Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Throughout the chaotic summer, Lexi became a fairy godmother to Ianthe. In Montana, vets pay house calls, and she started stopping to check on Jackie on her way home from work. Her visits coincided with the start of Brautigan’s cocktail hour. If things looked bad, Lexi found some excuse to take his daughter away for a drive down the valley. “She had an uncanny sense for when my dad was about to go on a binge,” Ianthe recalled.

  Price Dunn came back to Pine Creek in September, after Ianthe returned to California to begin her freshman year in high school. He kept Brautigan company and served as his hired driver. Price left a month later, receiving $700 for chauffeuring services. Three days later, Richard flew on Northwest to Traverse City, Michigan, traveling north to Jim Harrison’s place in Lake Leelanau. It was bird hunting season. Dan Gerber and Guy de la Valdène were there for the start of the hunt. Woodcock and grouse provided the quarry. Another hunter, Geoffrey Norman, a former Green Beret and currently a senior editor at Esquire, also joined their party.

  Snow covered the ground, unusual for Michigan at that time of year. Brautigan went with the others into the woods, his first day of hunting in more than twenty years, following an eager dog coursing the frozen ground searching for scent. Harrison’s other dog was down, and they had taken Linda’s favorite, a “semi–gun shy” Airedale bitch. Gerber remembered Brautigan “huffing and puffing and just sort of exhausted.”

  Richard found himself alone and heard “something move” behind him, spinning around to see “a beautiful cottontail rabbit.” Brautigan looked over the beaded sight of his .20-gauge shotgun. “He’s dead on arrival,” he thought. The bunny started hopping away. “And I just stand there with the gun,” Richard recounted, years later. “It was in range for maybe five seconds. And I just let it hop away. And I thought, ‘The rabbit doesn’t need me to pull the trigger. When I pull the trigger the rabbit’s going to be dead.’” Brautigan knew at that moment he “had lost forever the whole thing of hunting.” He just stood there with the gun and felt good, thinking if he’d lost something, perhaps he’d gained something, too.

  Guy Valdène recalled that Richard “had absolutely no interest at all in shooting. He just liked to wander around in the woods. He’d be trailing a hundred yards behind. You’d turn around and he’d be sitting under a tree looking at the trees or plants but always content.” By the end of the afternoon, the Airedale disappeared. They called the dog, waiting and searching for an hour and a half. Cold and tired, everyone wanted to go to the bar. “Let’s tell Linda that we didn’t take the dog,” Brautigan suggested.

  After his first, and last, outing, Richard didn’t join the other hunters again. He stayed behind in Harrison’s orchard to write poetry. One night, Brautigan got into a big wrangle with Geoff Norman about his experiences in Vietnam, demanding to know how Norman could justify having “actually killed people.” In recompense, the next day Richard took a Polaroid picture through the big plastic-covered kitchen window of a horse standing in Jim Harrison’s field. Dan Gerber thought it looked “like an impressionist painting, quite pretty actually.” Brautigan signed and dated the photo, giving it the title “Horse Number 8.”

  At the time, Jim Harrison was having a hard time financially. Writing Sports Illustrated pieces provided an unsteady source of income. After three highly-acclaimed books of poetry in the sixties, Harrison branched into fiction, a preferable alternative to teaching college lit courses. He had published two novels, Wolf (1971) and A Good Day to Die (1973), but found it hard to set aside enough free time to start on a third. Brautigan noted the situation, saying nothing at the time.

  Richard took off for New York on the first of November and checked into the Sherry Netherland Hotel at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, the most luxurious Manhattan hotel where he had lodged thus far. Brautigan paid $55 a night for his room, more than double the rate of One Fifth Avenue, three miles to the south. Richard had breakfast with Helen Brann across the avenue at the Plaza. Mostly, he hung out with friends. Harrison and Valdène had also come to New York about the same time. They ate together almost every night at The Palm, where Richard favored the cull lobsters at thirty bucks each. Bob Dattila’s office/studio apartment on Forty-ninth off Lexington was just down the block from the restaurant, and he joined the boys in their nightly feasting.

  One evening, after polishing off a gigantic expensive lobster, Brautigan blurted, “Listen. I’ve got to find a girl. I’ve got to get laid.” Dattila didn’t recall Brautigan usually speaking this way. Having more than his share of street smarts, Bob told Richard about a lovely young Puerto Rican prostitute he’d picked up three months earlier.

  “She’s not like the normal hooker,” Dattila explained. “She’s like cheery and it’s fun. It’s not like some sort of tawdry thing. So, if you want to get laid and you want to spend like a hundred bucks to do it, I can arrange that.” Richard thought this an excellent suggestion. Bob said she was always at the same spot every night. They all piled into his car and drove uptown to find the girl. After the arrangements had been made, Dattila took them back to his apartment and said he and Jim and Guy would return to The Palm. When Brautigan and the prostitute concluded their business, they could join them for drinks. They’d buy the Puerto Rican girl dinner if she was hungry.

  Dattila, Harrison, and Valdène sat waiting at The Palm, having round after round. A half hour went by, then an hour. After an hour and a half, they got worried and walked back to Bob’s apartment. Nobody was there. “What the fuck?” They phoned One Fifth Avenue, incorrectly assuming Brautigan had a room there. The desk clerk, checking old records, told Dattila that Richard had checked out.

  A couple weeks later, Bob Dattila spotted the Puerto Rican girl. Thinking he might bring her back to his place, he cheerfully approached. “Hey, how you doing?”

  “You son of a bitch!” she retorted. “Your friend tried to kill me! He threatened to kill me.” Dattila didn’t know what she was talking about. “He said he wouldn’t take off his boots and he said he had a gun in his boot and if things didn’t go right he said he was going to shoot me.”

  “He was kidding,” Bob said.

  “No, he wasn’t kidding!”

  At this point, the girl’s pimp came across the street. “That guy mistreats my woman and I’m going to kill you,” he threatened.

  In Bob’s expert opinion, “Richard ruined a perfectly good whore.”

  Brautigan lay low. He avoided Harrison, Valdène, and Dattila. Curt Gentry and his wife were also in town. Richard made much of The Palm, telling the Gentrys of the splendid huge lobsters and monstrous steaks. “He’d build up and build up,” Curt recalled. “No, we won’t go tonight. No, we won’t go tomorrow night.” He put them off, carousing with his wild-man buddies. Close to the end of Brautigan’s stay, a more sedate family dinner seemed in order.

  On the way to the restaurant, Richard worried that perhaps “they wouldn’t serve him.” He told the Gentrys the management had changed. “We got there,” Curt said. “They rolled out the red carpet the second he came in. Turned out he’d been going there for a month [sic] and almost every night and dropping $100 and everything.”

  Richard took an American Airlines flight back to San Francisco in November. Soon thereafter, he met Siew-Hwa Beh for the first time in a North Beach bar and began disengaging from his relationship with Mary Ann Gilderbloom. Remembering Jim Harrison’s monetary plight, he called him in Michigan. “I sense that you are trying to write your novel and don’t have any money,” Brautigan said. “Is this true?”

  “Yeah,” Harrison replied without much enthusiasm.

  “I thought so!” Richard said, changing the subject. Three days later, a check for $5,000 from Brautigan arrived in Lake Leelanau. “An enormous amount of money at that time for me,” Harrison recalled. It enabled Jim to write his third novel. In 1979, when Harrison had a great financial success with Legends of the Fall, he paid Richard back.

  By the end of December, Brautigan had to vacate his old ap
artment on Geary Street. He dismantled the Museum and packed a decade’s worth of memorabilia away in cardboard boxes. At the end of January, Keith Abbott came over with his pickup truck to help Richard move his stuff over Telegraph Hill. He rented a dolly and furniture pads. The job took thirty-two hours, spread out over five days, coming to an end in early February, when Keith drove a load of trash to the dump in Marin County. He charged eight bucks an hour for his labor and sent Brautigan a bill for $234.61, including expenses.

  Leaving the Museum forever represented another break with Brautigan’s impoverished bohemian past, one every bit as dramatic as his move to Montana the previous year. Richard’s new apartment at 314 Union Street seemed a galaxy away from the ramshackle slum out on Geary. Near the top of Telegraph, just a block from Pioneer Park, Union Street angled so steeply the facades of the trim wooden houses took on a near-trapezoidal shape.

  A couple flights up in a recently remodeled building, Brautigan’s flat consisted of a long hallway, a front bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen with a sunny back room that Richard used as a writing studio. Coit Tower provided a dramatic view out the rear windows. Of all the Museum’s yard sale treasures, only Willard gained entrance on Union Street. The rest remained sealed in the moving boxes. “Packed up,” Brautigan told his daughter. Ianthe liked the new place with its clean efficient kitchen, shiny linoleum, and the recently purchased matching furniture. “I loved the fact that he now owned something as ordinary as a couch,” she wrote in her memoir.

  Another important milestone, Richard’s fortieth birthday, came on January 30. Clocking forty represents a turning point. Kazuko Fujimoto’s translation of Trout Fishing in America had just been published in Japan in an edition of twenty-five hundred copies, which sold out almost immediately. Another edition was promptly printed and another after that, the novel staying continuously in print. It was time to celebrate. Richard wanted to mark the occasion with a memorable party. The Hodges offered to host one in their elegant Victorian law office.

  “Richard loved Nancy because she was the most competent hostess in the world,” Dick Hodge said. “He was in awe of her.”

  Nancy Hodge planned a sit-down dinner for twenty-four. The law library in the Page Street basement held a custom redwood slab table accommodating that number. They had beef Wellington for the main course. Brautigan picked up the tab, buying twelve bottles of Côte de Beaune, twelve bottles of Korbel brut, six bottles LPx D champagne, and six bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. The wine bill came to $273.51. Food costs were $356.73. Nancy spent a week making preparations, cooking the whole dinner herself with the help of two assistants. No detail escaped her attention. She got things right.

  Richard compiled the guest list, including many of his old friends. Price Dunn, Joanne Kyger, Ron Loewensohn and Kitty Hughes, Don Carpenter, Tony Dingman, Curt Gentry, and Margot Patterson Doss (Dr. John Doss being “away in India or something”) all received invitations. Jim Harrison, Harry Dean Stanton, Gatz Hjortsberg, and Bob Dattila flew up to Frisco together from Los Angeles. Poet Don Marsh and his wife, Joan, “friends of Carpenter’s actually more than Richard’s,” but great admirers of Brautigan and his work, came into town from Carmel Valley. “Everything was absolutely magical from the time someone walked in the door,” Nancy recalled.

  There were elaborate bouquets of hothouse flowers, hundreds of candles glittering like captive fireflies throughout the ninety-eight-year-old mansion. Nancy placed mirrors on each step of the stairs leading down to the law library. Every room scintillated with witty conversation and the sparkling play of candlelight on cut crystal and polished mahogany.

  Full-scale high jinks began in earnest at the dinner table, the preceding cocktail hour having been relatively sedate. The low-ceilinged law library, long and narrow, echoed and amplified the shouted jokes and raucous laughter. Nancy “spent the whole night running back and forth” between the kitchen and the improvised dining room.

  Jim Harrison called for everyone’s attention, saying he “wanted to share a letter that he had received.” Harrison stood, unfolded the letter, and started to read “this dry-eyed, flowery tribute” to Brautigan. After a few minutes, he paused, saying “there’s some other stuff in there you have to read because, you know, I can’t read it out loud.” At this point, Jim passed the letter around. It went from hand to hand, and everyone who looked burst into spontaneous laughter. The “letter” was a blank sheet of paper.

  During the feast, Bob Dattila dropped beneath the long redwood table, crawling along between the seated diners. Seizing a beautiful young blond by the legs, Bob hauled her off her chair, pulling her down into his private netherworld. Gatz Hjortsberg sat across from the woman. He thought it looked like a subterranean gopher feeding on a dandelion. The golden flower held her head up high, and suddenly she was gone, disappearing into darkness, fast in the rodent’s grip.

  After dinner, before the ceremonial cutting of the birthday cake and coffee service upstairs, Nancy Hodge organized a tour of the venerable house. About a dozen guests followed her up the wide carpeted steps, past a towering mahogany newel post crowning the bottom of the banister where Price Dunn’s previous rowdiness sent an antique crystal globe perched on top tumbling to a shattering conclusion. Entrance to the parlor on the second floor was gained through a pair of pocket sliding doors, a theatrical Victorian decorative touch designed to make a dramatic impression. When Nancy slid open the doors, the tableau revealed within was not what anybody had in mind.

  Displayed on the couch before the gathered party guests, Margot Patterson Doss had her dress up over her waist, with bad boy Price Dunn kneeling on the carpet, his head buried between her outspread legs. Hearing the commotion behind him, “Price turned around with this big goofy smile on his face.”

  “Hi, everybody,” he grinned.

  “Oh . . . ! Uh . . . ! We’ll see you later.” Nancy discreetly pulled the twin doors closed.

  Back downstairs, the assignation above dominated the conversation. Dattila, one of the wide-eyed onlookers, “thought it was incredibly charming,” and remembered the guys commenting on Price’s “heroic bravery.” Harry Dean Stanton, “the consummate Hollywood insider,” seemed “shocked” by what he saw, Dattila recalled. “She’s kind of old for that,” the actor observed. Joanne Kyger, another eyewitness, found this misbehavior on the part of a woman she regarded as “our sturdy Scots walker” a bit hard to fathom.

  Richard seemed quite pleased by it all. “That’s my pal,” he said of Price. “What a service! What a humanitarian guy!”

  Nancy, the consummate hostess, took it all in stride. “It was absolutely a hilarious night,” she recalled. “I think Brautigan was very joyful and was having the time of his life.” He had every reason to be happy. The next day Sam Lawrence wrote to Helen Brann reporting the approximate sales figure for the four Brautigan titles under the Delta and Dell/Laurel imprint was one and a half million copies.

  Three days following Richard’s birthday bash, Keith Abbott transported the last of Brautigan’s possessions from Geary Street over to the new Telegraph Hill apartment. Not long after moving in, Richard met Nikki Arai, a Japanese American photographer and art dealer, a neighbor who lived on Windsor Place, a residential alley off Green Street only a block or so away from Brautigan’s residence. Arai had recently broken up with her boyfriend, Simon Lowinsky, who had also been her business partner, and was feeling “very down on men.”

  Lowinsky and Arai had operated the Phoenix Gallery in Berkeley. A photo exhibit there on People’s Park in September and October of 1969 showed her work along with that of Alan Copeland. This led to the publication of People’s Park, a collection of their photographs she edited together with Copeland. Arai and Lowinsky moved to San Francisco in the early seventies and opened the Simon Lowinsky Gallery. They traveled often to Holland to buy the work of printmaker M. C. Escher, which they resold in Frisco for inflated prices. Copeland considered this “a Ponzi scheme.”

  It was nevertheless a lucra
tive endeavor. Nikki Arai drove a Mercedes Benz SL convertible and lived in a luxury apartment. She had flair. Brautigan was immediately attracted. When Nikki brought Richard to her boudoir the first time, he discovered she kept a pair of shackles attached to the headboard of her bed. She once told Alan Copeland, “I just love running a razor blade over warm flesh.” This was a bit more bondage and S&M than Brautigan had bargained for, and their affair was short-lived. But a link had been forged. They remained friends for the rest of her life.

  Very soon thereafter, Siew-Hwa Beh moved in with Brautigan at 314 Union Street. Living with this intelligent, outspoken, liberated Malaysian woman whom, from the very start of their relationship, he called “an avenging angel” charged his life with high-voltage emotional intensity. At first, he felt delirious with happiness. Don Carpenter remembered when Richard met Siew-Hwa, “he just couldn’t stop talking about it. He was so happy, he literally walked into lampposts.”

  For Beh, the two years she spent with Brautigan felt like ten. “You know how you can spend a whole lifetime with someone and never have that intensity of intimacy?” she said. “The first seven, eight months were so ideal it was like I felt in my soul and in every way that I had come home. All my life I had looked for a playmate, another person to play with me. I never had a boyfriend or even a girlfriend who was such an ideal playmate. Our life was so unreal. He never had to go to an office. We read poetry. We talked a lot. We loved to eat. We had great sex.”

  There had been previous lovers, and Beh had been married for four years while in college, but still she admitted, “I was so new to a whole sexual life because I came from a place where you’re not allowed to be sexually that free.” Part of the new freedom included bondage. The ever-independent Siew-Hwa set her own rules in that department as well. “I was into freedom and being able to express myself,” she recalled, “and I said, ‘Only if you allow me to tie you, too.’ I think no woman had ever told him that and I think that thrilled him.”