Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Tanikawa joined Brautigan for lunch at the Keio Plaza on another occasion. Their conversation ranged over “Western movies, poetry, the difference between Japan and America, literature, Montana weather, writers [they both] liked.” At one point, Tanikawa paused, searching his mind for something he wished to say. When at last he spoke, his tone was flat and confessional. “I live with three people over eighty years old,” Shuntarō said. He didn’t explain himself. Tanikawa shared an apartment with his elderly parents and an old aunt. Taken by surprise, Richard didn’t know how to reply. He felt unable to come up with an answer. “It was one of the most extraordinary things a person has ever said to me,” he observed. The two men sat silently staring at each other and “The time seemed endless like growing old.” Brautigan wrote down the episode later, calling it “Four People in Their Eighties.”

  One of Brautigan’s strangest notebook tales grew out of his persistent insomnia. Early on a mid-July morning, Richard wandered about the lobby of the Keio Plaza, observing the hotel’s Teletype as it came alive for the day. Brautigan carefully recorded the wire service machine’s preliminary clattering keystrokes, noting all the many repeated apostrophes (‘’‘’‘’‘), recurrent letter “M”s and the common typist’s warm-up phrase, “THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG,” in an “almost religious chant.” Richard wrote it all down. He called the story “Subscribers to the Sun.”

  Back in Pine Creek, Akiko fell ill, running a fever. An “awful” conversation with her drunken husband depressed her all the more. She walked down the road to ask for help at the Pine Creek Lodge and found everyone desperately hungover. Aki thought summer must make everybody crazy in Montana. “No one is normal except Gatts [sic] and Marian’s family,” she wrote to Richard, inspired by Marian Hjortsberg’s recent visit to her sickbed. The two women talked through the afternoon as woolly fluff drifted down like snow from the cottonwood trees.

  Akiko’s illness, combined with the isolation of Montana life, intensified her loneliness. In desperation, she called Don Carpenter. “I can’t understand,” she pleaded. “Why did he do this? He married me. He brought me over here. We had a good time for a while, and we came to Montana, and then he went back to Japan. He’s left me. It’s been a month. Why did he do that?”

  Don couldn’t think of what he might say to calm Aki down. He knew he couldn’t tell the truth. There was no way Carpenter could say what he was thinking: “You’ve married a man that you’ve never met. You don’t know this guy, and he doesn’t know you. And he’s had an obsession with Oriental women for ten years and you’re just one of them.”

  Don said none of this. He did the best he could in the moment. “Akiko,” he said, “don’t you realize that you’ve married a crazy man?”

  Aki’s fever broke, and she felt better. She worked on fixing up the house and started a garden in the weed-choked plot out back. Akiko tilled the earth and pulled weeds, planting various Japanese vegetable seeds. This made her happy, working up a healthy sweat. When she was done, she tapped herself on her back in the traditional manner of Japanese farmers, “ton, ton, ton.” Realizing she would see her husband again in less than a month filled her with joy and helped conquer her loneliness. She wished she’d been able to control her feelings and wanted him to know this was the first time in her life she’d ever lived alone. “I love you so much,” she wrote in a letter to Richard.

  Far off in Japan, Richard had returned to Tokyo from his trip to the Inland Sea. He enjoyed seeing other parts of the country, but as his wife observed, in his heart he was “the Tokyo-boy!” Akiko’s friend Yoko Yoshimura had seen Brautigan’s name in Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s oldest and largest national daily newspapers. She had not yet contacted him, apprehensive that her limited understanding of English would make communication difficult. Yoko had approached an interpreter, but he mistakenly thought Hiroshi Yoshimura, away on a concert tour, had been Akiko’s first husband and, wanting to avoid any possible conflict, declined to help. Because of this misunderstanding, Richard and Yoko never got together during his long stay in Japan and Akiko’s gift went astray.

  Northwest Airlines remained on strike. Aki called the carrier “North-worst.” She planned a trip to the East Coast. The only available ticket involved traveling by a circuitous late-night route on Delta. Before departing, she wrote a letter to her aunt in Japan, describing her loneliness and a fear that Richard might not come back. Akiko also described the bondage her husband had introduced into their sex life. Was this normal? On a lighter note, she worried the cabbages she’d planted might not survive during her absence.

  After a couple days in New York with a visit to the Museum of Modern Art, Akiko traveled upstate to Bard College in Annondale-on-Hudson to join Ron Loewinsohn and Kitty Hughes, who were spending the summer there. Ron’s friend Leon Botstein, the president of Bard, arranged for them to live in a “wonderful” house on the campus at the end of a green field stretching down to the Hudson River. Kitty remembered Aki as “kind of unhappy” that summer. She took long walks with Akiko while her friend looked for wild greens. “These are like we have in Japan,” Aki said, picking plants she took home and cooked for Ron and Kitty.

  By the end of July, Brautigan had written fifty-two new short stories. Back in San Francisco, after a three-week stay with the Loewinsohns, Akiko bragged of her husband’s achievement to Marcia Clay when they spent an evening together. On the first of August, Aki waited at the airport as Richard’s plane touched down, ending his two-month visit to Japan. The newlyweds resumed their life together on Kearny Street. Brautigan made his mind up to move out, wanting a new place to live. Akiko “really loved” their little home on Kearny and didn’t understand why Richard “was unhappy about it.”

  The task of searching for a new apartment fell to Aki while Richard took care of business. He got together with his secretary and read aloud the stories he’d written in his notebooks in Japan. His often illegible handwriting required this procedure. Glenise Butcher had recently gotten married and now used her new husband’s last name, Sibbern. She took everything down in her steno pad in shorthand, typing up clean copies later. Among the stories Brautigan dictated were “A Different or the Same Drummer,” “Fantasy Ownership,” and “Harem.”

  The second week in August, Akiko brought Francis Ford Coppola to lunch at Marcia Clay’s apartment. Clay met Coppola the previous year in the Napa Valley town of Yountville, at a show of her artwork in the local theater. Afterward, Marcia sat with Francis and his wife, Eleanor, at a table for four at “a very private dinner” at the French Laundry, a Yountville restaurant occupying a stone building built in the 1880s. The restaurant gained its curious name because the place housed a French steam laundry in the 1920s.

  “A friend of mine is well acquainted with you,” Marcia said to break the ice. “Richard Brautigan.”

  “Does he tie up your feet and hands?” Coppola inquired, taking Clay completely off guard. The film director explained he’d heard of these things from his girlfriend, Melissa Mathison, who had once enjoyed a brief fling with Brautigan. Marcia found it “really strange” for Francis to talk so openly in front of his wife, while at the same time feeling “very defensive” of Richard.

  “Richard Brautigan has some faults,” she said, “but he is my friend.” Clay explained she had never been Brautigan’s lover. She “wasn’t attracted to him that way” and therefore had no comment regarding bondage. Coppola couldn’t resist a final jab at Richard. “He makes terrible spaghetti,” Francis said.

  Marcia Clay believed Francis Ford Coppola had “an enormous crush” on Akiko Brautigan. On the day they came for lunch, Marcia thought Aki was “leading [Francis] around by the neck on a leash because she was the first Asian woman that he’d become smitten with. He was just staring at her with great big, round, absorbent eyes.” Brautigan’s close friends, Curt Gentry and Don Carpenter, gossiped that his wife was having an affair with Coppola. Clay regarded their relationship a harmless flirtation. Aki “
was very aware that she had a mystique and effect over a lot of Richard’s friends,” Marcia observed. She also noted that Francis “was willing to have some kind of a fling with a married friend of a friend while he was married.”

  Lunch at Clay’s apartment stretched out to “three or four hours [. . .] it was a kind of marvelous exchange.” At one point, Coppola said, “This would be wonderful just to have women looking after me all day.” Marcia considered him to be “very old-fashioned Italian.” Confirming this, Francis accusingly asked, “Why aren’t you married?” Clay, only twenty-four, found his question “sort of strange.” Coppola was always friendly to her after that afternoon, greeting her warmly whenever their paths crossed on the streets of North Beach.

  June 30th, June 30th was published simultaneously in hardcover and paperback on August 11. Three thousand hardcover copies were printed. Sam Lawrence sent Brautigan a congratulatory telegram, mailing a copy of the book on the same day, asking Richard “to write something nice and return to your erstwhile publisher.” A box of complimentary copies followed. Richard began inscribing and signing, giving them away to friends.

  At the same time, Akiko searched for a new apartment. She found one to her liking up between Polk and Larkin on Russian Hill, the second floor of a three-story building at 1264 Lombard Street. It was an attractive Spanish-style building with twin sets of double bay windows perched over one of the steepest streets in the city. The floor-through flat pleased Richard. “Why didn’t I buy a place earlier?” Brautigan complained. “It’s ridiculous to buy now. Everything’s so high.”

  After she found their new digs, it became Aki’s job to pack them up and move them there. While she worked, Richard was nowhere to be found. “On the moving days he would disappear,” she said. Akiko called Bekins. The moving van arrived at Kearny Street on the last day of August and trucked all their stuff across to Russian Hill.

  Brautigan devoted most of August to business, reconnecting with his agent as if nothing had happened between them. Early in the month, Helen Brann informed him about everything that happened while he was away in Japan. The advertising schedule for June 30th was of primary concern. Helen told Richard a planned ad in the Sunday New York Times would consume most of Dell’s $6,000 advertising budget. Knowing his books never sold as well on the East Coast, Brautigan suggested it might be better to spend the money at the Los Angeles Times and Rolling Stone. Sam Lawrence called Brautigan. After a lengthy conversation, the publisher agreed to run a four-fifths-of-a-page ad for June 30th in the Sunday New York Times Book Review with a panel across the bottom announcing the publication of the Delta edition of Dreaming of Babylon. The money saved would allow for additional advertisements in Chicago, L.A., and San Francisco newspapers.

  Brautigan took his mind off work at night, sitting at a bar, most often Enrico’s, drink in hand. These nocturnal excursions remained strictly stag. Japanese husbands traditionally behaved in this manner, so Akiko perceived nothing unusual. After the bars closed, dead drunk, Richard rang Marcia Clay’s doorbell. She often painted until dawn. Visitors at three in the morning were not unusual. Clay enjoyed Brautigan’s conversation even when he was inebriated. He described “the forms of the thought process and reasoning.” Richard imagined “horizontal thought” (instinct), opposed to “vertical thinking” (reason). Often, Brautigan passed out on Marcia’s bed. In the morning, he phoned Aki, inviting her for breakfast.

  One late September evening at Specs’, Richard ran into journalist Ken Kelley, a hard-drinking thirty-year-old Irishman who possessed an aura of one doomed to an extravagant destiny. For a period in the late sixties, Kelley worked as the personal secretary for Huey P. Newton, information minister for the Black Panther Party. Funded by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Ken cofounded Sundance, which lasted for only three issues in 1972. The magazine provided Kelley a springboard into his long career. Kelley became an interviewer for Playboy, Penthouse, People, Mother Jones, and other national publications.

  In her autobiographical novel, Lovers and Tyrants, Francine du Plessix Gray based her character Elijah Stewart on Ken Kelley, age twenty-two, “very tall and very lean, with long curling light-brown hair, a light growth of beard, deep-blue eyes with very long dark lashes. His features have a classic beauty, the nose is aquiline, there is a certain hardness to his thin, crisply chiseled mouth [. . .] There is a violence about his beauty which has to do with the fact that one cannot possibly conceive of him as ever getting older.”

  At thirty, after a decade of drink and drugs, Kelley still possessed remarkable good looks, offset by immeasurable amounts of charm. Armed with an expense account from the Examiner, Kelley started buying Brautigan drinks at Specs’, wanting an interview. Ken told Richard how they met in 1974, at a spaghetti dinner party in his apartment at 1722 Larkin Street. Other guests included photographer Annie Leibovitz, Jann Wenner, George Butler, and Charles Gaines, whom Kelley had met in Birmingham, Alabama, earlier in the year, during the filming of Gaines’s novel, Stay Hungry. Ken had been the house sitter/babysitter for director Bob Rafelson. Stay Hungry featured Mr. Universe, Arnold Schwarzenegger. This led to Gaines’s book Pumping Iron, with photographs by George Butler, who directed the 1977 documentary film of the same title.

  Back in 1974, Brautigan arrived late at Kelley’s place, bearing a bottle of Dickel and a Japanese print. Ken served spaghetti, poured a glass of 101-proof Wild Turkey, and put a Hank Williams side on the turntable. Richard came to see Charlie Gaines, whom he’d met in Montana. They all piled into Annie Leibovitz’s sports car and headed over to some “strange bar” George Butler wanted to see. “Of course, Richard stood out like a sore thumb in those situations,” Ken recalled. “You could see him physically get nervous.”

  When they parted, Ken asked, “Where do you hang out?”

  “Specs’,” Brautigan replied, keeping his favorite place, Enrico’s, to himself.

  Ken Kelley tracked Richard Brautigan down at Specs’ four years later. Over their next few evenings together, at Vanessi’s, for dinner, to Perry’s to watch the stockbrokers and lawyers picking up women, Kelley followed Brautigan armed with a ballpoint pen and a ruled legal pad. Their Q&A never saw print, but Richard used the time to observe Ken’s investigative technique. In a drunken way, it was an audition.

  Kelley’s hasty notes revealed the inner workings of Brautigan’s mind. “To me, words are just shadow and wind,” Brautigan told him. “Life is too short for one-liners.” After eighteen books, Richard confessed he was “just barely getting to know what’s going on,” saying twenty years of thinking produced a half hour of work.

  “Living and dying is the only thing to write about,” Brautigan said. During their peripatetic nights together, the drinks kept coming and coming. Kelley’s scrawl grew indecipherable. “Don’t think in terms of public recognition,” Brautigan lapsed into his repetitive stutter. “I’m really interested in people living and dying here. The books I write describe living and dying here.” Reflecting on his insomnia, Richard said, “Life keeps me awake.”

  Brautigan dubbed Truman Capote “one of the best writers in America,” praising The Grass Harp and A Tree of Night. Brautigan picked Capote’s stories “Miriam” and “Jug of Silver” for special commendation. “Can’t write anything better. Best American short story writer.” Brautigan thought Tennessee Williams the “best American playwright ever produced,” calling The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire the “best American plays.”

  Richard told Ken he started writing at seventeen. He wanted to write novels, but he said he used poetry to understand crafting sentences. Poetry was “telegraphic.” It took Brautigan eight years, “learning how to write sentences,” before he attempted Trout Fishing. Confederate General required eight drafts; In Watermelon Sugar three drafts. Richard called The Hawkline Monster his “only narrative novel, A to Z.” He told Ken his next work would combine Tokyo, Montana, and San Francisco.

  Kelley asked Brautigan about his musical preferences. Richard’s fa
vorite song was “May the Circle Be Unbroken” (performed by Mama Maybelle Carter). The soundtrack from Chinatown stood high on Brautigan’s top ten. Richard told Ken about his introduction for the Dell edition of The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics. Proud of this association, Brautigan considered Lennon and McCartney’s songs “some of the best writing ever done.”

  After several boozy nights of genial schmoozing, Kelley asked Brautigan if he was ever called anything but Richard. “When anyone calls me Dick, I know they want something from me,” Richard said. “A nickname is unnatural familiarity. You should know people before you use nicknames.”

  On October 3, the ACLU filed suit against the Anderson Union High School District in Shasta County. V. I. Wexner, along with William Woods, a fellow teacher, and three students (Donna Cartwright, Mary Osterday, and Brenda Galey) from Anderson High School, had filed a complaint with the ACLU, asking for legal help. Brautigan’s publisher, Seymour Lawrence, joined the lawsuit. Sam flew out to San Francisco the previous week to consult on the matter. He had breakfast with Richard. A “splendid afternoon tea and Jack Daniel’s” at Brautigan’s apartment before flying to Mendocino to buy “a redwood house perched on a cliff over the Pacific.”

  Margaret Crosby, the ACLU attorney representing Wexner and Woods, declared the case was “without precedent regarding publishers’ rights to disseminate information free from government censorship.” The ACLU suit demanded the five banned Brautigan books be returned to the classrooms under a court order. Private practice lawyer Ann Brick volunteered for the ACLU. She stated, “By no stretch of the imagination could any of the Brautigan works be considered obscene. The school officials are trying to pick and choose so that students see only the social and cultural views of the administration.”

  Not wanting to have the matter “clouded by his presence,” Richard Brautigan left town for Montana with his wife after a $94.74 farewell binge at Vanessi’s. Before departing, Brautigan released a press statement (September 24, 1978): On our Apollo 17 mission to the moon in December, 1972, the astronauts named a crater after a character from one of the books that is forbidden to be taught at Anderson High School. I do not think it is the policy of the United States Government to name the geography of the moon after a character from a dirty book.