Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  After these preliminary discussions, work began in earnest with Ron Little acting as the de facto foreman. The A. W. Miles Lumber Company in Livingston (a venerable institution founded by the nephew of famed Indian fighter General Nelson Miles) had a quantity of fine redwood on hand, so the crew bought a large amount for their project. “All they had was redwood,” Peter Lewis recalled, “the most beautiful redwood.”

  “Nobody was working off plans,” Little recollected. “It was making it up as you go along.” Ron did the basic stuff, “roughing, working on supports, foundations, checking to make sure what we built would stay up.” Tom Kyle handled the finishing work, “building cabinets and drawers and covers.” All along, they tried to keep the rest of the crew occupied, assigning tasks equal to their abilities.

  When the wall dividing the two rooms at the front of the house was demolished, a surprising discovery was made. Beneath the stucco, laths, and plaster, the house had originally been built of logs. Brautigan was delighted by the unexpected revelation. It thrilled him to know that his house had a secret history.

  Another chance discovery greatly pleased Richard. When the bathroom wall was knocked down to enlarge the space, a hospital baby identification bracelet was found behind the toilet tank. Made from plastic beads back in the forties, it had been fastened around a newborn’s wrist or ankle. Round blue beads signified the baby was a boy. White square beads spelled out the child’s last name: Shorthill. Brautigan’s place had originally been part of a larger ranch belonging to David Shorthill, a Union officer who came to the Paradise Valley in the 1860s. Richard felt this connection to a veteran of the Civil War, however far removed, was a rare treasure. He saved the baby bracelet for years.

  Aside from these two discoveries almost nothing about the remodeling project pleased Brautigan. “He hated the crew,” Peter Miller said. “Mostly because they were different than he was. They didn’t drink. They had their girlfriends and kids.” Gatz Hjortsberg remembered Richard grumbling about the crew. “Those bean sprout eaters,” he fumed, “those fucking granola heads!” Even though he griped about their eating habits, Brautigan brought Jimmy Buffett over to the construction site for a vegetarian dinner prepared by the cooks on the crew. No matter how much work they accomplished in a very short time, Brautigan always found something to complain about. “We were working under a deadline,” Ron Little recalled. “We had like four weeks.”

  Attempting to defuse the tense situation, Peter Miller created a task for Brautigan. “We gave him the job of straightening nails,” he said. “Pulling and straightening nails.” Quantities of scrap lumber had been torn out of the house and coal shed. Richard “would sit there all afternoon, pulling nails from boards and straightening them, putting them in the right baskets.” The crew had no plans to recycle either the wood or the nails. “We didn’t give a shit whether the nails ever showed up again or not,” Miller said. “He just needed a job. It was a perfect job for him. And he liked it because he didn’t have to bother with anybody. He was not handy and didn’t pretend to be handy.”

  “Kurt Vonnegut doesn’t do this,” Richard quipped, extracting yet another nail from a broken board.

  Ron Little, Brautigan’s drinking buddy from Cambridge, was the only member of the crew Richard actually seemed to like. Peter Miller thought it was because Ron was also alone. “I kind of hung out with Richard,” Little recalled. “I drank whiskey, and he’d get a bowl, fill it with ice, and get a bottle and drive around in a pickup and talk.” Brautigan appreciated Little’s skilled craftsmanship and liked the way his future studio was progressing. Whenever he saw Ron he’d say, “You are the one guy there. You and Tom knew what you were doing but those other sons of bitches, they even screwed up my bathroom wall.” Ron remembered Richard really hated the rough textured surface of the bathroom walls.

  Ron Little brought a .44 Magnum revolver with him from Colorado, bought originally to scare away the bears on a fishing trip to Alaska. Brautigan was impressed by the powerful handgun. Little was a take-charge sort of guy. Once, when a crew member’s mangy little dog bit one of the children, Ron ran over and petted the animal to calm it down. Without asking anyone, he took the dog toward the Yellowstone and shot him. Ron “liked that kind of keeping control of shit,” Peter Miller said.

  Little stayed in touch with Brautigan for a couple of years after the remodeling project was finished. “Rich and I liked each other,” he said. Ron stopped to visit whenever he passed through Montana. The last time they were together was a summer when Ianthe was staying with her father. Little arrived one evening, and he and Brautigan sat up late drinking whiskey. “And he talked to me about Hemingway,” Ron said. They had been discussing what it felt like for Little when he quit the international ski racing circuit. Richard mentioned “about how Hemingway had shot himself with a shotgun.” This conversation stayed in Ron’s mind for years because suicide had not been on his mind. “[Brautigan] brought it up,” he said.

  Living just across the creek, the Hjortsbergs frequently wandered over to Brautigan’s construction site to admire the work in progress. They thought more highly of the craftsmanship than Richard did. “He didn’t like it,” Peter Miller once told Gatz. “You liked it. We were always pleased that you liked it.” There weren’t many other onlookers. Jeff Bridges stopped by one day when he wasn’t working on McGuane’s film and praised the laminated redwood countertops Tom Kyle had put together in the kitchen. “See, they’ve beveled the corners,” Bridges said. Brautigan wasn’t paying attention.

  The filming of Rancho Deluxe remained the big news. It was hard to get away from the production. Many local residents were cast in small speaking roles. Scott Palmer and Gatz Hjortsberg, both short of coin, worked as understudies for Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston, the most menial jobs on the production. In spite of a lifelong interest in the movies, Richard Brautigan visited the location only once. Later, he told G. Haller he thought there were a lot of people sitting around doing nothing. “He didn’t quite understand the down time,” she said.

  Brautigan proved more capable when G.’s son Eric had a bicycle accident on Deep Creek Road near the McGuane place. Richard and Jimmy Buffett had been visiting with Tom and brought the unconscious boy back to the Pine Creek Lodge. Eric had a broken nose. After he regained consciousness, it was feared he might have a concussion. Brautigan called Dr. Dennis Noteboom in town and described the boy’s symptoms. Eric wasn’t vomiting or showing other overt signs of concussion. Dennis said to keep him in bed for a day or so.

  Richard and Jimmy hung around swapping stories for the amusement of the temporary invalid. They talked about how they disciplined themselves to get their work done, perhaps providing backhand moral guidance for the boy. It wasn’t all talk of noses to the grindstone. Buffett told a wild story about a dispute he once had with a business associate. It ended when Jimmy performed a wild tap-dance on the roof of the fellow’s car in his golfing shoes.

  Harry Dean Stanton became Richard Brautigan’s closest friend among the Rancho Deluxe cast. Born in Kentucky in 1926, the character actor with the weathered basset hound face had appeared in thirty-two films prior to his role as ranch hand Curt in McGuane’s opus. Cool Hand Luke, Two-Lane Blacktop, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Cisco Pike were among the best known, and Stanton went on to notable parts in Alien, Wild at Heart, Pretty in Pink, and Paris, Texas. Harry Dean had served in World War II, an experience that intrigued Richard, whose long-standing love of military history attracted him to anyone with firsthand knowledge.

  One afternoon, Brautigan and Stanton drove back from a binge in Bozeman along Trail Creek Road, an old gravel byway connecting Paradise Valley with Chestnut, a former coal mining town now reduced to a meager handful of ramshackle buildings alongside I-90. Harry Dean abruptly put on the brakes and jumped from the car. He climbed through a barbed wire fence and ran out into the pasture, dragging back a weathered section of wood about four feet long with rusting iron attachments on either end. It was the ta
ilgate to an ancient and long disintegrated wagon. “What do you want with that old piece of junk?” Richard asked.

  “Oh, man.” Stanton enthused, “won’t this make the most beautiful coffee table?”

  The drinking bout continued at Brautigan’s place. When Harry Dean headed back to his motel room in town he left the old tailgate behind. Stanton never returned for it, and Brautigan eventually propped the relic up against the trunk of a cottonwood tree in his front yard, affixing a long narrow copper strip on which he had engraved: the harry dean stanton coffee table. The tailgate leaned against the tree trunk for almost a decade, until Richard’s death.

  Mary Ann Gilderbloom arrived late in May for a short stay at the Pine Creek Lodge with Brautigan. Richard borrowed Tom McGuane’s truck and had Scott Palmer drive over to the Bozeman airport to pick her up. After that, Mary Ann became the designated driver. At the time, the Livingston social scene revolved almost entirely around the cast and crew of Rancho Deluxe. Gilderbloom recalled an evening in town at the Wrangler Bar. Richard and Mary Ann were just leaving after much heavy drinking when they spotted a guy veering down the street with a guitar slung over his back. “That’s Jimmy,” Brautigan said. “Let’s give him a ride home.”

  “Let’s go and have another drink,” Jimmy Buffett replied.

  This seemed a fine idea, and they all went back into the bar. “We commenced to drink some more,” Mary Ann remembered.

  At one point, Buffett and Stanton sat down in front of the Pong machine for a drunken mano a mano. Pong had become the bar game of choice for the Rancho crew. McGuane even wrote it into a scene in the film. The pair sat before the glowing video screen, so drunk their heads were nearly touching. Observing from behind, Mary Ann said to Richard, “That would be a fabulous album cover.”

  Later that night, Gilderbloom drove Buffett home to McGuane’s house in Tom’s truck. “I drove really slow because he sang to me the entire way,” Mary Ann recalled. “Drunk as a skunk. It was hilarious. It was one of the funniest nights in my life.”

  The remodeling project was nearly done. A tremendous amount had been accomplished for $15,000, a relatively modest sum. Only a few finishing touches remained before the ragtag crew would disperse into the rest of their lives. They were all sleeping one night when Stanton and Brautigan showed up in the dark house, skunked to the eyeballs. How it started was anybody’s guess. Richard’s critical appraisal of their craftsmanship took a violent turn. Ron Little was awakened in his tent by the sudden commotion, dogs barking, babies crying, women screaming. Little shoved his .44 Magnum into the waistband of his jeans and hurried to investigate.

  He found Brautigan raging in the kitchen, armed with “a great big thirty-two-ounce framing hammer.” With Harry Dean urging him on, Richard smashed at the newly completed ceiling. “This is the way I wanted the ceiling, goddammit!” he shouted. The wall was next. “This wasn’t the wall I was after,” Richard hollered, hitting it with the framing hammer, a heavy dangerous tool with a hatchet blade on one end. Everyone stood around terrified, the children wide-eyed, unable to deal with his insane behavior.

  Ron Little was pissed. “The job was almost over, and I was ready to go home, and he was wrecking things.” As Brautigan prepared to swing the hammer again, Little stepped up and grabbed it out of his hand. Taken off balance, Richard fell to the floor. When Harry Dean started to say something, Ron told him, “You get the fuck out of here, man.”

  Turning to assist Brautigan, Little said, “Richard, you’re going to bed. That’s enough. You’ve banged this place up plenty. You’ve scared the kids. You’ve scared the dogs. You can call it a night now.”

  Stanton moved slowly toward the door, continuing to mutter encouragement to the recumbent Brautigan. Ron tried to get Richard to his feet, telling him it was over for the night. If he had any problems they would talk about it in the morning. Harry Dean had gotten into his rental car and started the engine, still yelling at Richard, trying to egg him on. This really pissed Little off. He stepped outside, raised his .44 Magnum, and fired at the car, knocking out a headlight. In the darkness, a two-foot flame erupted from the muzzle of the revolver.

  “Made a hell of a racket,” Ron said. “A gun that big and that loud has a tendency to get everybody’s attention.” It sobered Stanton up in a hurry. “Scared the shit out of him,” Little recalled. Harry Dean floored it. His car spun around a couple times in the driveway, a maneuver known among hot-rodders as a doughnut. Mad as he was, Ron Little began to find the whole thing amusing. “I thought about killing the fucking car and make him walk back into town,” he said. Instead, Ron fired a second shot into the ground beside the driver’s side door, causing Harry Dean to concentrate wonderfully on his driving. The actor got control of the car and sped off into the night.

  The construction project, including patching up the kitchen, came to an end a couple days later, about the same time Rancho Deluxe wrapped. To celebrate both events, Richard Brautigan threw a big housewarming party at his new home on the first Saturday in June. Most of the cast and movie crew were invited, along with the much-despised hippie carpenters. Harry Dean was there. Ditto Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston. Tom and Becky McGuane mingled in the crowd. Marian Hjortsberg brought over a roast suckling pig to the feast. After a long, cold, wet spring, the bright sunny afternoon came as a welcome treat.

  G. Haller thought the party “was to honor the crew and Peter for the wonderful work that they had done.” She remembered Richard as being “very proud” of the redwood craftsmanship. At one point in the festivities, Brautigan took her over to a large cottonwood in the backyard, pointing out where he planned to plant his garden. G. felt concerned about the lack of sunlight. “Oh no,” Richard assured her, “this is the place to put the garden because the tree had been used as the slaughtering tree for all the animals on the farm.” He assumed the spilled blood enriched the ground beneath the cottonwood.

  Ron Little sat off by himself, observing the proceedings, when a very pretty young blond woman approached, carrying two beers. She gave one to Ron and sat down next to him. After she asked his name, they chatted for a minute before she wondered what he did. “I’m just a carpenter,” Ron said, “a simple carpenter.” Without another word, the blond got up and walked away.

  In a curious twist, a young couple who worked as the rural route mail carriers crashed Brautigan’s party. They brought a preacher along with them and proceeded to get married among the merrymakers while various children pelted them with tossed grass. Taken off guard, Gatz Hjortsberg was drafted as their reluctant witness. After the ceremony, they used the potluck as their reception dinner. G. Haller recalled that Brautigan at first seemed very upset by the unexpected nuptials, but quickly adopted a philosophical attitude. “You don’t want to ruin the party,” he told her, “so you just kind of let them do what they are going to do.”

  By the next afternoon, almost all of the remodeling crew was gone. Peter Miller never had another conversation with Richard in his life. One day, several years later, he bumped into Brautigan on a San Francisco street. “Hello,” Peter said.

  “Nice to see you,” Richard replied, walking on his way without another word. They never saw each other again.

  The last of the crew to leave was John “Spaceman” Fenu and his family. Their truck had broken down, and Spaceman was working on his transmission beside the barn when Brautigan came striding up the hill from his newly completed house. “You have to get off my property,” he said. Spaceman, basically a quiet guy, just stared at him, uncomprehending. “You have all the rest of great big Montana in which to repair your truck,” Richard told him. Fenu got the message. He somehow managed to start his outfit and drive away, leaving Brautigan all alone in his new home in the mountains.

  forty: over easy

  IN THE FALL of 1973, Richard Brautigan came into Livingston one evening for some serious drinking. He headed straight for the Wrangler, the bar of choice among the Montana Gang. The much-beloved watering hole has been
replaced by a succession of restaurants in the ongoing yuppification of the West. Back then, Livingston was still a railroad town, boasting twenty-four bars and an equal number of churches. A fellow could tie one on every Saturday night and pray off his hangover on Sunday without ever hitting the same joint twice for six straight months.

  Two rival drinking establishments stood on Park Street, across from the Northern Pacific depot. The Wrangler featured rock-and-roll bands and catered to a scruffier long-haired crowd, in those days most likely blue-collar guys, carpenters, and auto mechanics, not hippie weirdos. Next door was the Longbranch (now sadly transformed into a Chinese restaurant), a shit-kicker cowboy bar with country music and a frieze of the local ranch brands running around the walls. Most nights, customers wandered back and forth between the two long narrow rooms. Eventually, an interior door was cut through the dividing wall. Music came mainly on the weekends. The rest of the time, folks shot pool, played the Pong machine, and got slowly and religiously drunk.

  Richard spent a lot of time at the Wrangler. Cindy Murphy, a local gal who tended bar for proprietor Bob Burns, remembered him often arriving alone. Brautigan sat by himself drinking all night without saying a word to anyone. Cindy recalled that Richard always tipped well. Mary Burns, the owner’s daughter, was about nineteen when Brautigan started coming into her father’s place. He told her he was planning to raise ducks. “I ordered a bunch of baby ducklings,” he said. “They’re coming in soon on the train.” After that, whenever Mary saw him in the bar, she’d ask about the ducks. Had they arrived yet? “Nope. Not yet, any day now.” This went on for a couple of years until it dawned on her that he was pulling her leg.