Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Once the Swearingens departed, Brautigan slipped back into neurosis. His depression alleviated only when the bound page proofs for Sombrero Fallout arrived in the mail. Keith helped Richard work on the dust jacket copy, “as he obsessively wrote and rewrote the description of the novel.” Making up for his seven-month absence from his daughter’s life, Brautigan flew in her longtime childhood friend, Cadence Lipsett, to keep Ianthe company. They picked her up at the Belgrade airport, Keith Abbott driving. Richard sat in the backseat being “incredibly funny and charming.” He called Cadence by her mother’s name, “Shirley,” comically correcting himself. Not long after, Abbott made Brautigan’s “preoccupation with his book” an excuse to leave early. Before booking his flight to California, Keith arranged for a local company to continue the irrigation-ditch-clearing project.

  Around this time, Brautigan invited Ed and Jennifer Dorn to come up to Montana for a visit. “He was a generous host and an enthusiastic cook,” Jenny wrote nine years later in an article for the Denver Post’s Empire Magazine. Richard took them trout fishing and down to soak in the “scruffy, but marvelous” outdoor Chico Hot Springs pool. Jenny observed Richard “was such a keen student of life that he even turned the pathetic, worn-out cowboy nightlife of Livingston into a tour de force.”

  Their last night at Pine Creek, the Dorns sat up late with Richard, arguing about the Symbionese Liberation Army, a radical outlaw organization that had committed a string of bank robberies and murders two years earlier. They received nationwide press coverage when they kidnapped the heiress Patty Hearst. After being “brainwashed,” she joined the gang as “Tania,” her new revolutionary nom de guerre. Brautigan said he “did not like the idea of revolutionaries running around killing people.” Jenny considered Richard “a reasonably well-off landowner” unable to support any kind of revolution.

  Needing a driver after Ed Dorn’s departure, Richard called Don Carpenter, asking him up to Montana for a couple weeks to a month. Carpenter declined the invitation. “I told him that I refused to be at his beck and call,” Don said. He never visited Richard’s place in Montana. Next, Brautigan phoned Loie Weber, who had split up with Erik and just might be free.

  “He wanted me to come out for a month and drive him and sort of hang out with Ianthe,” Loie said. She looked at it as a job, not just helping out an old friend, so she “wanted benefits beyond just a certain amount of money.” She felt her specific needs should be met because she was giving up all her other work. Brautigan said he’d think it over.

  A couple days later, Richard called Loie back. “I’ve thought about it and I’m going to make other arrangements,” he said. A subtle dynamic shift had occurred in their long relationship. “He just went ice cold,” Loie recalled. “I had crossed the line, and I was ‘dead meat’ from then on. He used that phrase.” She never worked for him again. Once, at a later date, Loie went to lunch with Richard in San Francisco. She told him what she was working on and asked for advice. “He was very sweet, very attentive, very generous, very distant, very formal,” she said. “I don’t know if we ever talked again after that. I had no desire to talk to him. I felt we weren’t really friends anymore.”

  Brautigan finally got hold of his old pal Price Dunn, living on Hawthorne Street in San Francisco. He asked Price if he’d like to come to Pine Creek, adding that he really needed somebody to help him out. “Well,” Price replied, “I can come up and stay awhile.”

  Price arrived not long afterward, flying into Bozeman. Richard met him at the airport with Maria, his current petite Philippine girlfriend from Marin County, at the wheel of an Avis car rented once again with Peter Fonda’s plastic. “Richard always made a big production about my eating,” Price related, so they headed straight to a local steak joint before driving over the hill to Pine Creek.

  In the morning, Brautigan prepared a big ham-and-eggs breakfast. After eating, Brautigan took Price out to the barn to show him his studio. For several days, Brautigan entertained Confederate General Dunn with fishing trips to Armstrong’s Spring Creek and the nearby Yellowstone River. They caught a mess of little pan-sized trout, bringing them home for supper. The only problem between the two old friends involved Price’s snoring. “I snored like a grizzly bear,” Dunn admitted. Plagued by insomnia, Richard moved his pal down from the upstairs bedroom, switching places with him in an effort to get some sleep. When this didn’t work, Brautigan abandoned the main house, taking his girlfriend and retreating to his outside sleeping chamber in the reconstructed coal shed.

  Richard needed all the sleep he could get, worrying over the dust jacket copy for Sombrero Fallout while at the same time working on his book of Japanese poems. A ghost from his past had also returned to haunt him. Back in May, Edna Webster, now calling herself Edna Webster Jensen, mailed a batch of Brautigan’s early unpublished adolescent work to Durrett Wagner at Swallow Press in Chicago, asking him to publish them. She claimed the copyright belonged to her.

  Wagner wrote to Dell, Brautigan’s former publisher, for further clarification. Dell forwarded his letter to Helen Brann, who contacted Brautigan. Richard had no wish to see his early poems published, calling them “juvenilia, and highly imitative.” When Brann wrote back to Wagner, she stressed the work in question legally belonged to Brautigan and they could not grant him publishing rights. Richard insisted “the matter be handled with as much tact as possible.” He had not been in touch with Edna Webster in over twenty years. Having her haunt him with memories of his anguished youth troubled his intermittent sleep.

  Brautigan was additionally plagued by a severe outbreak of herpes. Not surprisingly, his girlfriend, Maria, was bored. No sex and Richard’s preoccupation with his work was not her idea of a good time. “He wasn’t giving her as much attention as she wanted around the house,” Price observed. “She was probably sexually frustrated.”

  Hoping to lift Maria’s spirits, Richard enlisted Price to drive her into town for the afternoon while he prepared dinner. They went to the Wrangler Bar. “She spent the whole damned afternoon drinking and hanging out,” Dunn recalled. Not wanting to get drunk himself, Price left the bar and drove across town to visit Sandi Lee, Russell Chatham’s girlfriend. She worked for the phone company as a long-distance operator and knew the inside dope on just about everyone. Unable to remember the exact address and not recognizing Lee’s house, Dunn returned to the Wrangler and nursed a beer, watching Maria “out there dancing around with the cowboys like she was ready to get jumped.” As it grew later and later, Price lost track of the time. Maria was in no mood to leave. “I just wanted to get out of the fucking bar,” Price said.

  When they hadn’t returned by dark, Brautigan walked next door to the Hjortsbergs’, seeking company. Gatz and Marian had taken the kids on a three-day camping trip to an old prospector’s cabin on Gold Prize Creek, midway between Warren Oates’s place and Sam Peckinpah’s wilderness hideout. A slender attractive young woman named Terry Cousins, who worked as a housekeeper for the Fondas, the McGuanes, and for Brautigan, was house-sitting. Richard liked her, and Terry poured him a drink, sitting down at the kitchen table to talk. Around nine o’clock, Terry’s date arrived.

  Thirty-one-year-old writer Toby Thompson came to Paradise Valley that summer to interview Tom McGuane for a planned book on the sixties. He’d published Positively Main Street, An Unorthodox View of Bob Dylan in 1971, and Saloon, his cross-country travelogue about old-time barrooms, was due out in the fall. Thompson met McGuane in Key West in 1974 while researching Saloon. He found much had changed during the intervening couple years. Tom’s ponytail had given way to a haircut “redneck short,” none of his films had been a hit, and ex-wife Becky had married Peter Fonda. Toby rented a $4-a-night room at the Murray Hotel in Livingston. While waiting for his interview, he bumped into Terry Cousins one night out honky-tonking.

  This was their second or third date. Toby, “trying to get [his] head back together” on the ragged side of a recent divorce, thought he just might get lucky. Su
ddenly, there sat Richard Brautigan, “looking his most imperious self,” having a drink with Terry. “I know you’re up here writing a book about McGuane,” Richard said. “I want you to know that anything I say or do tonight is totally off the record, and if you write anything about me, I can assure you that you’re going to hear from my lawyers.”

  In spite of this, Brautigan and Thompson “hit it off.” Richard “sort of invited himself along” on Toby’s date with Terry. They headed first to the Old Saloon in Emigrant, fifteen miles to the south in Paradise Valley. The Discords, a local cowpoke band, played that Saturday night. “Three guys standing there with guitars,” Thompson recalled. “All of them playing chords—nobody even playing a lead line—and singing these old cowboy tunes.” Toby, Terry, and Richard stayed on until about one in the morning, dancing and drinking Jack Daniel’s.

  Thompson found Brautigan to be “a great raconteur and loveable in his own way.” Several of the cowboys in the bar knew Richard and came over to engage him in conversation. Toby was impressed by his “easygoing eccentricity.” Brautigan interrupted the conversation to make several phone calls, hoping to reach Price and Maria at home.

  Thompson talked about the pain he felt over the breakup with his wife and how he was trying to understand what it was about writers that made it so difficult for other people to live with them. “This business of being a writer just cost me a marriage,” Toby said above the high lonesome music.

  “Only one?” Richard queried with a sly grin.

  The trio ended the night at the Chico bar. At the 2:00 am closing hour, Toby ordered three double Jack Daniel’s in plastic go-cups for the drive back to Pine Creek. They all piled into the front seat of Thompson’s Jeep Wagoneer and set off along the East River Road. Not realizing Richard didn’t drive and knew nothing about automobiles, Toby believed Richard when he said, “The thing about this road is you can drive absolutely as fast as you want.”

  “I took off. About seventy-five miles per hour,” Thompson related. Within a mile, the Jeep’s front wheels dropped into a bathtub-sized pothole a foot deep. “Every emergency light in the vehicle went on,” Toby recalled. “All three glasses of Jack Daniel’s coated the inside of the windshield. The wipers are going—the flashers are going—we were airborne, going to the fucking sky.”

  Thompson regarded Brautigan in a new light. “What the fuck is this guy telling me?” he thought, knowing he could no longer trust Richard. They managed to get the car started and limped back to Pine Creek, greeted by an empty driveway. Price and Maria had not returned from town. Toby switched off his ignition. He sensed beneath Brautigan’s drunken surface he “had become more and more furious.” When Richard got out, Toby couldn’t start his car. He and Terry set off on foot for the Hjortsbergs’ place.

  Inside his house, Brautigan vented his rage, smashing furniture, hurling chairs against the wall. The noise woke Ianthe in her small bedroom just off the main living/dining area. It sounded like her “father was breaking everything he could in the living room.” She whispered, “Cadence.” Her friend’s eyes widened in the dark. For the first time, Ianthe felt “truly scared.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Cadence said. The two teenagers tiptoed in their nighties to the bathroom and climbed out the window, fleeing barefoot through the night to the Hjortsbergs’ house. They found Terry and Toby still up in the kitchen and used the phone to call the Cowans. Deane drove down from Mill Creek and took Ianthe and Cadence home with her for the night.

  Price and Maria got back to Richard’s place around three. Years later, Dunn remembered it as “eight or nine o’clock.” The first thing Price saw as he pulled into the driveway was his empty suitcase. All his clothing had been thrown out onto the lawn “like garbage.” Richard stood glaring on the porch, “drunk as a lord.” Dunn scrambled about, stuffing his things back into his bag. Brautigan advanced on him. “Get the fuck out of here,” Richard demanded. “I’m going to kill you, beat the shit out of you!” Brautigan pulled off his glasses and took a swing at Price, so inebriated he nearly fell from the effort.

  “Richard, will you stop this?” Dunn said. “I am not going to fight you. There’s no way in hell I’m going to have a fight with you.”

  “You don’t want to stand up and fight like a man?”

  “You know,” Price said, “I’ll talk to you in the morning.” Knowing his friend “was just crazy drunk,” and thinking it was all “bullshit,” Dunn felt sure the whole unpleasant incident would blow over by the next day, when Brautigan was sober.

  Price gathered up his bulging suitcase, and he and Maria headed down the road to the Hjortsbergs’ place next door, seeking refuge. Toby and Terry were about to go to bed when they barged in. Almost immediately, Richard called, demanding Terry come over to keep him company.

  Pissed off at her compliance, Toby went to bed, alone. Inheriting this big slice of Richard’s troubled life had not been part of his plans. He regretted letting “a lot of crazy drunks” into the Hjortbergs’ “obviously meticulous” home. Price Dunn did not remember Toby Thompson. Dunn’s version of the story had Gatz and Marian finishing dinner in their kitchen when he showed up with Maria. Price claimed Maria didn’t stay long, but headed back to make up with Brautigan. He remembered spending the night in the guest room downstairs.

  When Dunn returned the next day, Brautigan was in his kitchen fixing breakfast. “Good morning, Richard,” Price said good-naturedly. Richard, his face gone hard as stone, ignored his oldest friend, refusing to speak. Dunn got some ham out of the fridge and started making his own meal. “Are you still of the same mind?” he asked. “You’re sober now, right? You’re hungover, but you’re coherent.”

  “Yep,” Brautigan replied, cold as the inside of his refrigerator, “I’ve made up my mind.”

  “Well, fine,” Price said, “if that’s the way you feel about it. I can’t believe this, but that’s the way it goes. All that bullshit you were talking about last night.” Richard left the kitchen without another word. Price ate his breakfast alone, in shock that an eighteen-year friendship, the longest of his life, had ended so abruptly. “How could he imagine I’m going to be trying to fuck his girlfriend?” he pondered. “For one thing, I wasn’t even attracted to her. She wasn’t my type. Didn’t make my music fly.”

  Not believing what was happening, Dunn got his gear together. He put his bags in the trunk of the rental car, accidentally dropping the keys beside them. “Everybody was in a hurry,” Price remembered. Someone slammed the trunk lid shut, locking the keys inside. The tension notched up several degrees. Dunn found a hammer and a screwdriver in the tool chest. “I didn’t give a rat’s ass, you know,” he said. Without another word, he chopped a hole in the trunk lid and pried it open. The end result looked like a bomb had gone off inside. After retrieving the keys, Price took off with Maria.

  His first stop was at the Cowans’ place on Mill Creek to tell Ianthe he was leaving. She had known Price all her life and thought him “the funniest storyteller” of them all. “I just wanted you to know that we are splitting,” Dunn told her. “Things are just too crazy here.”

  When Toby Thompson wandered back over to Brautigan’s place around ten or eleven, all was quiet on the emotional front. He ran into Price and Maria on their way down the road. Richard “had truly shown them the door,” Toby observed. “The outrage and surprise on everybody’s face was so intense. They didn’t look guilty. They just looked like they’d confronted a crazy man.” Not wanting to disturb Brautigan, Thompson didn’t go inside the house. “He was clearly nursing a bad hangover and was asleep.” When Toby tried to start his Jeep, the engine still wouldn’t turn over. He called AAA for assistance.

  Price Dunn left the damaged rental at the airport. When Peter Fonda got the bill from Avis, with additional damage charges, he couldn’t comprehend the jagged hole ripped through the trunk lid. Brautigan and Dunn never spoke again. Once, later in the summer, they ran into each other at Enrico’s. Price had finished a gla
ss of wine and started for the john just as Richard came out of the men’s room. “He looked right through me,” Dunn recalled. Brautigan walked past without a word, straight back to his table.

  Maria wrote Richard a polite and friendly thank-you card once she returned to San Francisco. Scant mention was made of the recent discord. Maria said she was thinking of Richard and Ianthe, who “were so kind during my visit.” She missed Montana and “all the lovely people you introduced me to,” but cautioned, “try not to break any more fireplaces and chairs, really! just stick to writing and fishing.” Maria signed off with love and the hope that she might see Brautigan again soon. “Onward thru the fog.”

  Summer rolled along. The disastrous severed friendships became just another blip on the community radar. Tom McGuane married Margie Kidder not long afterward in a tiny private ceremony with only the witnesses, Wilbur and Doretha Lambert, and Marian Hjortsberg, as official photographer, in attendance. Parties continued full tilt. Houseguests arrived in droves. Richard made sporadic trips to San Francisco between visits. Prior to one such journey, Siew-Hwa came out to travel back with him. As the fabric of their relationship unraveled, Brautigan and Beh’s intimacy intensified. Even after leaving for Malaysia in November, she wrote Richard asking him to describe the smell of her body.

  Around this time, Russ Chatham brought Dan and Ginny Gerber by for a drink. The Gerbers had been staying with their three young children at Chico Hot Springs. “It was a disaster,” Dan recalled. Richard insisted all five Gerbers move in to his place. Polite refusals were resolutely swept aside. Gerber remembered Brautigan as an “extremely gracious host.” The first night, Dan and Richard sat up late drinking. Gerber felt uncomfortable when Richard talked of his recently completed book of poems. “I’d never really cared much for Richard’s poetry,” Dan confessed.