Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  On another occasion, Richard appeared one morning in Montana wearing a Japanese kimono and cowboy boots and launched into an impromptu dance routine, reducing Ianthe and her friend Cadence to fits of uncontrolled laughter by “singing off-key, pretending to tap-dance [and] flapping around the kitchen [. . .]”

  Siew-Hwa Beh recalled an evening on Union Street in 1975 when Brautigan was fixing diner. “I pulled this joke on Ianthe,” he told her, “and I knew it was the last time I could pull this joke on her.” His daughter was fifteen and growing wise to Richard’s tricks. “I was with Ianthe, and we went into a shop with all these clocks,” Brautigan continued. “I said to Ianthe, ‘Ianthe, what time is it?’ And she ran around trying to look for a watch so she could see the time. She kept asking the people around whether they had a watch so she could tell the time, but the whole shop was filled with clocks.” Richard laughed at the memory of his joke as he stirred the spaghetti sauce. “I just had to pull it on her,” he said, “because it would be the last time I could get away with it.”

  In retaliation, the next year, Ianthe and Cadence Lipsett turned all the clocks in the Montana house back an hour while Brautigan worked in his studio out in the barn. With his concern for time and punctuality, Richard was furious with them when he found out the joke was on him. Resetting the clocks had thrown off his schedule. Cadence remained unrepentant. “He’s blowing this way out of proportion,” she told Ianthe. At the same time, Cadence held Richard in high regard. “He was so articulate and precise in the way he explained things,” she said. “One of the great things about your dad was that he was never condescending when he talked to us.”

  In his memoir, Downstream from Trout Fishing in America, Keith Abbott wrote about helping Richard move his possessions out of the Geary Street apartment. On the final day of the project, he brought his seven-year-old daughter, Persephone, along with him. The little girl was sullen and bored. Brautigan suggested she sweep his bedroom floor, where he still emptied the coins out of his pockets every night. Persephone dragged the broom into the empty room. The little girl’s mood changed the moment she saw what littered the floor. Brautigan “could barely contain himself” and hurried onto the back porch to fetch an empty mayonnaise jar for Persephone to collect the pennies, dimes, nickels, and quarters she had swept up. Keith Abbott remembered “the look on Richard’s face as he stood in the doorway, his hangover banished, watching delightedly [. . .]”

  Not all parents appreciated Brautigan’s subversive connection with their children. Dan Gerber’s wife, Virginia, was “sort of horrified” when they stayed with Richard at Pine Creek and he regaled their kids, especially ten-year-old Frank, with wild tales from his youth. “You know,” Dan recalled, “it would be things like stealing stop signs away from the streets and causing accidents.” Brautigan related other pranks, included the episode of hiding rotten chickens in the freezer of the local market and his trick of sticking a garden hose through the open window of a neighborhood house when the residents were away and turning on the water. The Gerbers were appalled, but their children sat enthralled by Brautigan’s juvenile delinquent memories.

  Fascinated by Richard’s towering redwood barn, Lorca Hjortsberg had frequently journeyed across the creek to play in its spooky deserted cow stalls. Her family’s own leaning red barn, populated with chicken coops and workshops and a functional hayloft, lacked the labyrinthian mysteries of Brautigan’s cobweb-draped basement-level byre, the floor caked three feet thick with ancient dried manure.

  Two summers later, shortly after school got out in June, Lorca complained to her father about all the trash littering Pine Creek Road between the Yellowstone River and old Highway 89. Gatz organized an impromptu cleanup, enlisting his daughter, her best friend, Polly Story, and her three-year-old brother, Max. They worked all morning and into the afternoon, picking up discarded bottles, cans, and Styrofoam takeout boxes. When they finished, the gravel road was clean and the back of the Hjortsbergs’ ’49 Chevy pickup piled high with stuffed black plastic trash bags. Gatz posed the kids leaning nonchalantly against the heaped garbage sacks and took a quick snapshot.

  When Richard Brautigan returned from his second trip to Japan at the end of June, he was fascinated by this photograph. Like discarded Christmas trees, rubber bands scattered across a city sidewalk, or a decrepit West Texas graveyard, there was something about the image that caught his fancy. He began talking with Lorca about the great trash pickup, trying to get to the heart of a story. Their conversations led to a curious and unexpected conclusion. Richard suggested he and Lorca collaborate on a screenplay.

  The entire project may have been nothing more than a fancy to capture the imagination of a ten-year-old girl, nevertheless Brautigan, professional to the core, insisted Lorca agree to follow a rigid writing schedule. He asked her to come over to his house every afternoon to work for at least an hour. Being taken seriously by an adult has great appeal for a child, and she immediately agreed. To seal the bargain, Richard proposed they both sign a formal agreement. He found a paper napkin from the Tastee-Freez, his favorite fast food restaurant, and drew up a contract with his ballpoint pen.

  The fragile document became its own work of art. At the top, Brautigan printed “The Contract” beside one of his iconic fish drawings. In block capitals below that, he wrote the name of their project, “GARBAGE TRIUMPHS OR ‘JUST GARBAGE.’” Inside a much larger smiling fish sketch at the center of the napkin, the words “For a movie” were superimposed above “Share and Share a like [sic].” The signatures of Richard and Lorca appear beside the place of signing, “Pine Creek, Montana.” Richard added the date and the deal was done. Brautigan carefully folded the contract, preserving it in an empty plastic Dan Bailey’s Fly Shop box.

  An element of make-believe crossed over into the realm of reality, so often the case in the movie business. It seemed very real to a girl of ten. Thirty years later, Lorca still treasured her paper napkin contract with Richard Brautigan. She recalled going next door to Richard’s house every day around noon, knocking on the door of his sleeping quarters, and working with him in his kitchen while he drank a cup of coffee. Brautigan employed a Socratic method. After instructing her in screenplay format, he asked Lorca questions about the story, and she wrote down the ensuing action in a school notebook.

  The plot involved a conflict between the “good Indians” and the “garbage Indians.” The project lasted for week or so, until Richard took off on one of his periodic trips to San Francisco. Lorca can’t remember what became of the “screenplay,” or even how much of their project was actually completed. Her memories of the script’s contents remain equally vague. What she never forgot was the magic of “collaborating” with a famous writer who took her ideas seriously and stimulated her imagination with his own.

  Bret Haller, Mike and G.’s youngest son, remembered a different sort of collaboration with Richard Brautigan. Bret, who later followed his father’s film career footsteps and became a movie producer, recalled Brautigan as “definitely one of those guys that if you were gonna get on your bicycle and go riding around in Pine Creek, he was one of those guys you’d want to go visit. He would have an open-door policy, and you could go bug him if you wanted to. ‘Let’s go hang out with our pal Richard.’”

  One time, Bret took sick and couldn’t go to school, staying home in bed. Richard came over to visit, as he had when Eric Haller broke his nose earlier in a bicycle accident. Brautigan brought along a model airplane kit, some jars of paint, and a tube of glue. He had owned the kit for some time, and the boys admired the Stuka JU 87 dive bomber, depicted on a colorful box-lid illustration. The Stuka was a formidable aircraft used by the Germans to great effect as an antitank weapon on the Russian front during World War II (Stuka is an abbreviation of sturzkampfflugzzeug , German for dive bomber), and the model airplane kit piqued Richard’s abiding interest in WWII.

  It took several days to assemble the airplane. Brautigan came over every morning to sit with the sick boy a
nd work on their project. The Stuka had upswept gull wings and a fixed undercarriage and landing wheels, an ugly and instantly recognizable aircraft. Richard told Bret of the Stuka’s fearsome capabilities as they pieced and glued the model’s parts together. A rear gunner sat behind the pilot. The two-man Stuka dove at close to eighty degrees. It carried either one five-hundred-kilogram bomb or four fifty-kilogram bombs under the fuselage, and the wheel covers contained the “Trumpets of Jericho,” sirens screaming during the dive “to shatter the morale of enemy troops and civilians.” Richard and Bret painted the plane a camouflage pattern and mistakenly applied the swastika decals backward on the wings.

  Bret Haller still owns the model Stuka dive bomber he built with Richard Brautigan. More than just a youthful memento, it’s a reminder of a very special friendship. Bret remembered Richard “certainly wasn’t one of those stern adults. He was a kid.”

  Brautigan concurred with everyone’s assessment of the eternal kid dwelling within him. In a poem, written in Japan in June of 1976, he had this to say: Age: 41

  Playing games

  playing games, I

  guess I never

  really stopped

  being a child

  playing games

  playing games

  forty-five: tokyo throes

  PLANNING FOR HIS first trip to Japan preoccupied Richard Brautigan through the early months of 1976. He had Helen Brann decline an invitation from the State Arts Commission of Washington set early in May because he would be out of the country. In mid-April, Gary Snyder answered a letter Brautigan had written asking for insights into Japan. Snyder’s travel advice reflected his own unique interests. “Tokyo will absolutely take you over,” Gary wrote. He urged Richard to visit the National Museum and have a look at the rooms full of “naked medieval sword blades.” Snyder knew Brautigan would appreciate how they all seemed alike and yet each was subtly different. “Purity,” Gary called it. Along the same lines, Snyder included a list of temples in Kyoto “worth doing” (Ryoan-ji, Toji, Todai-ji, Horyu-ji), balancing this aesthetic tour by recommending Cid Corman’s Kyoto ice cream parlor and Horagai (“conch shell”), a coffee shop run by an old friend in the remote Tokyo district of Kokubun-ji.

  For a couple months before he left for the Philippines to work on Apocalypse Now, early in’76, Tony Dingman lived in Richard Brautigan’s Bolinas house. Richard sometimes came out on the weekend, but mostly Tony was alone, “waiting to leave,” and working with Klyde Young, painting and fixing up the bathroom. “I met him like late compared to a lot of the guys,” Tony said, “but once we got to be drinking partners things were good for a long time.”

  Brautigan wrote to his Japanese translator seeking information. “I’m so glad we have cleared up the business about The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster,” he told her. He planned to arrive around the end of April and remain until early June. He had heard the Imperial Hotel was “a good place to stay in Tokyo, centrally located, etc.,” and wanted to know what she thought about the idea. Kazuko reassured him that the Imperial was a five-star world-class hotel. Richard promptly booked a reservation.

  Brautigan arrived at Haneda (Tokyo International Airport) on May 13, 1976. Having already obtained a valid travel visa from the Japanese Consul-General in San Francisco, he was unexpectedly detained by emigration officials. He had listed “writer” as his occupation on the entry form. Taking a hard look at his scruffy appearance, the officials decided Richard must be a “technical writer.” Seeking such employment in Japan might deprive a legitimate citizen of a job. Brautigan was not allowed to enter the country.

  Desperate, Richard phoned Curt Gentry, who was staying at the Hotel New Otani with his fiancée, Gail Stevens. A couple days earlier, Curt and Gail had overheard an American speaking perfect Japanese in a bar. Piqued by his own dwindling knowledge of the language, Gentry approached the stranger and introduced himself. “I had read Helter Skelter,” Len Grzanka remembered, “and was really impressed.” Grzanka lived in Tokyo, working on a Harvard PhD and teaching English part-time at Tsuda women’s college. Len took Gentry and Stevens to a number of art galleries the next day (“Gail had a black belt in shopping”) and went out on the town at night with Curt.

  Gentry phoned Grzanka to inform him of Brautigan’s plight. “My sponsor in Japan was the Minister of Justice,” Len said, “so I had a little bit of clout.” Grzanka found his way to where Immigration authorities held Richard. He explained Brautigan was not a teknakada (technical writer) but a shosetska, “an author. And when I said yimina shosetska, a famous novelist, they backed off and let him in.”

  Brautigan took a cab to the Imperial Hotel, the oldest and most prestigious in Tokyo. Located across from the forty-acre Hibiya Park, adjacent to the emperor’s palace grounds, the hotel had a long and distinguished history. The first Imperial was built in 1890. Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned in 1916 to design a replacement. His “Maya-revival-style” structure opened in June 1923, and survived the 7.9-magnitude Great Kantō earthquake, which leveled most of Tokyo months later. Wright’s Imperial also made it through the Allied bombing of World War II, only to fall to the wrecking ball in 1968. (The Japanese saved the facade, entrance lobby, and interior reflecting pool, reconstructing them in 1976 at the Museum Meiji-Mura, a collection of historic buildings in Nagoya, outside of Tokyo.) By the time Brautigan arrived that same year, two new European-style high-rise buildings had been constructed to form the resurrected Imperial Hotel.

  At the front desk, oppressed by the opulent formality, Richard also felt the haughty scrutiny of the hotel staff. He had no credit cards and was asked to pay cash, up front, for his room. Being mistaken for a hippie drug dealer, the second indignity suffered since arriving in Japan, drove Brautigan to the sanctity of his posh quarters, where he spent the evening drinking and watching television. He wrote “Kitty Hawk Kimonos,” his first Tokyo poem, about the two young women in kimonos “standing beside a biplane” that he saw on his TV screen that night. Richard didn’t understand a word of Japanese but felt an affinity for the “old timey airplane” and the women’s “very animated / and happy conversation.”

  The next morning, Brautigan went for a walk, beginning his habit of exploring the remote neighborhoods of Tokyo on foot. He wandered through the back streets of the Shibuya District wanting to see his first Japanese bird. Richard was surprised to hear the sound of a rooster crowing. He jotted down a poem (“Crow”) in his notebook.

  The management of the Imperial remained adamant about payment up front from Brautigan, every single day. When it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, the hotel asked him to leave. Richard appealed to Len Grzanka for help. He called the Imperial “and tried to straighten things out with them.” “They just said no,” Len recalled with a chuckle. “Yanayatsu . . . He’s disgusting.” Richard complained about the situation to all who would listen. The next afternoon around three, he traveled to Kazuko Fujimoto’s Tokyo apartment in the Harajuku/Aoyama District, with the hotel problem uppermost on his mind. Brautigan brought a bottle of Hennessy cognac, most of which he drank himself. Kazuko’s other guests were Katsuya Nakamura, publisher of Shobun-sha (Brautigan’s Japanese publishing house) and Kaitaro Tsuno, Shobun-sha’s editor in chief.

  Later, they all went to dinner at Szechwan, a fine Chinese restaurant in the Roppongi District, the most international area of the city. After their meal, Kazuko and her husband, David Goodman, brought Richard and the men from Shobun-sha to The Cradle Bar, also located in Roppongi. Both Shinjuku and Ginza boasted a greater number of restaurants and nightspots, but the high density of discos and bars in a much smaller district intensified Roppongi’s pleasure-seeking atmosphere. The Cradle opened in 1971 on Stars and Stripes Avenue (Seijoki Dori), a thoroughfare named for the nearby offices of the U.S. Army newspaper. The basement bar had become a favorite Tokyo hangout for writers, artists, and filmmakers by the time Richard Brautigan first walked down the stairs five years later. Known to its devoted habitués
simply as Cradle, the place owed its congenial ambiance to the warmth and curiosity of the proprietress, forty-two-year-old Takako Shiina, whose father had translated Alice in Wonderland into Japanese in 1927. He later became a screenwriter and, between 1931 to 1941, directed fifty films under the name Saburou Aoyama.

  In 1968, Takako met English playwright Arnold Wesker (Chicken Soup with Barley, The Kitchen, Chips with Everything). She was recovering from the tragic and unexpected loss of a child and had embarked on a pilgrimage, walking from temple to temple. Wesker had been invited to Tokyo as part of “Wesker 68,” a festival celebrating his work. Takako Shiina was one of three translators hired to serve in shifts during the official program. “I came to her at a vulnerable time,” Wesker recalled. “There was something about the way we hit it off, and she took courage.”

  Takako decided to open a nightspot congenial to artists. Initial funding came from a wealthy American she met during a trip to the States. Shiina built the bar and block of flats. She lived upstairs with her actor husband. Takako asked Arnold Wesker to name the bar. “Well, you’re creating a place that’s going to be sort of a comfort for artists,” he mused. “Call it The Cradle.”

  Wesker described the look of the subterranean boîte: “You went down a flight of stairs into the basement, and you turned right into The Cradle. Turn right again and you’re looking down the length of The Cradle. On the left is a bar, and on the right there might have been bar stools or there might have been sofas. And further along, you stepped down into a well, and there was a table with lots of armchairs around it. That’s really all it was.”