Preoccupied with typographical nit-picking involving the forthcoming Dell editions of his first three books, Richard Brautigan did little new writing. He continued taking notes for his projected Western novel but had not yet started on the book. He fussed with Loie Weber over the correct spelling of “harpsichord,” the accidental addition of an “a” by a typesetter, and changing the word “while” to “a while” on the page proofs. Brautigan had Helen Brann insist that Dell pay Loie $4.50 an hour to “go over” the page proofs, comparing them to the corrected galleys. Dell refused to pay the $90 billed by Brautigan for Loie Weber’s editorial services. In the end, Sam Lawrence wrote Richard a personal check, insisting that if he wished to check the galleys again “it will have to be at his own expense.”
Ken Kesey wrote Brautigan in February, telling him about Spit in the Ocean, his new alternative magazine, and asking if he might be interested in becoming an editor. The theme of the first issue was to be “Old in the Streets.” Richard said he was not an editor. He offered a poem instead. “The only literary activity I am interested in is writing,” he wrote to Kesey, “and as you know, at best, that is like having a bull by the balls at midnight in a bubble gum factory.” He wished Ken good luck with his new project.
Jayne Walker (formerly Palladino) wrote to Richard in mid-February, saying she’d like to see him, having recently had an “absolutely outrageous” dream about him. She included her phone number. She would have called but Brautigan had changed his number so often. Richard got in touch with her. They soon started keeping company again.
Brautigan took Walker out to Bolinas for the weekend. Jayne found the place “ultragloomy, the creepiest house, a horrible house,” and couldn’t figure out why he’d ever bought it. “Incredible cobwebs” hung down from the “cathedral ceiling.” She thought he’d just moved in. Jayne couldn’t stand it. When Richard left the room, she got a broom from the kitchen and started “swatting at the cobwebs.” Brautigan raced back into the room, greatly disturbed.
“Don’t touch those cobwebs,” he shouted. “I love those cobwebs. I want them to stay exactly the way they were.” Jayne knew nothing about the resident Chinese ghost but thought Richard wanted his own haunted house, an Addams Family mansion.
The next morning, Robert Creeley, a poet Jayne greatly admired, came over for breakfast. Richard had turned her on to modern writers, and she took a graduate seminar in contemporary poetry with Tom Parkinson at Berkeley in the summer of 1971, writing a long paper on Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson. Jayne had the feeling Brautigan invited Creeley over as a special treat for her. She sensed that Richard and Bob “were very uncomfortable with each other, and they talked with difficulty.” Jayne detected a certain shyness in their relationship. She was also struck with the way Creeley talked “in really short bursts, only two or three words at a time. Just like his poems.” This was the only time Jayne Walker visited Richard in Bolinas. She never saw Robert Creeley again.
Whenever Walker went to see Brautigan on Geary Street they launched into lengthy and detailed conversations covering everything from literature to politics. “He was really fascinated by San Francisco city politics,” she said. Richard cooked for her once or twice, but most often they got so caught up in their heated talks that it would suddenly be ten thirty or eleven at night and they would head over to some late-hour soul food place on Fillmore Street for a couple orders of ribs.
Brautigan repeatedly returned to certain conversational topics. His literary reputation provided a favorite theme. He expressed frustration at begin typecast as the hippie writer. “Not that he didn’t do everything in the world to encourage this identification,” Jayne recalled with amusement. Once Richard “talked on and on about all of the ways in which he wasn’t a hippie. He just spoke with such horror and contempt of the drug culture. He really didn’t believe at all in the hippie rejection of the work ethic.” Jayne was convinced by Brautigan’s reasoning. “He obviously does come from a different generation,” she said.
Brautigan kept in touch with Gatz Hjortsberg, who patched things up with Marian. Gatz suggested that on his next Montana trip Richard might stay at the Pine Creek Lodge & Store, less than a quarter mile up the old East River Road from his place. The establishment’s name was misleading. There was no lodge. The Pine Creek Store, a simple one-story log building with a front entrance of river rock, was built in 1946. A number of simple cabins were added later on the other side of an irrigation ditch flowing beside the store. Most resident tourists incorrectly assumed it to be Pine Creek. Only the first two cabins, built of logs and closest to the road, had any substance; the others were little more than plywood shacks. They could be rented daily, weekly, or monthly.
Dave and Sue Dill, a young couple from Long Beach, California, had recently purchased the Pine Creek Lodge. They redecorated the store, putting in a lunch counter where Mrs. Dill served sandwiches and home-cooked meals. Dave was a fly-fisherman, hoping to guide and sell his own hand-tied flies. In March, Gatz gave Richard’s name and address to Sue Dill. She mailed Brautigan a copy of their recently printed brochure. Richard got back in touch, reserving the Dill’s best cabin for the coming summer.
In April, Richard filed his tax return right on time. Brautigan’s gross earnings for 1972 came to $101,826. Esmond H. Coleman, CPA, reduced this to an adjusted gross income of $95,001. Brautigan’s tax bill came to $36,458. He had already prepaid $24,990 and sent the IRS a check for $11,633 including a $165 penalty for underestimating his tax payments. Mr. Coleman received $300 for his services, double Brautigan’s charitable contributions for the year. Not that Richard wasn’t generous. Keith Abbott never saw him refuse a panhandler.
Richard Brautigan first met his Japanese translator around this same time. Kazuko Fujimoto moved to California from Tokyo when her husband, David Goodman, resumed his graduate studies at Stanford. Unhappy with Palo Alto, they relocated to San Francisco. One afternoon, the Goodmans went to lunch at the Suehiro restaurant in Japantown and Fujimoto spotted a man with long blond hair seated with a friend at a nearby table. Kazuko decided it must be Brautigan. Gathering her nerve, she approached his table and said politely, “Not to disturb your lunch but I would like to introduce myself. I am the Japanese translator for your Trout Fishing.” Brautigan seemed very pleased to meet her. Fujimoto told him she had some questions about the book but knew this was not the proper occasion. Richard gave her his address, and they agreed to get together sometime soon.
A week or so later, Kazuko phoned and said, “I’m coming, and I’ll bring some lunch. Am I right to assume that you don’t eat sandwiches?” A few days later Fujimoto drove over to Geary Street with a freshly baked salmon soufflé. Kazuko was “very touched and impressed” that Richard had prepared steamed asparagus. Knowing the importance of the visual in Japanese cuisine, he had lined up the stalks in a “very nice way.” She thought, “This is a sensitive thing to do.”
After their lunch, Richard and Kazuko had “a nice conversation” lasting several hours. She recalled, “He was very generous in answering my questions.” Aside from the Rizzoli edition of Confederate General, foreign editions of Brautigan’s work were a recent manifestation of his growing popularity. He told her that usually he had no interest in knowing what went into the translations of his work because, through friends, he had discovered many errors had occurred over which he had no control. Brautigan wanted to make sure the Japanese version was “right.” Richard told Kazuko that in the 1972 Dutch translation of Trout Fishing, his reference to a “tropical flower” had mysteriously transmogrified into a “gay man.” Fujimoto recalled Brautigan was “horrified” by this error. She resolved not to make the same mistakes.
One thing Kazuko observed in the Museum, along with the line of crude fish outlines painted on the hallway floor, was Richard’s inflatable trout. Fujimoto thought it funny. Brautigan told her he took it with him when he traveled, keeping it in his shirt pocket. “And when the attendants come around and ask what I want t
o drink,” he said, “I tell them maybe a martini or something like that and I take [the balloon fish] out and say, ‘One more for this guy.’”
Fujimoto and Brautigan met several times afterward in coffee shops and restaurants to discuss the progress of her translation. She asked many questions. Richard was always thoughtful and concise in his answers. Impressed with her thoroughness and professionalism, Brautigan instructed Helen Brann to include a clause in all his Japanese foreign rights contracts stipulating that Kazuko Fujimoto was to be his designated translator.
Richard continued seeing Jayne Walker from time to time throughout the spring of 1973. That summer Walker left on a trip to Europe and Brautigan started dating a young Japanese American nurse named Anne Kuniyuki. Don Carpenter recalled that no one ever saw her. Richard “would call her up and she would come over at eleven or twelve at night when she got off her nursing shift.” Anne Kuniyuki hailed from Honolulu, Hawaii, and aspired to be a potter. Along with a full-time job, Anne studied ceramics at the San Francisco extension of the University of California. When she first met Richard, she needed to find a new apartment. Her busy life demanded juggling her job with school and the drudgery of house-hunting. Richard Brautigan brought Anne Kuniyuki to dinner often at Page Street and to Richard and Nancy Hodge’s home in Berkeley. Nancy remembered that Brautigan seemed “quite fond” of Kuniyuki.
Around this time, Richard started writing the Western he had toyed with in his imagination for so long. He followed the scheme he worked out in his notebooks: combining two different genres, a cowboy story and the gothic novel. As always, he incorporated many elements from his actual life.
Set in 1902, Brautigan’s story opened in a pineapple field in Hawaii, both a sly joke (the islands are the westernmost point in the United States) and a nod to Richard’s recent friendship with Anne Kuniyuki. Like his gunslinger, Cameron, Richard Brautigan was a counter. This habit formed in Brautigan’s youth and stayed with him throughout his life. Staring out a car window, Richard silently counted the telephone poles flicking past or the number of cows in a distant field. Brautigan compiled a five-page chart in an early notebook, counting the punctuation marks in an unnamed text. Many writers make lists of possible titles for their books. Brautigan’s list for The Hawkline Monster ran for pages. For more than a decade (late 1962 to September 1973), Richard compiled a dated list of every letter he wrote. In a brief poem written on the first of September, Brautigan wryly commented on his counting proclivities. The complete text of “Nine Crows: Two Out of Sequence” reads: “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 6, 8, 9.”
Brautigan set Hawkline in eastern Oregon, where he’d hunted deer as a teenager. Richard described hills “that looked as if an undertaker had designed them from leftover funeral scraps.” The twenty-one-room Hawkline Manor stood alone amid this desolate landscape. Brautigan’s imagination recaptured Mrs. Manerude’s four-story, thirty-room mansion in Eugene, where he’d worked odd jobs after school as a teenager. Another autobiographical touch found in The Hawkline Monster involved Professor Hawkline, who conducted strange experiments in the basement of his mansion, combining various ingredients into a toxic stew called The Chemicals. What random thoughts of Dr. Frankenstein and other B-movie mad scientists flashed through Brautigan’s mind when he mixed barium swallows formula down in the basement of Pacific Chemical?
In the third week of August, Richard packed his fishing gear, some clothes, books, and his unfinished manuscript and flew to Montana. He took a cab over the Bozeman Pass to the Pine Creek Lodge in Paradise Valley and settled into one of their rustic cabins. A couple days later, Roxy and Judy Gordon drove in to join him, accompanied by their four-year-old son, J.C. (John Calvin), and a German shepherd named Mike. The same day, Art and Suzy Coelho showed up to join the party with their son, Eli, and a dog called Milo.
Art Coelho (Brautigan spelled it “Quehlo” in his notebook) was raised on family farms in California’s central San Joaquin Valley. A writer and painter, the grandson of Portuguese immigrants from the Azores, Art first met Roxy and Judy back in 1969 when they were heading down to San Diego after their VISTA service. Art had been in Austin two years earlier and attended Brautigan’s reading at the university.
Peter Miller, now settled in Seattle, remodeling houses and working with a contractor on Pioneer Square, had plans to start up a bookstore in the market area with the writer Raymond Mungo (author of Famous Long Ago, a memoir about cofounding the radical Liberation News Service in the sixties, and Total Loss Farm, a comic chronicle of life on a rural commune). They hoped to find an old building and restore it. Almost on a whim, Peter drove out to Montana, blasting straight through “like an auto assassin,” to keep his buddy Richard company.
The plan was for all of them to head down to Crow Fair together. Brautigan didn’t want to miss the powwow for a second time. Richard arranged for the Gordons to meet Thomas McGuane, and over drinks in Tom’s kitchen, Judy found it “so funny” how these two “giants danced around, trying to outdo each other.” Jimmy Buffett had returned for another summer visit. Much impromptu music resonated on the premises. Buffett’s first major-label album, A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean, had just been released. McGuane wrote the liner notes, commenting that Buffett’s music lay “at the curious hinterland where Hank Williams and Xavier Cugat meet.”
While Brautigan, Buffett, and McGuane retreated into the farmhouse for booze and literary gossip, Peter Miller, the Coelhos, and the Gordons played mixed-doubles badminton on the patch of reconstituted prairie passing for a lawn. Later that evening, fueled by the afternoon’s libations, Richard read his poetry aloud after supper to a captive audience back at the Pine Creek Lodge. Eventually, both couples left Brautigan to his insomnia, escaping to their own separate cabins for the night.
The next day, they got a late start. After a leisurely breakfast, the couples set off in two cars for Billings, where they dropped Milo off at Art’s rented pink house on Burnstead Street. By the time they departed for the powwow, driving south toward Hardin, it was late afternoon. They didn’t arrive in Crow Agency until twilight.
Brautigan wrote in his notebook: “There were thousands of Indians from all over America and hundreds of tepees and pickups and campers and tents [. . .]” Art Coehlo had been adopted into the Yellowtail clan of the Crow Nation and had participated in their grueling Sun Dance ritual two years earlier. The group found their way to the camp of Pie Glenn, a Yellowtail on his mother’s side, where they were invited guests. After gifts of food and tobacco were exchanged, the visitors were made welcome as if they were blood kin. Sleeping places were prepared for them in the lodges, and everyone shared in the communal evening meal.
Saturday night was the main event at Crow Fair, featuring family giveaways and a fancy dance competition. Dancers in their feathered finery had come from all over Indian country to participate. A steady drumming throb accompanied the wailing chants. Rising dust clouds drifted like fog in the floodlights’ glare. Food stalls encircled the dancing ground. The smell of fry bread and corn dogs sizzling in boiling fat scented the nighttime summer breeze.
Richard Brautigan, tall and blond, cut a distinctive figure in the crowd the next morning with his shoulder-length blond hair, drooping mustache, and high-crowned hat. Numbers of young laughing Native American children followed him around, calling him “General Custer” in a good-natured teasing way. Richard had long been interested in Custer and went with the Gordons to explore the Little Bighorn battlefield. Later, exhausted by sightseeing, Brautigan took a nap in the Custer National Cemetery on Last Stand Hill. A group of Livingston people (John Fryer, Joe and Carolyn Swindlehurst, the Hjortsbergs, and Dr. Dennis Noteboom, newly arrived with his beautiful young wife, Patricia, after two years of medical service on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota) were among those watching the dance competition.
Gatz accidentally encountered Richard among an ocean of unfamiliar faces. He could tell at a glance his friend had had a snootful although the reservation was lega
lly dry. Brautigan, ever sly and evasive when it came to personal details, told him he had been invited to sleep in a tepee that night, implying a mysterious affinity for Native Americana and never letting on his connection to Art Coelho and the Yellowtails. Gatz, who planned to sleep with his wife and friends on a tarp spread on the nearby hillside, took this as a measure of Brautigan’s fame and was duly impressed.
Richard, Peter, the Coelhos, and the Gordons left Crow Agency early on Sunday morning, not waiting for the horseback parade in the afternoon, the official end of the powwow. Roxy and Judy drove Richard and Peter back to the Pine Creek Lodge and soon were on their way home. Although they stayed in contact over the years via phone calls and letters, they never saw Richard in person again.
Sue Dill got Brautigan settled in for a long stay in cabin number 2, the most desirable residence as it was farther from the road. Richard always had trouble sleeping. He discovered the first night that his bed wobbled, so he jammed a paperback copy of War and Peace under one of the legs to level it.
Peter and Richard fished together after returning from Crow Fair. They talked about basketball and Brautigan’s plan to buy property in Paradise Valley. Richard asked Peter if he might be interested in a house-building project. Brautigan also wanted to take in a number of consecutive professional basketball games in Seattle. Miller promised to look into both requests, and almost as quickly as he had come, he was off again, back to the Pacific Northwest.
Five days later, Anne Kuniyuki wrote Richard a brief note asking, “Would you dig my coming to visit you.” Because of appointments, the approaching start of the school year, moving out of her apartment, and the demands of her job, it had to be the first two weeks of September. Brautigan never felt entirely comfortable without a woman. When her letter arrived, Richard hurried to the glass public telephone booth by the highway and called Anne to invite her up to Montana. They made plans for her to come and spend a week.
Jubilee Hitchhiker Page 87