induced abortion. “That was the craziest family,” Mary Lou remembered. “They never talked about anything they did. They just did it and forgot it.”
When first investigating the life of Richard Brautigan in January of 1991, the story of the missing father who resurfaced only after news reports of his famous son’s suicide intrigued me. I found Bernard Brautigan’s phone number in Tacoma through information and gave him a call. The voice on the other end of the line sounded gruff and impatient. He clearly had no interest in further questions six years after Richard’s death. “Don’t want to talk about it!” he grunted brusquely when I brought the matter up.
I mentioned the book I was researching and said I would be happy to present his version of events.
“Not interested,” came the curt reply of an old man who didn’t want to be bothered.
Feeling uncomfortable, I muttered something about how he’d talked plenty to the newspapers when the story first broke. “Go read the newspapers then,” Brautigan snapped, slamming down the receiver.
The following June found me snooping around the Pacific Northwest again. I spent several weeks in Eugene, Oregon, where I interviewed Mary Lou Folston, as well as several of Richard’s friends from high school, and unexpectedly stumbled upon a cache of six early Brautigan notebook manuscripts sealed for more than thirty-five years in a safe deposit box belonging to an old woman named Edna Webster. The key was lost, and
I hired a locksmith to drill the box open. After Xeroxing this serendipitous literary treasure trove, I headed north to Portland and on to Tacoma, Washington, where I paid $11 for a photocopy of Richard’s birth certificate at the Health Department’s Bureau of Statistics.
Richard Gary Brautigan was born at the Pierce County hospital. His mother’s maiden name was entered as Lula Mary Kehoe, age twenty-three; occupation, housewife. Bernard F. Brautigan, a “common laborer,” aged twenty-seven, had been listed as the father, with 813 East Sixty-fifth Street, Tacoma, recorded as their shared address. The baby’s birth was declared legitimate.
I looked up Bernard Brautigan in the white pages by a pay phone at the Board of Health. The address listed on Sixty-fifth Street was not that far away. I found the place easily, a modest one-story house on a side street off McKinley Avenue, set well back off the road behind a spacious sloping lawn fringed by fruit trees. A low fence bordered the property, and a sign on the gate read BEWARE OF THE DOG. Walking to the front steps, I exercised a certain caution, half-expecting huge red-eyed Dobermans to leap savagely for my throat. My fears verged on the preposterous when a lap dog’s enthusiastic yapping greeted the doorbell’s ring.
A moment later, a small ancient man appeared behind the screen door beside the frantic leaping terrier. Veiled by wire mesh, his shadow-masked features were difficult to discern. I remember thinking it curious that two such tiny people (Mary Lou Folston was a petite woman) might have produced such a towering son. I introduced myself, mentioning my previous phone call seeking an interview. His brusque manner remained the same. He told me through the screen that he had nothing more to say about the matter. I said his son was one of the most famous American writers of the century. “He’s not my son!” Brautigan spat venomously. “That woman even said so.”
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