Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Still a virgin at twenty-three, Masako was the perfect “daughter in a box.” Born in Tokyo into a strict, conservative family, she finished college at twenty and won a scholarship to the master’s program at Hofstra University. This pleased her father, Masamichi Kano, a linguist, translator, and critic. Versed in twelve languages (including Latin and Greek) Kano spoke English with a British accent although he had never been to the United Kingdom.

  Masako entered Hofstra in the fall of 1979, studying English and American literature under the direction of Dr. William D. Hull II, a distinguished poet and scholar. Her father allowed her to take a summer course at CU only after arranging for her to live in the Boulder home of a friend, Dr. Joyce Lebra, professor of Japanese history at the university. Dr. Lebra treated Masako like a daughter, giving her a large teddy bear. Masako named it Winifred Whimsy Bear.

  Masako means “feminine elegance” in Japanese. She immediately caught Richard Brautigan’s attention. “I noticed a very peculiar-looking guy was watching us,” Masako said. Kano had not gone to Brautigan’s Chautauqua reading. She attended a university performance of Hamlet, a Freudian interpretation where the prince of Denmark wore pajamas and got cozy with his mom. Richard approached the group of students and asked Masako where she was from. “Japan,” she told him. Thinking Richard was an English professor, Kano launched into a discourse on literary theory. Brautigan stopped her.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  Masako had just eaten an appetizer. “Well,” she said, “I’m going to move on to the main course.”

  “Why don’t you sit underneath that nice tree, and I will bring you food,” Richard replied. While she waited, someone told her Brautigan said he wanted to see how she ate.

  As a “very modest Japanese girl,” Masako did as instructed even though she found his reported remark quite unpleasant. In Japan, it was considered very rude to watch someone eat. Brautigan brought her a full plate and a plastic fork. Because of the difference in their heights, Richard fetched a small chair for Masako. He sat on the ground beside her. After some time passed and Kano had not taken a single bite, Brautigan said, “I’m waiting for you to eat.” Masako explained that etiquette in her homeland dictated against watching other people eating. “I know that,” Richard replied. “I know that.”

  Brautigan told her about his four trips to Tokyo, describing in detail events that had happened to him in Japan and the people he’d met there. Masako felt Richard’s storytelling transported him back to Japan. She was fascinated. Before she knew quite what was happening, Brautigan started feeding her, picking the food off her plate with his fingers and slipping it delicately between her lips. “I ended up eating it,” Masako recalled in amazement.

  Before long, consumed by a mutual attraction, they were kissing passionately beneath the big tree. The dutiful daughter broke out of the box. “What a woman,” Ed Dorn said, watching the amorous pair from a short distance. “What a woman.”

  “Is he talking about me?” Masako demurely asked Richard.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  Masako said it was the first time anyone had referred to her as a woman. “I was always called a girl in New York.”

  “It’s a very good start then,” Richard told her.

  A fine gentle rain began misting around them. Most of the guests headed indoors. Brautigan wanted to remain outside, sheltered under the big tree. When the rain let up, he suggested they escape from the party. Masako said she probably should go back to Professor Lebra’s house. Her father’s friend was nice but very strict. She needed to feed the professor’s Burmese cats. Brautigan said he’d walk her home, and they strolled off together. Masako didn’t know Richard had come to the party with another woman. They left the gathering without saying a word to Simone.

  Brautigan and Kano wandered down a gradual slope to the Farmer’s Ditch, a narrow creek spanned by a sturdy little bridge. Richard asked Masako to sit on the rail. She confessed that she’d watched a performance of Hamlet instead of going to his reading. Masako had never read any of Brautigan’s books. Richard suggested they each try to describe the other as Shakespearean characters. Masako couldn’t think of any of the Bard’s creations who reminded her of Brautigan. “You’re more like, not a character,” she told him. “You’re like a mountain cat.”

  This greatly pleased Richard. He explained that this animal was called a puma. Thinking about Masako’s “character,” Brautigan decided she was like Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. From that moment, these became their pet names. In private, she called him Puma and Richard always affectionately referred to Masako as Puck. When Brautigan asked how old she was, Kano lied, embarrassed at being a twenty-three-year-old virgin. Masako told him she was twenty-one. “Oh,” Richard replied. “You’re the same age as my daughter.”

  Brautigan visited the Dorns nearly every day during his stay in Boulder. The next afternoon, he sat in their kitchen, drinking beer with Ed. “However obnoxious his behavior might have been the previous evening, it was easy to forgive him,” Jenny observed. “His mischievous or drunken behavior was more like that of a naughty boy than a disturbed adult.” On this day, forsaking an oft-repeated lament about his “complicated and painful divorce proceedings,” Richard was regaling his friends with tales of budding romance, when one of Ed Dorn’s former students stopped by.

  Brad Donovan, whose master’s thesis at CU had been a book of poems (“sort of mainline stuff”), had started collecting a year’s worth of unemployment and was looking for a place to live with a ski area nearby. Over “a few beers” with Ed, Richard told Brad about Bozeman, Montana, “saying how much fun [it] was.” Brautigan told Donovan the Bridger Bowl ski hill was a fifteen-minute drive from town. He should check the place out. They talked for a while about fishing. Brautigan invited Donovan to come up and fish with him on the Yellowstone. Brad reciprocated, asking Richard to a barbecue the next afternoon at a friend’s house in the country “four or five miles north of Lyons,” where he was staying with his wife, Georgia. There would probably be some handgun shooting.

  In their conversation at the Dorns’, Brad noticed “Richard was not quite into the Boulder scene because it was so centered on Naropa.” Brautigan’s issues with the tiny Buddhist institute reflected his independent spirit. He’d certainly heard of an incident at a Halloween party in 1975 when visiting poet W. S. Merwin and his girlfriend had been forced to strip naked by the “Vajra Guard,” Trungpa Rinpoche’s personal goon squad. Ed Dorn had secretly distributed mimeographed copies of The Party, a compilation of eyewitness accounts by former Fug Ed Sanders. Dorn’s good friend, poet Tom Clark, wrote “When the Party’s Over” for the Boulder Monthly, an article expanded in 1979 into The Great Naropa Poetry Wars, an eighty-seven-page book designed and printed by Graham Mackintosh, who had published Please Plant This Book.

  Richard always found such strong-arm tactics offensive. His low tolerance for fatuous pretension kicked into high gear when he learned that Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman had named Naropa’s literature program the “Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.” Donovan had no connections to Naropa, and Brautigan seemed “very relaxed” talking with him.

  The next day, Richard and Masako went to the cookout at Joe Wilson’s place on the road to Estes Park. Among the half-dozen guests were writers Wayne Moore and Roger Echo-Hawk, a Pawnee tribal historian. Wilson had a long-barreled .38 Colt, and everyone, including Masako, took turns shooting it. She had never fired a gun before. Empty beer cans provided the targets. Brautigan badly wanted to show the young Japanese woman that he was a good shot, but the others “were much better than he,” Masako observed. “Made him a bad mood after that,” she said.

  Brad Donovan noted that Masako “was kind of standoffish. She pretended she didn’t understand English.” He was later surprised to learn Kano was writing her master’s thesis on William Butler Yeats’s connections to Japanese Nō drama. In truth, Masako was self-conscious about her command of the language despite
being a graduate student in the history of American and British literature. “My English was not perfect,” she confessed. The third time Masako saw Richard, he put her language skills to the test.

  Brautigan took the young woman to his corner room at the Boulderado. She went with him naively enough, thinking she was much too young for him to be interested in her. Masako sat on his “very big bed” watching Brautigan standing by the window. “Well, you said you would read some of your poems for me,” she said. “Now it’s time. Why don’t you read for me?”

  Richard picked a small volume off the dresser top. “Here is a book,” he told her. “I actually want you to read aloud for me.” Brautigan handed Masako a copy of June 30th, June 30th, asking her to read the preface. She read very slowly because he “wanted to hear every word” as she pronounced it. At first she thought Richard was judging her and strove to perform well for him, but as she got into the content, reading about his uncle Edward’s experiences in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, she reflected on how the details of the Pacific War had been overlooked during her primary education.

  When she finished, after a long silence, Brautigan asked her to read it again and she did. “How did you know?” he asked at the end of the second reading.

  “What?”

  “How could you understand?”

  After that afternoon, Richard and Masako endeavored to spend as much time together as possible. She found him “always very gentle, kind of fatherlike,” and felt completely natural around him. With Richard, Masako no longer had any need of pretending to be an adult. He made her relax. Richard held back his sexual desire, giving Masako the impression that he simply enjoyed going out with her and wanted to show her the natural and cultural sides of Colorado.

  At the end of July, Sam Lawrence wrote Brautigan in Montana, thinking he had returned from Colorado. He hoped Richard hadn’t run into any rattlesnakes. “Only adoring fans. Screaming for your books and your body.” Lawrence didn’t know how on the money he was. Sam had good news. The number of bookstores requesting autograph parties on Brautigan’s reading tour was “building beautifully.” Best of all, the Quality Paperback Book Club picked Tokyo–Montana as its featured alternate selection for January 1981.

  Richard continued his daily sojourns to Ed and Jenny Dorn’s kitchen. Simone Ellis also remained a regular visitor. One afternoon, she showed up with the stuffed head of a small female grizzly bear her father shot in 1955. It was among Simone’s most treasured possessions, a connection to her dad’s Native American heritage. She had taken it with her when she went off to college. One of the reasons Ellis came back to Boulder that summer was to retrieve her totem animal from a former roommate who held it for ransom until a number of “borrowed” books were returned. Brautigan took one look at the taxidermy bear head and fell in love. Many toasts were lifted to the ursine trophy. Richard had to have it. Simone explained the powerful family connection, how the head attained totem status. Ellis agreed to only loan it occasionally to Brautigan after calling her father for permission.

  In order to spend time with Richard, Masako found ways to sneak out of Professor Lebra’s elegant condominium with its swimming pool and beautiful gardens. “I was little bit in prison, I think,” she recalled. It was easy in the daytime when Kano had a class schedule. After dark, she pretended to go to the library or came up with other excuses. When Brautigan met her in the evenings, they’d stroll down Pearl Street, a pedestrian-friendly thoroughfare closed to automobile traffic, for dinner at a favorite Italian restaurant. Pearl attracted numerous musicians, buskers, mimes, and clowns. Masako remembered Richard, “when he was in a good mood, just dancing around me” in time to the ambient street music.

  Their pas de deux continued as July slipped away into August. One afternoon, she waited for him outside a restaurant. Brautigan snuck up from behind and covered her eyes with his hand. “I have something special for you,” he said, “so please close your eyes.”

  She did as he instructed. “He was kind of humming and dancing in front of me,” Masako remembered. “Can I open my eyes?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  Brautigan handed her Simone’s stuffed grizzly bear head. Masako remembered the trophy as “kind of a family cult thing,” a “spiritual thing.” She hated it on first sight. The mounted head was not meant as a present. It didn’t belong to Richard, but from that day on the bear played a continuing role in their lives. Brautigan named it “Teddy Head.” He borrowed it often, carrying it to parties, making a joke of the doleful decapitated bruin.

  Summertime in Boulder was “a carnival thing,” Masako recalled. Pearl Street throbbed with musicians and itinerant performers. Wherever Brautigan went with his lovely Japanese companion “he was always surrounded by people.” Richard asked Masako to dress in a colorful Indian sari and carry Teddy Head on many of these excursions. “So I looked quite noticeable.”

  On other occasions, Brautigan carried the stuffed bear head himself. Then, he wanted Masako to hold her teddy bear, Whimsy. Kano understood the symbolism of the image, knowing their delicate dance could lead in only one direction. When Richard asked Masako if she used birth control, she told him she didn’t need to worry about “those things” because she was a virgin. “I was kind of pretending I knew everything,” she confessed. “I was desperate to get rid of my virginity.”

  Thinking Kano was only twenty-one, “Richard was a little bit hesitant.” Masako felt she had “missed something very important,” but “was waiting for the moment to come.” All along, as her relationship with Brautigan developed, she thought “it’s a chance for me to become a woman. So, I didn’t want to let him go.” Masako had never had a serious boyfriend. In Tokyo, if a young man ever called, her father answered the phone speaking Chinese or Russian and scared him off.

  The gateway to womanhood swung open for Masako Kano one hot August afternoon in Richard Brautigan’s room at the Boulderado. “I wanted to become a woman,” she said. In “waiting for the moment to come,” Kano allowed her imagination to invest the act with romantic elaboration. “Maybe too much imagination,” she recalled. Teddy Head, perched above them on the bureau, grounded their lovemaking in reality. The stuffed bear stared down with blind glass eyes.

  “Always watching us,” Masako said.

  Brautigan was gentle, approaching the anticipated union as a serene ritual. Once it happened, Masako asked, “Was it really? Did I become a woman? Is that it?”

  She noticed Richard was crying. “I don’t want to lose you,” he said. “You have to come with me.” Brautigan insisted she travel to Montana. He told her how beautiful and peaceful it was there. Masako could work on her Yeats thesis in tranquility. He had academic friends at MSU, Greg Keeler and others, who could help her. Masako had to finish her summer course at the University of Colorado first, but promised to come once it was over.

  Brautigan had never discussed his divorce proceedings with Kano. A “Marital Settlement Agreement” had been successfully concluded. By the first of August, both Richard and Akiko had signed the document. Aki was awarded $15,000 in cash, plus $1,400-a-month spousal support, beginning on the signing date and running through the end of December 1981. For his part, Brautigan retained all his earnings since the separation, his real property in Montana and Bolinas, as well as the rights to all of his literary works, including the as-yet-unpublished Tokyo–Montana Express. All things considered, it wasn’t such a bad deal for Richard. He even got to keep the Plymouth Fury and all the fishing gear he’d bought for his wife.

  As Brautigan’s time in Boulder drew to a close, Masako continued sneaking out to spend afternoons with him in his hotel room. Richard wanted more. He dreamed of holding her in his arms through the night and couldn’t wait until she came to Montana. Brautigan planned a weekend getaway in Estes Park. First he had to get permission from her protector. Dr. Joyce Lebra was a formidable individual. Born in 1925, she was the first woman to earn a PhD in Japanese history in the United States and the la
st person to interview Yukio Mishima in 1970 before his suicide. She had lived in Japan for ten years. Lebra knew far more about Asian culture than Richard Brautigan could begin to imagine.

  Richard called Dr. Lebra “the witch professor.” He arranged for a private meeting. “A kind of session,” according to Masako. “Joyce wanted to make sure Richard would protect me.” Kano told her chaperone she was taking a course taught by Brautigan. This was a fabrication. As a writer-in-residence, Brautigan did not conduct classes at CU. He presented himself in a professorial manner during his interview with Dr. Lebra and persuaded the stern scholar to give him permission to whisk her old friend’s daughter off on a weekend rendezvous. The decision caused Lebra some concern. Many of her Japanese friends were horrified. She immediately phoned Masamichi Kano in Tokyo. Kano, “an iconoclast in a society that doesn’t foster such,” responded calmly, saying “something like, ‘she will use her own judgment.’”

  Masako’s heart, not her head, made the call. She went up to the beautiful home of a gun collector in Estes Park at the eastern entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. After shooting more guns, the couple went for long walks. Masako felt “so simpatico” with the older man, remembering Richard stopping to make a comment about falling leaves that resonated within her. Brautigan introduced Kano to a creature she called a honeybird. A feeder filled with colored sugar water hung from the eaves of the house, and a jewellike miracle darted out of the trees to hover and sip. It was the first time Masako had ever seen a hummingbird.

  At four the next morning, Richard staggered into the Dorns’ kitchen, encountering Ed and Simone Ellis having a late-night conversation. Teddy Head sat on top of the refrigerator. Brautigan had to have it. He started weeping. “Let me take it back to the hotel just for the night,” he pleaded. Pissed at Brautigan’s foolish behavior, Ed told Richard to take the damn thing home for the night and go. Brautigan swooped it up and headed out into the early dawn, catching a cab straight to the airport. He kidnaped Teddy Head. When Dorn phoned the Boulderado the next morning, he was astonished to learn Brautigan had trashed his room and departed without taking his manuscripts, his clothing, or a crumpled pile of cash.