Feeling like a gambler with little to lose, I called his bluff. “I’ll pay you $100 an hour to talk with me,” I said. Bernard Brautigan shut the door in my face.
The late summer of 1993 found me back in the Pacific Northwest. I attended Richard’s fortieth high school reunion in Eugene, an event he would himself have avoided like a dose of the clap. One inebriated woman unfamiliar with Brautigan’s work cornered me in a banquet room at the sprawling Valley River Inn. “Why do you want to write about him for?” She waved her plastic cocktail glass and told me she wrote professional verse for greeting card companies, a career she considered more worthy of a biography.
Early in September, I worked my way back up the coast to Tacoma for more interviews. I took advantage of a sun-drenched day and explored Richard Brautigan’s childhood neighborhood with a simple aim-and-shoot thirty-five-millimeter camera. Snapshots provide handy visual aids when writing description. I proved such an inept photographer that all of the film came out blank.
Circling the narrow two-story white frame house on East Sixty-fifth Street where Richard had lived as a small child, shooting a roll of film, I thought about Bernard Brautigan’s place, only ten blocks away down McKinley Avenue. It made sense to get a couple of photos there. I drove to the little house set back from the road. Everything looked the same, the metal sign on the gate still warning of dangerous dogs. Not a soul in sight. With the aplomb of a spy, I pulled out the camera.
Perhaps never to be in Tacoma again, I decided to give the interview another try. “What can he do, shoot me?” I thought, retracing two-year-old footsteps. I rang the doorbell. A cosmic eraser swept clean the blackboard of the past. Ben Brautigan’s mood (Mary Lou Folston said he was called Ben) seemed as sunny as the bright late-summer day. My first question got him talking and he stepped out into the afternoon’s warmth, followed by Buff, his surprisingly docile little dog.
I asked if I could turn on my tape recorder. Ben Brautigan agreed. He’d been married to Lula Mary Kehoe for about seven years when they broke up. There was another man. “She was running around,” the old man insisted. “Yeah, yeah. Sure, she knew it was Ron Bluett. He lived not very far from us out there on 64th and McKinley. But, we were split up for a long time before we got a divorce. And I got sewered [sic] for divorce and got the divorce.”
“And you think this fellow, Bluett, was the actual paternal father?” I asked, as Buff sniffed around our feet.
“Oh, yes, yes, yes, I know. I’d swear to it. Absolutely. She would, too, if she wanted to, you know, make herself clear.” Frowning with assumed sagacity, he tried to sum up his thoughts about Richard. “For her to say a thing like that, that’s what hurt him. He knew that in his mind all this stuff was going on that he has no way to prove it.”
Ben tossed a worn tennis ball across the yard. Buff barked in frantic pursuit. I said Richard’s mother obviously never told him anything about this man, Bluett.
“No, no, no. And if she ever told him anything about me being the father, it would seem like he’d come up here.”
Somewhat hesitantly, I brought up Richard’s claim of seeking him out decades before in a barber shop.
“It’s just a story, that’s all it is,” Ben Brautigan said.
I asked him if he thought Richard had made the story up.
“Yeah. Because if I had a feeling that he was—I’d invite him over so we could talk. For coffee or a glass of beer or something. But, I have no idea, no idea.”
I looked carefully at Ben Brautigan. Although he was a short man and eighty-six years old there was something about the sharpness of his long nose and the emphatic candor of his distant blue eyes clearly reminiscent of Richard. “So,” I asked, “your marriage with Lula Mary Kehoe had broken up considerably long before the child was born?”
“Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah. I was probably single, away from her, for three, four years.”
When I mentioned that Mary Lou had listed him as the father on the birth certificate, Ben replied, “Yeah, yeah. But, she comes out now and she says that she got that child alongside the road. Why did she use that figure?”
I said I didn’t know. We talked some about Mary Lou’s other three children, each by a different father. I mentioned it must have been a terrible shock to learn about Richard only after his suicide.
“Yes, it was.” Ben’s anger resurfaced. “I said, my god o’mighty! You know, to be a father and don’t know nothing about it . . .”
“That’s why I really wanted to hear your side of it,” I said. “You never met Richard or even saw him and—”
“I don’t know none of the family!” Ben Brautigan interjected.
“And when he was born, she never notified you then?”
“No, no, no, no.”
I said it seemed highly unlikely that had he been the father she wouldn’t have gotten in touch with him.
“Right in the neighborhood even,” he snorted. “She’s over there and I was here and he was over in the hospital.”
I was astonished. “You were living in this house in ’35?” I asked. “Right here on Sixty-fifth Street?”
“Yeah. It’s in the phone book.”
“Right. And she never said a word to you?”
“No, uh-uh, not a word. Why should I hide it?”
“She put your name on the birth certificate but didn’t bother to tell you?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Old Ben Brautigan stared thoughtfully out over the fruit trees shading his lawn. “I wish I had the opportunity to see him, not even talk to him, but see him. And, too, his mother to lie like that, to hurt everybody. Not only the poor kid had to suffer about it, but that it’ll go on for years and years and years, till they find out what in the hell the real truth is. You know, if Lula knew that was mine,” he mused, “why didn’t she have nerve enough to step over a couple of doors and tell me?”
I asked if his ex-wife had ever requested any child support from him.
“No. It’s funny, the hospital didn’t come after me to pay for the bill.”
“They never did? They never approached you?”
“No, no. It’s funny. It isn’t a lot of things, you know, that we try to figure out ourself [sic] in our own mind, but that’s as far as we get, is to try to figure ’em out.” Ben Brautigan struggled to express the great eternal conundrum of never knowing the answers to anything. Wrestling with the ineffable seemed to tire him. Something inside sagged a little. His watery eyes lost their focus for a moment as he stared at the endless sky.
A more relentless and diligent investigator might have probed on, but I didn’t have the heart for it. Ben and I talked about the trolleys that once ran the length of McKinley Avenue in the thirties and how he had worked as a laborer in a local plywood factory for most of his life. I remarked what a pretty spot he had, saying I understood why he’d happily lived here for nearly sixty years.
“Yeah,” the old man murmured, “I lost two wives living here. I was married to one, I was married to her for thirty, about thirty-two years.”
“Your second wife?” I asked, patting Buff as he nosed around me.
“Yeah. And my third wife, I was married to her. She died not too long ago, about five years. She died of cancer. She didn’t have cancer when I married her, but she got it and picked it up fast.”
Not knowing quite how to reply, I told Ben Brautigan that he looked to be in very good health. I said I hoped he continued to have it.
“I do, too. I do, too. There’s a lot out here yet to enjoy.”
We talked a bit longer but I couldn’t think of much more to say. “Any time I can help you, stop in,” he called as I headed back to my car. I figured on phoning him once I sorted out my notes. I might as well have been a paving contractor on the highway to hell. When I tried to get in touch with Ben Brautigan again, he was dead.
three: american dust
IN HIS WONDERFUL short story “Revenge of the Lawn,” Richard Brautigan combines details from the lives of his grandmothe
r and great-grandmother to create a character who, “in her own way, shines like a beacon down the stormy American past.” Brautigan’s great-grandmother had a poem for her name. Madora Lenora Ashlock was born on April 20, 1856, in Collin County, Texas, just across the line from the Indian Territory. There had been Ashlocks in North America since 1720.
At sixteen, on January 9, 1873, Madora wed her first cousin, William Ashlock, a tall, charming man six years her senior. The Ashlocks returned to Greene County, Illinois, where William’s branch of the family had settled on land made available to veterans of the war of 1812. Altogether, they had nine children. The youngest daughter, Elizabeth Cordelia (called “Bessie”), born in Woodville, Illinois, on September 30, 1881, became Richard Brautigan’s grandmother. Mary Lou described her mother as a “big Spaniard woman, six foot two, dark eyes, and dark hair . . . quite a stature about her.”
Life on the Ashlock farm found its way into Brautigan’s fiction. The episode when Madora plucked a flock of drunken geese reverberated for a hundred years through family legend until it came to rest in “Revenge of the Lawn.” Knowing his great-grandfather, William Ashlock, signed up with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency may have inspired Brautigan to write Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942.
Not much is known about William Ashlock’s career as a shamus. Late nights in low-life taverns disguised as somebody else led the dark-haired detective into the company of loose women. It nearly killed Madora Lenora when she discovered her husband’s philandering. She sued for divorce, not a common practice in the nineteenth century. Dora Ashlock was the first in her devout Catholic family to take such a drastic step. Like modern single mothers, Madora went off to raise her large brood on her own.
Her daughter Bessie Cordelia Ashlock first married Michael Joseph Kehoe, a Boston Irishman who listed his occupation as “peddler.” The couple settled in St. Louis, Missouri. With Kehoe, she had two daughters, Eveline Elaine, born in 1909, and two years later, on April 7, 1911, Lulu (baptized with the middle name Mary), who was called “Tootie” as a child and “Mary Lou” later in life. Beginning a lifelong habit of reinventing herself, Bessie shed a year from her age on the her second daughter’s birth certificate.
Things didn’t take with Kehoe. Like her mother, Bessie divorced her husband. She soon remarried. Jesse George Dixon was a carpenter from Kentucky. On July 21, 1914, Bessie had a son by Dixon, naming him Jesse Woodrow, known to the family as “Sone.” This time, Bessie was three years younger on the certificate. Two years later, the day before her thirty-fifth birthday in September 1916, another son, Edward Martin, followed. Bessie stated her age as thirty-one.
When Mary Lou was six years old, the Dixon family moved to the Pacific Northwest, settling in Tacoma, Washington. By 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment made Prohibition the law of the land. Before the “Jazz Age” was a month old, Congress passed the Volstead Act, and the twenties began to roar. Bootleg booze provided an opportunity for those with ambition and vision. Bessie Dixon, a natural-born business woman, had ample amounts of both. By decade’s end, she was known as “Moonshine Bess.”
In 1921, Mary Lou’s mother worked at Manning’s Coffee Shop on Converse Street in Tacoma. A regular customer, an Italian named Frank Campana, spoke broken English and had been a machine gunner during the world war. Mary Lou remembered him as an insulting man, “very crude and insolent.” Her mother left Jesse Dixon and after an “ugly divorce battle,” began a relationship with Campana that lasted for the rest of her life.
Bessie Dixon never married her bootlegger Italian lover. Frank Campana sold illegal hooch out of a place a couple doors down the street from Manning’s. Bessie became his business partner. They opened a restaurant on Pacific Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street, housing a “blind pig” in the rear. In league with several other Italians, Frank and Bessie maintained a still hidden in the woods, cooking moonshine under the towering fir trees. They brought the booze into town in gallon jugs and hid it under the sawdust in a woodshed potato bin behind Bessie’s place on 813 East Sixty-fifth Street.
Along with their speakeasy behind the restaurant on Twenty-fifth Street, Moonshine Bess and her Italian cohorts operated another joint known as Ruth’s Place above a branch of the Bank of California in downtown Tacoma. Customers slipped furtively up the side stairs to buy hooch while the honest johns down below negotiated short-term loans. The bankers never suspected that bootleggers prospered above their heads.
When Ruth’s Place got raided, Johnny Pisanni was upstairs taking a bath as the cops pounded on the door. His brother George thought it was an overeager client. The police stormed in and nabbed him. Hearing the commotion below, Johnny slipped out the bathroom window onto the roof of the bank, clad only in a towel. A neighbor spotted Pisanni prowling around in the rain and called the law, claiming a naked bandit was robbing the bank.
Somehow, towel-wrapped Johnny Pisanni eluded the law. His brother and Robert Columbini went to the slammer but didn’t rat out their partners. George Pisanni was deported back to Italy and Columbini sent to McNeil Island Penitentiary for a three-year stretch. Frank Campana and Bessie Dixon got off scot-free. When Columbini was released from prison they paid him off for his silence.
In 1923, Bessie Dixon asked her mother to come live in Tacoma. Over six feet tall and pushing two hundred pounds, Dora Ashlock knew how to whip some sense into her unruly grandkids. With her mother keeping an eye on things, Moonshine Bess moved with Frank Campana to St. Helens, Oregon, a little town north of Portland on the Columbia River. They opened a restaurant there called The Boy’s Place.
Tensions ran high in the little house on Sixty-fifth Street. Eveline’s rebellious spirit did not take well to Grandmother Dora’s restrictions and strict discipline. At sixteen, within two years of Dora Ashlock’s arrival, Eveline ran away from home and went to live with Johnny Pisanni, Bessie’s old bootlegging partner. They kept house together, as the saying went in those days.
The year before, in the summer of 1924, Mary Lou met Ben Brautigan for the first time. She worked in her mother’s Twenty-fifth Street grill for $2 a day, helping out wherever needed. Brautigan worked nearby as a planer in the local plywood factory for the same princely wage: twenty-five cents an hour. He lived in a workingman’s hotel above Bessie’s restaurant and ate there day and night. She called him Benny. He was sixteen that summer. Mary Lou was thirteen.
Ben Brautigan kept coming around. Mary Lou observed he was a good steady worker, five days a week at the planing mill. He got a raise of ten cents an hour. At sixteen, Mary Lou said yes. Bernard Frederick Brautigan and “Lula Mary Kehoe” were married in the Pierce County courthouse in Tacoma on July 18, 1927, by Judge Frank A. McGill. Asked to designate “Spinster, Widow or Divorced,” on the Marriage Return, Mary Lou wrote “spinster.” Underage, she lied on the form, stating she was eighteen on her last birthday. The groom’s mother and stepfather were the witnesses.
Within a couple years, the marriage was in trouble. So small he could wear Mary Lou’s shirt, Ben Brautigan considered himself something of a dandy and a lady’s man. A pint-sized sheik with a size 9 shoe, he fancied patent leather footwear and by 1929 was waxing his mustache, wearing his sideburns long, and putting on mascara. Half-inebriated, he’d flirt with the flappers and shebas crowding the speakeasies of Tacoma. “He’d go koochie, koochie, koo, and rolled his eyes around,” Mary Lou said, scornfully recalling Ben’s gin mill shenanigans. “My god, it was sickening.”
When she was nineteen, during one of her numerous separations from Ben Brautigan, Mary Lou drove with Eveline and her now brother-in-law, Johnny Pisanni, down to St. Helens to visit their mother. When not running The Boy’s Place with Frank Campana, Bessie Dixon raised canaries in the apartment upstairs above the tavern, and her musical flock numbered around two dozen. Before Mary Lou left, Bessie gave her a canary.
Back in Tacoma, Mary Lou was drinking pop at the New Country Grocery, the business her sister and Pisanni operated across from the Union Pacific
depot on Pacific Avenue. Jealous because she didn’t also get a gift canary, Eveline stepped up and smacked the bottle into Mary Lou’s mouth, knocking out her front teeth.
Eveline ran. Mary Lou nailed her sister between the shoulders with the empty bottle. Eveline gained the safety of her bedroom, locking the door behind her. Furious, Mary Lou got an ax. Johnny Pisanni interceded, dropping to his knees before his sister-in-law as she prepared to chop down the bedroom door. “Please, Tootie,” he pleaded, “I just rent this place. I’ll be evicted. Don’t do it! Don’t do it.” In the end, Mary Lou relented. She put down the ax, collected her canary, and left.
Nineteen thirty was a bad year for Mary Lou Brautigan. On March 13, she came down with appendicitis and had surgery. A month or so after the appendectomy her grandmother grew sick with cirrhosis of the liver. In May, Ben moved back into the family home on sixty-fifth street to help take care of Mary Lou.
Not long after, the police came by the house looking for Mary Lou’s brother Jesse. An older kid in the neighborhood used a pair of handcuffs to restrain younger children and beat them up. He sold the handcuffs to Jesse for fifty cents. When the cops found the cuffs, they arrested Jesse Dixon and took him to jail. He got sick while locked up. Once released, the boy came home and grew worse, lying in his upstairs bedroom, burning with fever.
Dora Ashlock’s liver problems developed into cancer. When the doctor came out to treat her, no mention was made of the teenager lying above their heads. Jesse was dying from peritonitis brought on by a ruptured appendix. Mary Lou called an ambulance the next day. She and Edward kept a lonely vigil at their brother’s bedside in St. Joseph’s Hospital. Bessie Dixon refused to grant permission for an operation until she came up from St. Helens. By the time she arrived, it was too late. “I’ll be operating on a dead boy,” the physician in charge told her. She insisted they go ahead. Jesse lived less than a day, slipping away on May 8, 1930.
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