Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Peter Lewis recalled another incident revealing Richard’s preoccupation with his rightful place in the literary pantheon. A postcard arrived from Donald Allen congratulating Brautigan on the recent publication of Sombrero Fallout. Don wrote that he considered him “one of the great American writers working in the humorous vein of Mark Twain.” Allen’s praise was not received well. “Richard was furious,” Peter remembered, “just beside himself.” Years before, Brautigan had claimed to be Twain’s reincarnation and deliberately cultivated a Twain-like nineteenth-century appearance. Now, he resented the comparison, especially the designation of humorist. Lewis regarded the outburst as “an absolute misgauge of his own importance as a literary figure.”

  Compared to the manic emotional turmoil engulfing Brautigan’s place, the Hjortsberg household next door struck Peter Lewis as a “bastion of conjugal and literary sanity.” He often walked over to buy eggs from Gatz and Marian and felt their home “projected a calm that was the complete opposite of Rancho Brautigan. It seemed to represent all that was sane and good about the literary enterprise.”

  Peter also became aware that “Richard was very paranoid.” Whenever Lewis went into Livingston to run errands and shop for groceries, Brautigan rummaged through his personal papers. “I was writing a lot of poetry at the time,” Peter recalled, “and he seemed to feel somewhat challenged by my daring to undertake my own literary life under his roof. I was a threat to him.” Lewis complained about this to Toby Thompson. “God, he’s driving me crazy,” Peter said. “He comes into my room, and he goes through my stuff, and he pulls the pages out of the typewriter and reads them. Things that I’m writing.”

  Thompson thought Peter Lewis “was freaked out about it.” Peter told him Richard had said, “Everything you have is mine!” In addition to suspecting Brautigan of snooping through his work, Lewis was convinced Brautigan listened in on his telephone conversations with his family and his girlfriend from an extension in another room. “That upset me tremendously,” he said.

  Peter had taken the semester off from Berkeley and hoped to stay in Montana through the fall. He found Paradise Valley “beautiful and compelling.” He also enjoyed meeting “a bunch of very interesting people.” Now, Lewis toyed with the idea of leaving. “It became clear that my position there was really untenable. [Brautigan] was becoming increasingly violent.” The final straw came at a small dinner party at which Harry Dean Stanton was the guest of honor. “Richard started to lace into me about my poems and who I chose to read and the composition of my library,” Peter recalled. He also said Brautigan “made reference to some of those phone conversations. That’s when I really put the whole thing together.”

  Lewis blew up, lambasting Brautigan about his “Hooveresque” behavior. Harry Dean, “who saw himself as a peacemaker,” came to Peter’s defense, attempting to defuse the tension and calm Richard down. Lewis realized at that moment it was time to leave. A couple days later, while driving Brautigan to the Bozeman airport for a flight to San Francisco and his “fix of Chinese food and movies,” Lewis told him he wouldn’t be there when he got back. Lewis remembered saying he “was very, very sorry,” maintaining he “simply couldn’t continue to work for him given the situation.” Richard expressed disappointment, apologizing for his behavior. He respected Peter’s decision and made no attempt to cajole him into staying. “That was that,” Lewis said.

  Before he left late in September, Toby Thompson came for dinner at Brautigan’s place. Guy Valdène prepared an elaborate meal. He and Jim Harrison had spent the day bird shooting, and a brace of rough grouse hung from the rafters of the porch ceiling. Halfway through dinner, Richard noticed one of the Hjortsbergs’ cats prowling around. “Watch this,” he whispered to Toby. “Watch this.”

  Brautigan snuck out onto the porch and cut down the grouse, stuffing them into his coat pockets. Back in the dining room, Richard feigned great concern. “Geez,” he said, “those grouse aren’t there. The cat got your grouse.”

  Harrison and Valdène ran out onto the back porch. “They were furious,” Toby Thompson recalled. “Just really furious.”

  After dinner, the boys all headed into town for a nightcap (or two, or three) at the Wrangler Bar. A couple hours later, drinking with Guy and Jim, Richard reached into his pockets and pulled out the grouse. “I’ll be darned,” he said, setting the dead birds down on the bar in front of his friends. Valdène and Harrison were pissed. “They knew they’d been had,” Thompson observed.

  After Toby Thompson returned home to Cabin John, Maryland, Richard lacked a regular drinking buddy. With no designated driver and the weather growing ever colder, Brautigan arranged for the usual end-of-season shutdown, emptying his refrigerator, hiring someone to drain his water pipes, and bringing his television set, fishing rods, and gun collection over to the Hjortsbergs’ for safekeeping. Back in Frisco, it was business as usual for Richard: watching double features, breakfast at Mama’s with Don Carpenter, hanging out at Enrico’s.

  Early in November, Helen Brann traveled to San Francisco to meet with her new clients, some (Don Carpenter and Keith Abbott) recommended by Richard Brautigan. Brann hosted a cocktail party at her suite in the Stanford Court Hotel, Richard and Keith among her many guests. Brautigan brought along a manuscript copy of his latest novel, Dreaming of Babylon, to give to his agent.

  Journalist John Grissam was also at the party. In collaboration with Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld, who had long written a medical advice column for the underground press under the pseudonym “Dr. Hip,” Grissam was at work on a book of interviews on the subject of jealousy and asked everyone in the room about experiences with the green-eyed monster. Swilling bourbon, Brautigan did not participate in these discussions. Richard ignored Grissam, making phone calls in the other room. As time went on, it became clear the journalist was one of his fans. Grissam told Brautigan of his perceptions about the freedom enjoyed by rich and famous writers. Richard deflected these comments. As the whiskey took hold, he sat down on the rug beside the journalist, insisting fame meant nothing, only the work counted. Grissam remained adamant. Surely the money provided by fame provided a boon to a writer.

  Brautigan exploded. Reverting to one of his favorite Digger gestures, he tore up a $20 bill and scattered the shreds over Grissam. “This isn’t real.” he shouted. “You think this is real? This is nothing.” As Grissam gathered up the torn banknote bits and stuffed the pieces into his vest pocket, Richard dropped to his knees beside him, grabbing one of the journalist’s legs, banging his foot against the floor. “This leg is more real than any of that,” Brautigan insisted.

  Grissam explained his leg had “mysteriously atrophied” at the disastrous end to an unhappy love affair. Brautigan became suddenly solicitous of Grissam and apologized to him, leaving the hotel suite shortly afterward. To Keith Abbott, it seemed as if Brautigan “had gone instinctively to the source of another person’s pain [. . .] doomed to return constantly to his own pain.” Whatever Grissam may have felt about Richard’s finding the source of his inner agony, he was grateful for the gift of the torn-up double sawbuck. “The next day, I Scotch-taped the pieces together,” he said, “exchanged the twenty at a bank, and paid my phone bill.”

  Not long after this, Brautigan encountered filmmaker Nicholas Roeg. Their evening concluded over a bottle of Jurgensen’s at Richard’s Union Street apartment. By 1976, with the release of The Man Who Fell to Earth, forty-eight-year-old Roeg’s reputation as a cinematographer had been eclipsed by growing recognition of his skills as a director. His first three motion pictures in the director’s chair, Performance, Walkabout, and Don’t Look Now, were all praised for technical innovation and offbeat insights into human relationships.

  Late into the evening, a dispute arose between Brautigan and Roeg over the age of the whiskey they were drinking. Richard owned the bottle and maintained that it was eighteen years old. Nicolas insisted it was much younger. A check of the label revealed the bourbon to be sweet sixteen. Brautigan immediatel
y claimed victory, claiming he’d owned the bottle for two years. Roeg refused to accept this false logic. A struggle ensued. Richard pushed Nic down a long flight of stairs in his apartment building, landing the Brit in the emergency room with a broken foot.

  Years later after Brautigan’s death, Jack Thibeau attended a New Year’s Eve party at Helena’s, a private celebrity supper club obscurely located in an industrial section of Silver Lake, a Los Angeles district east of Hollywood. No sign marked the large gray stucco building housing the exclusive hideaway, formerly the dance studio of proprietress Helena Kallianiotes, whose gold-spangled belly-dancing costume hung framed under glass against a far wall. A close friend of Jack Nicholson, Kallianiotes enjoyed a sporadic film acting career, most notably as the tough lesbian hitchhiker in Five Easy Pieces.

  The glittering party swirled on toward the new year, when Thibeau spotted Nicolas Roeg seated at a candlelit table with his actress wife, Theresa Russell. When the moment seemed right, Jack approached them. “Mr. Roeg,” he said, “I am a friend of Richard Brautigan’s.”

  Roeg immediately pushed a chair aside for Thibeau. “I just wanted you to know that Richard’s favorite story when he got drunk was about how he broke your leg,” Jack told the director.

  “Richard broke my leg?” Roeg replied, looking totally nonplussed. “Do you know that for three days I stayed in my hotel room in San Francisco waiting for the police to come and get me because I thought I had killed him?”

  As she listened to the conversation, Theresa Russell’s “jaw dropped.” She asked Jack how he knew Richard. The other guests at the Roeg’s table were also curious, chiming in: “How did you know Richard? How did you meet Richard?”

  “Well, I met him in North Beach,” Thibeau explained. “We used to drink wine in alleys together.”

  Nicolas Roeg rose to his feet, holding his drink aloft in a toast. “Here . . . Here . . .” he exclaimed.

  Roeg and Brautigan never spoke again after the whiskey dispute at Richard’s apartment. “So neither one knew what happened,” Thibeau said years later, “and it sort of drifted off into a memoir for both of them.”

  Shortly after pushing Roeg down the stairs, Brautigan gave up his Union Street apartment. He planned on returning to Japan for an extended stay and didn’t want to pay rent for an unoccupied place. Siew-Hwa Beh had left for Malaysia in November, so Richard arranged with Keith Abbott to truck her belongings over to Berkeley. His own larger possessions went into storage. The smaller stuff, books and manuscripts, his clothing and personal mementos, Richard packed in several large “beautiful trunks.”

  Curt Gentry had purchased a modern house on Russian Hill with money earned from Helter Skelter. “It was an incredible house,” he recalled. Curt lived there with his second wife, Gail, his former girlfriend, whom he had married six months earlier. Brautigan called him and asked if he could come and spend the weekend, saying he was going back to Japan soon. Curt agreed, and Richard arrived with his new trunks in tow. “Well, the weekend passed,” Curt said, “then a month passed. Almost three months later, Richard was still there. I gave him his own keys, and he’d come and go, but he was wearing awfully thin.”

  One annoyance involved taking all of Richard’s telephone messages. The Gentrys got Brautigan his own phone for his bedroom. Curt and Gail quarreled frequently, but Richard didn’t hear their arguments (“He was the only one in the neighborhood that didn’t”) and decided during his extended stay that marriage could be a wonderful and happy thing. Richard immediately adopted the role of pampered husband, asking Gail when she planned to change his sheets, even though she had just changed them the day before.

  All along, Richard kept telling the Gentrys that he planned on leaving “in a couple days.” Things came to a head when Gail received a telephone call from Japan Airlines confirming Brautigan’s reservation two months ahead. “That was it,” Curt said. “I had to tell Richard to leave.” Brautigan was furious. “He got very, very mad,” Gentry recalled, “and he got very drunk, and so he didn’t come home that night.” Actually, Richard did return to the Gentrys’ house with Tony Dingman in the middle of the night to collect his trunks. Brautigan told Dingman he was “never going to speak to [Curt] again.”

  Richard and Tony hailed a cab at one o’clock in the morning and hauled Brautigan’s trunks to the Fairmont Hotel at the top of Nob Hill. When they attempted to check in, the desk clerks at first were hesitant to admit a staggering drunk with shoulder-length hair dressed like a refugee from the Summer of Love. Richard grew indignant and started throwing down $100 bills, shouting, “I can buy this place.” Dingman persuaded the management Brautigan was a world-famous author, and his friend was given a room.

  The next morning, the Gentrys arose at their usual hour, walking around quietly not to disturb Richard, whom they assumed was still sleeping upstairs. When Curt went up at last to wake him, the phone rang. It was Brautigan, calling to say he needed to come and get something. Gentry didn’t understand. He thought Richard was calling from the guest bedroom on the other line. Things got straightened out, and Brautigan collected his stuff, leaving only Willard, his papier-mâché bird, behind at the Gentrys’. Not long afterward, on February 19, 1977, Richard flew to Tokyo, his second visit to the Land of the Rising Sun in less than a year.

  forty-four: kids

  ALTHOUGH HE OFTEN said he didn’t like children, Richard Brautigan possessed a natural rapport with kids. As Keith Abbott observed, “Children generally liked Richard, recognizing an ally in anarchy.” Brautigan’s daughter, Ianthe, became the main beneficiary of his talent for thinking like a child. She felt young peoples’ affinity for her father stemmed from his recognizing and sharing their latent fears. Richard was terrified lightbulbs might explode at any moment. This made perfect sense to a kid. As a child, Brautigan felt afraid of statues. He thought they were actual people covered alive with molten metal. He often walked blocks out of his way to avoid passing a statue. Hearing of this irrational fear struck a familiar chord in the haunted imaginations of children.

  Richard and Ianthe often played games together. Waiting for elevators, they made bets on which car would arrive first. When she was around ten, Brautigan took his daughter to lunch with Bruce Conner. Richard and Bruce played a private game similar to the dirty dozens. The object was to ridicule and insult the other guy as comically and outrageously as possible without ever laughing or even cracking a smile. This went on until the bill arrived. After sitting straight-faced through the meal, Ianthe suddenly burst into gales of hysterical laughter while walking away from the restaurant. “Hey!” Brautigan said to Conner, “she understood the point of our game and was playing along with us.”

  Richard never missed a chance to instruct Ianthe on his own peculiar view of life. He once told her that people were crazy when they were alone. The protective wall of solitude allowed an individual’s innate insanity to emerge. People talked to themselves and did various other strange things when they thought no one was looking. Then, Brautigan explained, the phone rings or the doorbell chimes unexpectedly and they are suddenly sane once again.

  From her earliest childhood, Richard shared his love of the movies with Ianthe. A weekend dad, Brautigan didn’t simply regard moviegoing as an easy way to spend time with his kid. Richard’s genuine passion for film stretched far back into his own boyhood. He didn’t take his daughter to family movies suitable for children, light fare like Disney. They went to pictures that he was interested in seeing. Ianthe was treated to films like Slaughterhouse-Five, Chinatown, Amarcord, Sleeper, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show at a relatively tender age. During one “brief horrifying period,” they attended nothing but Japanese samurai films. Ianthe developed a liking for the Blind Swordsman series.

  Although he never wore a watch, Brautigan had “a thing about time” and liked to arrive at appointments ahead of schedule. He always got to the movies early. He and his daughter often spent a quarter of an hour sitting together in an empty theater, eating popco
rn and staring at a dark screen. They both enjoyed comedies, becoming “hysterical with laughter.” In her memoir, Ianthe recalled her father’s “wild, whooping laughter” filling the auditorium. Watching Young Frankenstein, Brautigan laughed so hard that he stuck his hand into his supersized soda instead of his popcorn.

  Richard walked out of the theater when he didn’t like a movie. Ianthe remembered him leaving with her during Woody Allen’s Manhattan. Brautigan disliked Black Moon Rising so intensely he headed for the exit shortly after it started, this time in the company of Siew-Hwa Beh. Exiting a movie he didn’t enjoy was Richard’s way of saying that just because you get served crap, you don’t have to eat it.

  At fifteen, Ianthe needed eyeglasses, and her father brought her to an optometrist. A developing interest in boys caused her to worry about her appearance. Ianthe shared her fears with Brautigan. “Remember that Dorothy Parker poem?” she asked her father. “‘Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.’”

  “Wrong!” Richard immediately replied. “Boys don’t make passes at girls without asses!”

  Brautigan took pains to treat Ianthe’s burgeoning sexuality with dignity and offer serious advice. “Don’t ever get involved with someone who has more broken wings than you do,” he told his daughter. He also warned her of the dangers of VD. Acutely aware of his own herpes problem, Richard advised Ianthe to always take a close look at a man’s penis before having sex. Not one to avoid frank talk with his daughter, Brautigan cautioned her to “never do speed. You can come back from anything else. You can come back from heroin. But not speed.” He also instructed Ianthe to “always take care of your body [. . .] Keep your body safe.”

  On a lighter note, Richard taught his daughter to love practical joking. In her memoir, she mentioned a time when she came home from school and was “considerably put out” because her father had eaten all the chocolate chip cookies she had baked. A couple days later, she found chocolate chip cookies hidden all over her room, in her shoes, in the desk drawers, under her pillow. Chocolate chip cookies turned up in odd places for weeks.