Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Back in Montana, Richard resumed long-standing habits, heading across Pine Creek in the mornings for coffee with Marian Hjortsberg and more frequently for glasses of white wine on her porch in the evening. Marian’s younger sister, Rosalyn, who lived nearby, often joined them for a chablis nightcap. Embittered by his bruising divorce, Brautigan enumerated his grievances against Akiko. Marian, equally angry at her two-timing husband, eagerly joined in the litany of complaint. They compiled long lists, itemizing every bit of perceived abuse.

  Vampires provided an appropriate metaphor for such perfidious spousal misbehavior. Fueled by cheap Almaden, they groped for the right name. “Vorpal is coming!” they cried, evoking Lewis Carroll’s vorpal blade. The name that eluded them was Vlad the Impaler. They settled on Vopol. Doubled up with laugher, Brautigan cried, “Vopol is coming and the list grows” after each bitter expletive. Rosalyn went to Bozeman the next day and had T-shirts made for Richard and Marian with vopol is coming and the list grows printed across the front.

  Toby Thompson had not been to Montana in four years. At the beginning of August, he checked into the Murray Hotel in Livingston with his new girlfriend, poet Deirdre Baldwin. It was a “crazy” relationship and Toby was “under a lot of pressure.” Thompson called his old bachelor pal Brautigan, who invited them out to dinner. Masako was still in Boulder and Richard was alone. He asked Toby to pick up a fifth of George Dickel on his way out of town. Said he’d pay him back but never did.

  Brautigan was drunk when Thompson and Baldwin arrived at Pine Creek. Richard greeted them at the door, giving Toby a big kiss on the lips, his newest affectation. Thompson was disgusted. Brautigan “really took umbrage” and expressed his displeasure by “making snotty comments” about Deirdre upon learning she was a poet “with her own small press.”

  “His nose in the air,” Richard played the part of a perfect host, preparing “this really marvelous dinner.” Brautigan served spareribs, fresh corn, and salad, preparing it all himself. “He was a very good cook,” Toby recalled. Thompson thought Richard’s manner seemed different. “He was self-possessed in a way that made him standoffish.” When Brautigan offered Toby a vacant rental apartment he had in town, rent free, Toby declined. He knew conditions would be attached.

  One Sunday in mid-August, Lynne Huffman strolled around Gardiner, the little Montana town at the north entrance to Yellowstone Park. He was dating a “savage,” a summer park employee up in Mammoth. They found their way into the Blue Goose Saloon on West Park Street and ran into Jeff Bridges playing the upright piano in the cool recesses of the nearly empty bar. This chance encounter set a pub crawl in motion. The group enlarged as it wandered northward down the valley. By the time they got to Chico Hot Springs, Toby Thompson, Deirdre Baldwin, and Dink Bruce had joined the crowd.

  The celebrants found Gatz Hjortsberg and his girlfriend, Sharon Leroy, having cocktails in the tiny Chico bar. When Richard Brautigan arrived, the whole thing turned into an enormous dinner party. Later, Brautigan got up and left. After he didn’t come back, Lynne asked his date where Richard had gone. “I think he’s going to Japan,” she said, not knowing that Japan would soon come to him.

  Another August evening, just before Masako flew up from Boulder, Toby and Deirdre were in the Wrangler Bar, waiting for Brautigan with Gatz and Sharon. When Richard came in with Marian’s sister, Roz Mina, Thompson thought they looked a little surprised to see Gatz, who was “sort of out of favor” for his marital misdeeds. They had just come from the Empire Theater, having watched The Empire Strikes Back, the second installment of the Star Wars trilogy. “How did you like the movie?” Toby asked Brautigan.

  “I feel like I just spent three hours in a pinball machine,” he said.

  Brautigan mailed Masako Kano an airline ticket to Montana. In his meeting with Dr. Lebra, Richard had mentioned the possibility of just such a trip, suggesting the classmate who brought Masako to Ginger Perry’s party might come along as a chaperone. In the end, Kano just ran away and escaped. She arranged to sleep at her classmate’s place. Instead of taking only enough for an overnight, she packed everything, including Whimsy, her teddy bear.

  Brautigan sent a young cowboy who worked occasionally for him to pick Masako up at the Bozeman airport. He was Ianthe’s boyfriend from Park High in Livingston, back when she had hoped to become a vet. Masako remembered the drive, “the beautiful panorama to Livingston.” When the pickup pulled onto the short curved driveway, Richard sat waiting on the fence. They’d not seen each other for two weeks. “Good afternoon, Mr. Brautigan,” she said.

  Brautigan soon introduced Masako to Marian Hjortsberg and Roz, along with other friends in the Pine Creek area. Marian had an antique upright piano in her living room, and Masako, musically inclined, came over in the afternoons to play. Greg Keeler made the trip from Bozeman to meet the comely graduate student. His first impression was one of impending doom. “He was so big and old and American,” he wrote later, “and she was so tiny and young and Japanese.” Keeler also saw how well they got along and how happy she made Richard in spite of his divorce woes. Late one night, Brautigan read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” aloud to Greg and Masako, turning his kitchen into “an odd little classroom.” Keeler was surprised to learn Richard liked T. S. Eliot. As a rule, he avoided academic poetry.

  “Dobro Dick” Dillof owned a local reputation as a lady’s man. It had a lot to do with his dark good looks. At certain angles he resembled John Garfield, although none of the women who fancied him had ever seen those old black-and-white movies. He almost never took off his battered cowboy hat, preserving a mysterious allure until his Stetson hung above them on the bedpost. His wondrous skills as a musician also proved powerfully attractive, as did his vagabond troubadour persona. He lived in a sheepherder’s wagon parked behind the Pine Creek Lodge, and a steady procession of dewy-eyed farm girls paraded through for a serenade.

  Dillof was a good friend of Ed Dorn, whom he first met a year or so before while playing a concert with Fiddling Red at the Hummingbird Café in Indianapolis, Indiana. “Thought he was brilliant,” Dick said of Dorn. “Hit it off right away.” As a wandering minstrel, Dillof had crisscrossed America for years, hitchhiking and hopping freight trains. Dick and Red’s Midwest tour ended around Thanksgiving, and they stopped in Boulder to visit the Dorns on their way back to Montana. When Ed heard their destination, he casually mentioned that he knew Richard Brautigan, who had a place near Livingston.

  Back in his sheepherder’s wagon under the fir trees behind the Pine Creek store, Dillof had no idea that Brautigan lived just down the road until Marian Hjortsberg introduced them one August afternoon. As they talked, Richard was delighted to learn Dobro knew Ed Dorn, “who he considered a big brother.” Brautigan invited Dillof over, and the musician walked in on a phone conversation with Aki. Richard sat on the couch, speaking loudly, “in a big round voice” so Dick could hear. “Let me get this straight,” Brautigan intoned, “you took half of the money I make writing my books, sweating my blood. Half of my money you took in the divorce and you want to be my friend? That’s very interesting. Could you tell that to a friend of mine here.” Richard handed Dillof the phone. Dick didn’t want any part of it.

  Having gotten off to an amicable start, Brautigan introduced Dillof to Masako. Later, at a picnic, she expressed an interest in seeing his “cart.” Dick saw nothing wrong with inviting her over for a peek at the sheepherder’s wagon. Masako felt no impropriety about making such a visit. Dillof and Roz Mina were obviously lovers. Kano observed them at the picnic “very nice and very close and being in love.”

  Brautigan was often busy in the mornings, rewriting the “hamburger” passage from So the Wind over and over “because he wanted to get it exactly right.” Masako didn’t mind the separation. She “loved being alone and just strolling around.” Richard told her to do whatever she wanted. One morning Masako walked up the road for a look at Dobro’s horse-powered mobile home.

  The sheepherder’s
wagon was as compact as the interior of a sailing ship. At the far end, above an ingenious Chinese-puzzle arrangement of cabinets and drawers, a built-in bed occupied almost a third of the living space. Arching translucent canvas roofed the tiny tidy compartment. Other amenities included a twin-lid wood-burning cookstove and a table that folded down from the wall. Dick added a windup portable Victrola to play his collection of old-time 78s and decorated the interior with nineteenth-century advertising flyers. The wagon also housed his exotic collection of antique musical instruments: guitars, Dobros, fiddles, concertinas, prairie zithers, and autoharps.

  Masako’s was the briefest of visits, only a few minutes at most. She found Dillof taking a nap. He groggily offered to show her around. When Brautigan heard about it, he hit the ceiling, furious as a suspicious old rake upon learning his latest conquest had been to the boudoir of a younger rival. “He’s very jealous,” Kano recalled. Masako told Richard not to worry. Dick was in love with Rosalyn. Nothing had happened, so the event blew over without incident.

  Later Masako met Roz’s husband, Mina E. Mina, a Coptic Egyptian whose family had fled to Canada during the Nasser revolution. She asked Richard what would become of such a complex triangle. Mina was an actor frequently away for long periods, looking for Hollywood work or touring in his one-man show based on the writings of Charles Bukowski. Richard laughed. “She loves her husband but she is in love with Dobro Dick too,” he explained. “You have to learn about this.”

  To make amends for even the presumption of betrayal, Dillof offered a demonstration of his antique instrument collection at Brautigan’s place, along with lessons for Masako. Marian and Rosalyn got wind of this. In retribution for a recent Richard prank, they planned to retaliate with a stunt of their own. The afternoon that Dobro Dick brought the autoharps, banjos, and National steel guitars over to Richard’s place, the two sisters headed for town. At the hardware store, inspired by the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, they bought a number of large metal funnels, fitting them on their heads like hats.

  It grew dark in Pine Creek. All remained serene at the Brautigan household. Richard had gone fishing earlier. Masako filleted his catch and made trout sushi. According to his wishes, she dressed in her special cotton kimono, the obi belted tight. Brautigan had planned a tranquil evening “of Zen-like perfection” and had arranged Dick’s exotic instruments around his long dining table, placing cut daisies and dried flowers into the sound holes. “To make me surprised,” Masako recalled.

  Dillof stopped by Marian’s house on his way over to Brautigan’s and encountered the sisters preparing their costumes: black capes, Donald Duck and Arabian masks, topped off by funnels tied to their heads. “I don’t know if we should do this,” Dick protested.

  “Dobro, you’re the biggest prankster of them all,” Marian remonstrated. “We have to do it.”

  Decked out in outlandish getups, the trio snuck down East River Road to Richard’s house. Inside, tranquility prevailed. Green tea and trout sushi had been prepared. “We are kind of celebrating,” Masako recalled, “kissing each other as usual, and suddenly there is noise.” They looked out the windows and saw three masked Boschian zanies cavorting on their porch.

  Brautigan struggled to maintain an inscrutable composure. “He wanted to laugh, but he was going to one-up us,” Marian remembered. “He wasn’t going to fall for it.”

  Richard came to the front door. “Is there something I can do for you?” he solemnly asked the masqueraders, taking the wind out of their sails.

  “He turned the whole situation around so that we ended up feeling like complete assholes,” Marian Hjortsberg said.

  Brautigan and Kano’s new life together soon found a harmonious groove. Richard wanted Masako to see Yellowstone Park because “it’s really wild.” On an overcast, rainy day, inauspicious for sightseeing, Brautigan remained determined to go. Brad Donovan joined the party as the designated driver. They wound up past Mammoth Hot Springs, climbing high onto the Yellowstone Plateau toward the Upper Geyser Basin, where Masako got to see Old Faithful.

  After observing fumaroles and mud volcanos, they strolled along the banks of the Firehole River. When Kano commented on the numerous bleached bones and animal droppings, Richard produced a small volume from his satchel on a shoulder strap. It was a scatological encyclopedia. Like an amateur coprologist, Brautigan proceeded to identify the various types of excrement they encountered.

  Greg Keeler remembered watching Richard teach Kano to fish, “like his little girl, and she loved every minute of it.” Kano called Brautigan “my old Puma” and “Papa” and “Big Fuzzy Bear.” Richard was delighted. “Isn’t she cute as a bug’s ear,” he whispered to Keeler as they watched her practice fly-casting. “I can’t believe she’s real.” Greg fished with them on Little Mission Creek, where John Fryer lived during the summers, and up Mill Creek to Brautigan’s favorite beaver ponds.

  Richard had a morning ritual. He got up first and always put George Benson’s record Breezin’ on the phonograph, saying it got him going. Next Brautigan started a pot of coffee percolating and made fresh-squeezed orange juice while “lots and lots of bacon” fried crisply on the griddle. Masako found Richard “quite domesticated in that sense.” To commemorate their union, they took photographs of Whimsy Bear and Teddy Head posed together in an open field behind Brautigan’s house.

  After breakfast, Richard usually went to his barn-loft studio to work for a couple hours. They spent the afternoons together, fishing with Greg Keeler, going to picnics (one at the Fondas’ spread involved flying kites with Jeff Bridges), playing one-on-one basketball at Pine Creek School (Masako had shot hoops in high school), and making love outdoors. “To be honest,” she confessed, “we made a lot of love.”

  The lovers had a special secret place down in the woods near a number of old tepee rings on the Hjortsbergs’ property. Richard told Masako, “there’s no wind there.” They’d bring a blanket and perhaps a pot of coffee to the spot, just across the creek from a mysterious oblong stone formation that long ago supported the frame of a large Salish bark lodge. It was rumored Daniel Boone spent the winter here on a trip up the Missouri to the Yellowstone River sometime around 1810, when the old trailblazer was in his seventies. It was a magic place, imbued with a timeless aura.

  At day’s end, Richard and Masako watched the sunset blazing over the Gallatin Mountains, sitting on the hood of one of Brautigan’s junker cars parked in front of his barn, the windshield providing a convenient backrest. The “pink clouds running all over the sky” amazed Masako. When electrical storms rumbled into the valley, they took refuge in the house, watching the thunder and lightning from the upstairs bedroom window. At every fiery strike, Brautigan made a sound like “Oooh . . . Oooh!” Storms like this never happened in Tokyo.

  Late summer provided her introduction to bondage. Richard was very coy about broaching the subject. Brautigan had prepared a separate bedroom downstairs for Masako. Sometimes he wanted to sleep alone in his little house outside, he explained, and she needed a private space of her own. Their lovemaking was a moveable feast, often in this room, other times upstairs or outdoors or in Brautigan’s tiny private sleeping building. After sweeping it clean, Richard decorated Kano’s little chamber with a “very nice Indian couch” and a basin of flowers.

  One morning Masako found a letter in Japanese strategically placed on the table (“a funny thing”). It was the note Akiko’s aunt had written two years before, offering reassurance about her husband’s sexual proclivities. Kano remembered reading about “tying up things. Some men have some tastes, so don’t worry about so much.” She thought “the physical condition of the letter seemed to suggest it had been read many times,” and she was certain Brautigan placed it deliberately in her room.

  This was Masako’s first love. She trusted Richard. She thought, “That’s the way. This is just how things are done in the West.” Brautigan had already taught her that you could be married and still have “a summertime love with any
body.” In “observing everything,” Kano made the connection with “the young geisha girl, tying only the hands.” Richard explained that by binding her, making her wait without any touching, her “body would be more open and expecting.”

  One rainy day, Richard had just tied Masako in the upstairs bedroom when the telephone rang. He excused himself and went down to answer the call. Brautigan became totally involved in the conversation. After a while, Masako fell asleep. When she awoke, she was still bound and Richard wasn’t there. “I was so afraid,” she remembered. “He just forgot me.” Masako started shouting, “Richard, please come back!” This became a funny story, Kano admitted, after Brautigan returned to untie her before his game playing turned into a nightmare.

  Toby Thompson and Deirdre stopped by Pine Creek one afternoon to visit Brautigan and encountered Brad and Georgia Donovan just up from Colorado. Toby assumed they were Bozeman people. Thompson thought Richard was moving away from the Livingston gang and spending more time with Bozeman friends. Greg Keeler planned a party later in the evening to welcome the Donovans to Montana. First Brautigan wanted to go fishing.

  Richard invited Toby to join them, both on the stream and over at Keeler’s. Georgia and Deirdre said they’d take Masako into Livingston and teach her to shoot pool. Thompson “could tell [Brautigan] was a little queasy about this.” The boys headed to Mill Creek to fish Richard’s favorite water, the beaver ponds at the lower end of Arch and Peg Allen’s ranch.