Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Erik remembered he and Bob “felt very comfortable, having a good time,” but Brautigan proceeded to get quite drunk. “He was really loaded,” Weber recalled, “annoying the hell out of everybody. The only way Richard could really talk to people that he didn’t know too well was just to get totally smashed.”

  Late that night when everyone else was asleep, Brautigan, an insomniac, wandered into the mud room/pantry to get some ice for his drink from an old Norge refrigerator where cases of beer and soda were stored. The machine was not a defrost model, and the ice trays had frozen fast in the freezer compartment. Tugging at them, Richard pulled the whole outfit over on top of him, breaking the door off the freezer. “I heard this terrible crash,” Becky recalled. Brautigan moaned, “Oh, no . . . Oh, no . . . What am I going to do?”

  What Richard did do was wake up Erik and tell him to “get going and fix the freezer door.” This was the sort of chore Weber normally handled for Brautigan, but he was too tired and told his friend to “fuck off.” After Erik rolled over and went back to sleep, Richard started creeping up the stairs, whispering, “Becky . . . ? Becky . . . ?” in a plaintive tone.

  “What is it, Richard?” she answered, thinking his voice seemed so soft he really didn’t want to wake her, yet “the whole house sounded like it was coming in.”

  “I have a present for you,” he answered.

  “You do?”

  “Trout money,” Brautigan said. “I have tons of trout money for you.” He tiptoed into the McGuanes’ bedroom with about forty sheets of typing paper, each hand signed and featuring a stylized drawing of a fish, his Carp Press logo. Becky thought they looked like something her son Thomas might have drawn when he was four or five.

  Tom found Richard’s behavior that night completely “inappropriate, crawling up and down the stairway dead drunk writing trout money on pieces of paper, pushing it into your room, saying you’re going to be richer and richer.”

  “These are worth a fortune,” Richard said.

  “What am I supposed to buy with it, Richard?” Becky asked.

  “I would suggest you buy a new refrigerator.”

  “Well, I was going to get one tomorrow, anyway.”

  “You were . . . ?” Brautigan sounded extremely pleased. “That is just marvelous, because you could put these in your safe deposit box and someday they will be worth a lot of money.”

  “Richard thought that everything he touched was worth something,” Erik Weber observed. “Anything that had his name on it was going to be worth a lot of money.” Twenty years before, Brautigan had given Edna Webster his early writing saying it would be her “social security.”

  After handing the McGuanes a fortune in trout money, Richard crept back downstairs and exacted his revenge on Erik for refusing to help with the broken freezer door. One by one, he collected every chair in the house. As silently as possible for a staggering drunk, he assembled them over Weber’s sleeping form, stacking a makeshift cage above him. Alerted by a strange noise, Erik awoke to find himself imprisoned within Richard’s peculiar creation. “I couldn’t get out of the goddamn bed,” he said, “without knocking down all of these chairs.”

  After that, things settled into the usual summertime routine, badminton games out on the small patch of lawn in front of the McGuane farmhouse (“Badminton was the game of the year that year,” Dink Bruce recalled), a road trip up north to Ringling, fishing on the Yellowstone or over at Armstrong’s Spring Creek on the west side of Paradise Valley, and long literary conversations around the kitchen table at night. After the initial trout money fiasco, McGuane found Brautigan to be “pleasant and very nice to have around.” Tom was surprised to discover that “he was a product of a very normal evolution in literary history. He liked the mainline, liked to talk about Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson.”

  Dink Bruce found Brautigan to be “standoffish.” He observed that “Richard was basically quiet and sort of subdued about meeting everybody. He and McGuane got into arguments about things.” Bruce eventually warmed toward Brautigan when he offered to assist in repairing a used Saks Fifth Avenue panel delivery truck Bruce had converted into a camper. Dink was installing a vent in the roof, and Richard wandered over to watch. “Can I help you?” he volunteered. Dink told him to get into the truck and hold things steady while he stood on the roof and put the screws in. “I thought that was pretty nice of him,” Bruce said. “I didn’t know him from Adam’s apple.”

  At this point, Brautigan still fished as he had as a boy, without waders, no vest or net, only a minimal amount of gear besides his rod and reel and a simple canvas creel. For the first time in his life, Richard found himself in the company of world-class anglers. “He was not a very good fisherman,” Guy Valdène observed. Jim Harrison had his own opinion about Brautigan’s technical skills, noting, “He had awful line control as they call it, just awful. But he kept at it.” Erik Weber, who knew nothing of fly-fishing at the time, accompanied the boys to Armstrong’s Spring Creek, where he photographed Richard casting from the shore. He said that after observing the difference in everyone’s technique, “once I saw Jim Harrison out there, I couldn’t believe it. It was like two totally different ways of fishing.”

  Every year on the third weekend in August, the Crow Nation hosted a large powwow and Indian rodeo on their reservation on the Little Big Horn River south of Billings. It was just the sort of festive hoolihan the gang at McGuane’s place couldn’t resist. Well-supplied with whiskey and accompanied by John Fryer, a self-taught expert on Montana history, they all set off for Crow Agency in high spirits. Everyone except for Richard, awaiting Sherry’s arrival, and Becky, who remained at home because she knew the trip was really a guy thing. The boys were gone for two days and found Brautigan in a snit when they returned. Erik said his friend seemed “very angry, upset, and not saying anything, not talking.”

  Richard’s bad mood lifted once Sherry flew up from San Francisco for his final week in Montana. She remembered, on her first night at Deep Creek, sitting around the kitchen table eating Becky’s freshly baked apple pie, along with Tom, Guy and Terry, Jim Harrison, Jimmy Buffett strumming his guitar, Erik and Bob, and a young journalist, “sort of a nerdy guy, short with glasses, dark hair,” who had a tape recorder. Richard was furious at the thought of having his words recorded. “He practically broke the thing,” Sherry said. “He was really angry.”

  Sherry stayed with Richard out in the remodeled chicken coop. She hated the place and thought “it was full of fleas.” No fleas live in Montana, but there are plenty of other small biting insects. Sherry was also bothered by Brautigan’s inability to see beneath the surface of the domestic situation surrounding him. Richard had been completely dazzled by the McGuanes, “hung the moon on them,” in Sherry’s country idiom. He adored Becky and was “smitten with Tom. Thought Tom was so great.”

  One night, when he and Sherry were having “a little argument” in bed, Richard held up the McGuanes as paragons of marital bliss. Sherry couldn’t believe what she was hearing. How could her lover be so oblivious to what was going on right under his nose? She patiently explained what she had observed in her first few days, detailing the rift in Tom and Becky’s marriage. “Richard was flabbergasted,” Sherry said.

  Several times, to repay the McGuanes’ generous hospitality, Erik Weber cooked large Indian meals in a wok over a charcoal fire out in the yard. He acquired these exotic culinary skills during his travels on the Asian subcontinent. Tom remembered Erik cooking for as many as fifteen people at a time and regarded this as Richard’s attempt at reciprocation. “He’d impose on you to the point he’d recognize his imposition,” McGuane said, “and then do some tremendous thing to pay you back. He’d see that his people cooked for a few nights.”

  On their last weekend, Richard and Sherry went to the Jaycee Centennial Rodeo in Livingston with a bunch of McGuane’s other houseguests. Before the bull rides, they watched skydivers drift down from the clouds into th
e arena at the Park County Fairgrounds. On a Monday morning near the end of August, Brautigan, Vetter, Bob Junsch, and Erik Weber bundled into the rental car and made “a beeline back to the city,” driving straight through to San Francisco.

  Two days later, Richard wrote a letter of thanks to Tom and Becky. He knew an era of his life was drawing to a close. Up in Montana, Brautigan encountered an unexpected literary scene. Something different. At Tom McGuane’s place on Deep Creek, he met a group of writers who enjoyed trout fishing, drinking whiskey, and shootings guns as much as he did—writers who rejected trendy urban coteries, yet remained passionate about art and literature. And in Tom McGuane, Richard found another attractive charismatic madcap whose free-spirited energy invested the rowdy misbehavior of the group surrounding him with near-mythic import.

  Brautigan hired Erik Weber to photographically document his Geary Street apartment shortly after they returned from Montana. Shooting pictures, Weber noticed numbers of cardboard boxes filled with packing material, and he had the feeling Richard was preparing to move out. Brautigan kept the Museum for almost three more years, until the building was condemned, but psychologically he had already departed. Weber’s photos provided an elaborate time capsule of Brautigan’s former life.

  Brautigan began spending more time in Bolinas. The fogbound town made a fireplace welcome even in August, but when Richard tried to light a fire he discovered a hive of bees blocking the chimney. They swarmed into the room in a raging cloud. Brautigan hired a couple guys to tackle the problem. The bees proved a greater menace than ghosts. Joanne Kyger believed Richard invented the story of the female Asian spirit because he wanted to live in a haunted house, but she joined in the “fantasy” with the same playful spirit as when they watched Batman on TV together in 1965.

  “He had a quirky sense of humor,” Kyger said. Joanne’s contribution to the haunted mansion make-believe involved helping Brautigan build a nest in his house on Terrace Avenue. “It was in an upper back room,” she said. “We built this kind of thing for the ghost child to stay in. We had some twigs, and we had some feathers. It was just an elaborate fantasy sort of nest. You could get into those things with Richard.”

  The house in Bolinas provided Brautigan a place to entertain friends and a home for Ianthe when she came to visit. These were the first extended periods she’d ever spent with her father. She picked out her own bedroom up on the third floor, but nighttime presented a problem. Whenever the old house creaked in the wind, Ianthe thought “the ghost was going to come and visit me.” The nest in the room next door was not a fantasy for a girl of twelve. The Mickey Mouse sheets and a happy face nightlight provided no consolation. Ianthe moved downstairs to a little second-floor bedroom closer to where her father slept.

  In the daytime, the house transformed into a magical place. The deck was “wonderful,” and a secret passage connected two of the third-floor bedrooms through a closet. Ianthe found cupboards stuffed with mysterious musty magazines from the thirties and forties. She read a batch of letters written during World War II to a girl named Polly. She played an off-key piano downstairs. Sherry taught Ianthe how to bake chocolate cakes in the spacious kitchen.

  Over Easter vacation, when she spent a week in Bolinas, Ianthe and her father had a debate about the TV. Richard wanted to watch the Lakers game, Ianthe preferred The Brady Bunch. A bet was proposed. “We did a lot of wagering together,” Ianthe wrote in her memoir. “I got most of my allowance raises from winning bets.”

  Betting with Brautigan “often involved elaborate preparations.” Father and daughter searched the backyard for perfect-sized pinecones. Teasing was part of the process, and Richard firmly insisting he was going to win. The bet involved tossing the pinecones at a wastepaper basket from a measured distance. Whoever made three baskets in a row was the winner and got control of the television. “He let me win,” Ianthe wrote, “and I was allowed to watch my program, only cutting to the game during commercials.”

  “He was so good to her,” Sherry recalled. “And she loved him so much.”

  Ianthe hung out on the beach near the Jefferson Airplane house, hoping “that this time the band would be home and someone famous would come to that gate and use the speaker phone.” No one ever did.

  The Bolinas house provided ample space for dinner parties, and the second floor filled often with hard-drinking writers and poets. When the Creeleys came, the drink and talk went on until dawn. Sherry cooked elaborate meals, assisted by Nancy Hodge whenever she and Dick were on the guest list. Brautigan prepared his signature spaghetti dinner for Joanne Kyger, Bobby Louise Creeley, and Ron Loewinsohn, who brought his new girlfriend, Kitty Hughes, a graduate student at Berkeley, where he was teaching.

  Kitty’s parents hailed from Nebraska. She was a second cousin to Bruce Conner. Kitty studied at Bryn Mawr and the University of Pennsylvania and taught at Norfolk State, a black college in Virginia. Two of her colleagues there had known Loewinsohn at Harvard. Later, when she encountered them again at Berkeley, they introduced her to Ron. Tom and Becky McGuane also arrived for the spaghetti feast. Kitty Hughes thought they “looked sort of yuppie.” Becky struck her as “a suburbanite.” Kitty wondered what she was doing in this crowd. “She was perfect in some way,” Hughes recalled, “but she was also the domesticated kind of trophy of this guy.”

  The first time Tom McGuane was introduced to Dick and Nancy Hodge, he showed up in Bolinas with a woman no one knew. Ianthe enjoyed all the wild evenings, “marathons [. . .] filled with a kind of foot-stomping, boisterous noise that chased all my kid fears away.” After a harrowing few days when Ianthe had been sick and throwing up, Brautigan phoned Sherry Vetter. “You’ve got to come up and get her,” he pleaded. “She’s driving me crazy. I can’t get any work done.” Inspired by his Montana trip, Richard had started the Western novel he had dreamed of for so long. He had not written a novel in six years and was desperate to avoid any distraction.

  Vetter taught a fifth-grade class in the City. She regarded his request as “way beyond what a regular friend would ask.” Sherry called him on it. “This is what you do,” she told Richard, “you never say please and you never say thank you. The request is always really beyond friendship. You’re trying to get people to prove over and over that they love you and you want them to fail. Because then it would prove that they really don’t love you like your mother didn’t.”

  Sherry still found the time to drive out to Bolinas. She sat in the little blue bug, with Ianthe beside her and the motor idling, preparing to depart, when Richard appeared at the open driver’s side window. “He did a deep plié, his hands on the car door.” After repeated entreaties of “Daddy, Daddy, will you miss me?” answered by multiple pledges of devotion and an urge that they “get out of here,” Ianthe reached over to Richard and said, “Think of me.”

  Brautigan stared past Vetter at his daughter. “I think only of you,” he said. The “beautiful sweet” moment hung in the air.

  Sherry took Ianthe shopping and then drove her up to her mother’s place in Sonoma (“the flies on the ceiling of the hippie house kitchen, the women forlorn, overwhelmed”). She hesitated on her return at the fork in the road. Either back to the City or over the hill to Richard. He’d begged her to come back, but his recent heavy drinking argued against it. Sherry turned right toward Bolinas, a place she always thought of as “spooky. God, did the sun ever shine over Bolinas?”

  She arrived back at Brautigan’s house in the late afternoon. He had already gone to Smiley’s. Richard left her a note: “I am at the bar.” Sherry felt happy being alone. She sat in the growing dark, “listening to the ocean, distant, murmuring.” Later, she read and prepared an omelet, glad “not to have to smile and listen to philosophical gibberish: writers’ conversations.” After eating, Sherry picked up Ianthe’s scattered play clothes and got ready for bed, putting on a pair of pajamas but not unpacking her canvas bag. Snug in the big brass bed on the second floor, she phoned Ianthe, who asked for her dad. “He�
�s in the bathtub,” Sherry lied.

  “Go holler at him and get him. Make him talk to me!”

  “He’ll call later, but don’t wait up in case he forgets.”

  Sherry prowled the house, examining the bouquets of dried flowers gracing every corner, ghostly decorations from the past she believed had been placed there by Mary Elizabeth Parsons seventy years earlier. She followed her own advice and didn’t wait up for Richard. After she fell asleep, nothing disturbed her until she heard an approaching car around three in the morning. Sherry awoke as someone delivered Richard from the bar. She felt vulnerable in bed. Not knowing Brautigan’s “state of inebriation” made her jump from under the covers and run into the kitchen.

  The door to a screened-in outdoor cooler stood in the far wall. Sherry and Richard had long used this secret vantage point to observe who was coming to visit before deciding whether to lie low. She opened the cooler door and looked down through the bottom slats at the back stairs leading up to the second-floor redwood deck, “like a child in a hide-and-seek game.” Richard stood at the foot of the stairs, clutching both railings, “leaning forward, waiting for his head to clear.”

  Brautigan threw back his head and called, “Sherry . . .” Getting no answer, he started laboriously up.

  Sherry watched from above, frozen, unseen, and “by the weaving of his body, the looseness of his limbs, the shadow of his long torso cast across the hillside below him from the floodlights affixed to the house,” she saw he was quite drunk. Four steps up, Brautigan’s right foot broke through a rotten tread, catching his leg, fracturing the femur when he tried to jerk it free.

  Richard wailed in pain. He lurched forward, disappearing from view.

  Sherry left the kitchen and walked to the French doors opening out onto the deck at the other side of the house. As she fiddled with the lock, she heard him coming and “a great overwhelming anger” rose within her. It squeezed the breath inside her chest. Sherry saw Richard’s “white face leering through the glass” at the door. She pushed the door open and sent Brautigan “reeling across the deck in a crazy dance. Winding down like a top off its spin.”