Brautigan positioned Brad and Toby on a pair of promising riffles and headed through the willows to his secret spot. Richard loved fishing these beaver dams, their shallow pools filled with eager little brookies. “I remember him trotting back with this huge plastic bag full of fish,” Thompson recalled. Brautigan kept more than twenty small brook trout for a fish fry scheduled on the next day.
It was late when they got back to Pine Creek. The women hadn’t returned from town. Brautigan grew agitated. The big sky darkened. They would be late for Keeler’s party. Masako remembered, “Richard got very upset” when she came back from town with Georgia and Deirdre. Brautigan knew Deirdre least well, so he blamed it all on her, determining never to see her again. “He just shut the door,” Masako observed.
Brad Donovan recalled “a real fast ride” over Trail Creek Road with Toby, trying to get to the Keelers’ and finding Thompson “a little bit standoffish.” At the party, Masako observed a lot of MSU faculty members among the gathering. Richard got very drunk. He took Toby aside and told him, “I believe a man should be able to control his woman.” Later, Thompson’s profession came up in conversation with Donovan. Brautigan warned, “Whatever you do, don’t call yourself a journalist. Journalists piss in the water we have to drink.”
Toby and Deirdre went to Richard’s fish fry the next night, and he treated them cordially. They were around the area for another couple weeks. Brautigan “refused to get together at all,” Thompson complained. “He practically would not take my phone calls.” Richard and Masako had a big Labor Day party at Pine Creek, for which he cooked Swedish meatballs. Greg Keeler brought a bunch of smoked whitefish. Marian Hjortsberg tossed a large green salad from her garden. Jeff and Sue Bridges came. Cindy Olson was among those shooting guns off the back porch. Toby and Deirdre were not invited.
At summer’s end, Ianthe came out to Montana from San Francisco where she’d been part of the ACT therafter program. Three years younger than Masako, Ianthe believed they were both the same age. To Greg Keeler they looked like “international sisters.” They liked each other right from the start, although Ianthe kept her distance at first. When Masako noticed her holding back, she “asked her directly what is wrong.” Ianthe spoke honestly, telling Masako she’d had a “traumatic relationship,” giving her love to another Japanese woman. When her father married Akiko, she became Ianthe’s de facto mother. When they split, she felt “really hurt.” Along the way, “she suffered from Aki and Richard’s fighting.” Once it was all out in the open, Ianthe and Masako became good friends.
Masako was particularly impressed by the easy rapport between Ianthe and Richard. She recalled sitting on the couch one afternoon after they’d all been drinking, listening to a conversation she couldn’t completely follow. Brautigan and his daughter talked about Montana summers gone by, laughing together as they remembered one time in 1978 when they were “crawling under the table.” Kano found their close connection “a wonderful thing,” a father and daughter relating as friends.
When one of Masako’s wisdom teeth became impacted, Richard took her to see Dr. Jim Smith, his dentist in Livingston. She needed to have it extracted. Brautigan was writing on the day Masako’s surgery had been scheduled, so Ianthe drove her into town. When she first arrived in Montana, Richard told his girlfriend she must learn to drive, but that was as far as it went. After the operation, Dr. Smith wrote out a prescription and instructed Masako to “tell your father . . .” Having known Akiko, Smith assumed Kano was her child. Brautigan found it very funny when he heard the story. Afterward, from time to time Richard teased Masako, calling her “my daughter.”
Masako spent a couple days recovering, mostly napping in bed. While asleep, she bled from her mouth and the blood stained the pillowcases. A year later, when Kano was back in Japan and Brautigan believed their romance had ended forever, he slept on the blood-stained pillows, “possessed by the artifacts of our affair.”
As if to turn her from him, Brautigan told Masako, “I’m not beautiful.” At first she found it funny. “You need a young beautiful boy,” he went on. “Maybe you should make love with a young beautiful boy.” This hurt her feelings. At times, being so much younger she “felt more like Richard’s exotic pet than a real girlfriend.”
“I was so much in love,” Masako confessed, not understanding why Brautigan would say such a thing to her. Deeply troubled, she talked it over with Ianthe. The real daughter reassured her honorary sibling, “He didn’t mean that.”
Another emotional moment came when Masako found Richard weeping on the couch after a phone conversation with Akiko. She didn’t know what to do. “It’s really disgraceful,” Richard said. Masako felt he suffered from “losing of face.” She was very worried. Not knowing what to say to her lover, she called Don Carpenter in California. Masako had spoken with Don before when he phoned from Mill Valley and Richard put her on the line with him. Carpenter had been drinking then. He told her about serving with the U.S. Air Force in Japan and a beautiful girl he’d met there. Masako felt a connection. This time she asked him what to do about Richard. “Maybe you can talk to him?” Don had again been drinking. He instructed Masako not to tell Brautigan she’d phoned him but to say he just happened to call before she handed the phone to Richard.
Before long the days grew shorter. As summer drew to an end and the time for Masako to return to Hofstra approached, Richard began maneuvering to keep her in Montana. Greg Keeler gave Kano a copy of The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats to help with her thesis. Brautigan concocted a plan for her to transfer to MSU and complete her graduate work there under Keeler’s direction. Masako explained all her work thus far had been with William Hull. Richard told her to phone her professor or write a letter. “So you don’t need to go back.”
Working for the other side, Joyce Lebra called Masamichi Kano in Tokyo to apprise him of the situation. Masako’s parents became “quite worried.” Her father asked about Richard Brautigan among his intellectual circle and was told he was “not the type of man” for his daughter to be involved with, “too old and too bohemian.” Not a serious marriage prospect. Masako knew her parents “were very confused. They didn’t want this kind of thing happening to their daughter.”
Masako regarded Professor Hull as “a fatherly figure.” When she phoned him to say she didn’t plan on returning to Hofstra, Hull informed Kano that her actual father had been in contact. “You should call him,” her professor advised. Masako phoned home. Mr. Kano didn’t want to speak with Brautigan. His daughter put Richard on the line anyway. They talked for a while. Masako thought it sounded “quite friendly.” Brautigan told Masamichi Kano that he had a daughter Masako’s age and understood how he felt. The conversation made her father more concerned. Knowing Richard was planning a nationwide reading tour, Kano made him promise not to reveal his daughter’s identity.
Masamichi Kano left Tokyo for New York at the end of the third week of September, scheduled to return on October 6. He sent word to his daughter that he expected her to see him while he was in the United States. Brautigan didn’t want Masako to go, but she was “still under the protection of [her] parents” and felt compelled to obey their wishes. Richard believed her father was taking her away from him. Masako promised she’d come back soon. At the Bozeman airport, she studied the reflection of her crying eyes in Brautigan’s sad blue gaze.
When Masako flew off to New York, she left most of her belongings behind in Pine Creek. A couple days after Kano’s departure, a letter arrived from Nikki Arai in San Francisco. She’d had new stationery printed and wanted to know how Brautigan liked the letterhead. A trifling thing, but hearing unexpectedly from an old friend provided a bit of welcome distraction. Back under her father’s influence, Masako knew she would break her promise to Richard and never return to Montana.
Masako stayed at the home of Edgar Lynn Turgeon, a professor of economics at Hofstra. “Richard got very upset,” she recalled. Once he learned Turgeon and Professor Hull were both ga
y, he “was really at ease about me staying there.” When she told him she had decided to complete her thesis with Professor Hull, Brautigan said she was too serious and analytical. “You can be relaxed,” he said, suggesting Greg Keeler’s “literary assistance” would offer a different, more creative approach toward her work. Masako knew he proposed an “artist’s attitude,” not the scholarly discipline the Yeats thesis demanded.
Brautigan called Kano repeatedly at Professor Turgeon’s Long Island home in the middle of the night, which she found annoying. Richard vented his frustrations to his daughter so often that Ianthe finally phoned Masako herself, begging her to come back. As a final gambit to force her return, Brautigan held onto Kano’s belongings. She repeatedly asked him to ship her things, “including my teddy bear,” to the East Coast. Richard resisted. As long as he kept her stuff, he clung to the impossible belief that she might come back.
Around this time, a Montana writer named Steve Chapple (whose book Don’t Mind Dying: A Novel of Country Lust and Urban Decay had just been published by Doubleday) arrived at Brautigan’s place in Pine Creek with his girlfriend, Kathy. He’d come to interview Richard for the San Francisco Chronicle. They talked in the kitchen, where Teddy Head guarded the door, working their way through two fifths of George Dickel between the late afternoon and 3:00 am.
Brautigan told Chapple he planned to move to Japan for a year. “Trout Fishing in America is not taken as a rolling picaresque hippie novel in Japan,” he said, “but rather as a questioning of man’s relation to the environment.” When Steve asked about the influence of Montana on his writing, Richard replied, “Montana has reestablished my proximity to heroic nature.”
It grew dark. Their conversation continued as the first dead soldier was laid to rest.
Having put potatoes in the oven earlier, desperate for food, Kathy tossed a salad and slid steaks into the broiler around midnight before collapsing on the couch beside Whimsy Bear. Richard compared Trout Fishing and Tokyo–Montana. The first, he said, “was a book written by a boy. This book is written by a man. I’m no longer a boy. That’s the difference.”
As they wolfed baked potatoes and rare meat, Brautigan spoke about mortality. “I don’t give a shit about death, man,” he proclaimed. “I have no fear of it at all. I’m interested in the role it plays in others. It defines our lives. I use death to emphasize life. Death is the electricity of life. People wouldn’t take life seriously if they didn’t know it would turn dark on them.”
Speaking with his mouth full, Chapple asked how he could be so unconcerned about death. “I almost died once,” Richard told him, completely lucid in spite of downing an ocean of whiskey. “I was eight. Appendicitis. I got peritonitis and filled up. At the hospital they talked of my autopsy. I went to a place. It was dark without being scary. It was dark without dimensions. There were no memories there. It was so spectacular, Steve, dark without being warm. The reason I’m not afraid of death is that it would have been okay.”
The interview ended three hours before dawn. Brautigan informed Chapple, “Now I’m following the future.”
Part of that future meant accepting Masako would not return to Montana. Conceding all was lost, Richard packed up her stuff a few days later and sent it east to Professor Hull’s house. Putting Whimsy into a cardboard box, sealing it shut like a coffin, struck a pathetic note of doom. Puma knew he would never have sweet little Puck back in his life. Brautigan immediately resumed his familiar bachelor habits, linking up with his drinking buddies. “I won’t see her again,” he lamented to Greg Keeler.
“Probably not,” his friend observed.
“Why do these things happen to me?”
“I don’t know.”
There was no explaining fate. Richard again faced an inexorable descending curtain of despair. After Ianthe left for New York, he began eating dinner nearly every night over at Marian Hjortsberg’s. The other regular guests at her table included sister Roz, Dick Dillof, Marian’s current boyfriend, John Wonder (“a kind of wild white supremacist”), and Bob Bauer, a stonemason who was helping rebuild Marian’s wood-heated sauna, which had burned down earlier in the summer.
Bauer, son of noted outdoor writer Irwin Bauer, lived by himself in an old one-room schoolhouse on Mill Creek Road. He had first met Brautigan in the summer of 1978. Bob was staying then in a cabin at the Pine Creek Lodge next to Jim Harrison, who seemed always to have a hangover in the morning. One day, Bauer bumped into Richard and Akiko in the store and they chatted casually. “I remember Brautigan looked so funny because he was wearing one of those stupid hats, comes up real high with a little ball on it. Little Elmer Fudd hat.”
During the monthlong period in the fall of 1980 when they dined together almost every night at Marian’s house, Bob came to know Richard a whole lot better and “really didn’t enjoy him too much.” Brautigan, upset over the divorce and Masako’s recent departure, “was very pissed off,” according to Bauer. “Into himself. Real self-centered.” Richard revealed his deep despair during a dinner table conversation. Marian Hjortsberg’s other guests that night included Roz, Becky Fonda, and Sean Gerrity. Sean told a story about a mistreated junkyard dog in Livingston. Everyone was shocked to hear about the abuse, formulating plans to liberate the animal. Bob volunteered to drive the dog over to Missoula and find it a good home. “Fuck,” Richard interjected bitterly, “I don’t even like fucking dogs!”
Throughout the summer, beautiful calligraphic postcards penned by Ward Dunham arrived from Enrico’s. All the old gang missed him. “Get those tungsten carbide kneecaps on back home!” Ward implored. A folded card from Dunham, as elegantly inscribed as a college diploma, invited Brautigan to a Halloween Party “at the Fechhëimer [sic] Palace.” A follow-up postcard included a note from Magnolia Thunderpussy. She looked “forward to sharing some witches brew on all Hallows Eve.” Dunham added, “It will be good to have you back here,” appending a footnote: “Dingman is massively fucked up!”
Two diversions took Brautigan’s mind off his woman troubles. Greg Keeler had been recruited by some Bozeman writers to participate in a reading at Chico Hot Springs resort. Knowing Greg was friendly with Richard, they asked him to invite Brautigan. They read to a small but appreciative audience in the lobby. When Richard read his short poem “Two Guys Get Out of a Car,” it brought down the house.
Shortly before Ianthe’s departure early in October, photographer Michael Abramson came out to Livingston on assignment for People magazine. He hung around Paradise Valley snapping pictures of the local literary/art scene in flyover country. Russell Chatham’s fall one-man show always occasioned a big party. Abramson photographed the McGuanes and the Fondas, Jeff and Sue Bridges, Guy and Terry de la Valdène, and Dan and Ginny Gerber. A double portrait of Richard and Ianthe, seated under a cottonwood with the big barn looming behind them, was not published by People until after the writer’s suicide.
Cheryl McCall, an editor at People, arrived to write the accompanying article. She interviewed every writer, actor, and artist to be found, focusing mainly on Russell Chatham. She missed Gatz Hjortsberg, off on a trip to Europe with his girlfriend. The magazine wanted a group photo shoot of the Montana Gang, and word went out one afternoon by phone chain. Everybody gathered at Russ Chatham’s place at the upper end of Deep Creek for an impromptu party.
Abramson posed the gang on and around Chatham’s old pickup. The McGuanes and the Fondas were there, along with the Bridges, the Valdènes, and the Gerbers. Marian, Roz, John Fryer, Terry McDonell, Michael Butler, and Dr. Dennis Noteboom all turned up. Chatham stood close to the center, leaning on the open truck door. More than thirty people grouped together to say cheese. Masako had departed. Richard Brautigan brought Teddy Head instead, his substitute date. He sat cross-legged in the grass up-front, the stuffed bear perched on his lap as a forlorn love token. When the article was published, People did not run this group shot.
Near the end of October, Brautigan returned to San Francisco and took a room at the
Kyoto Inn at the corner of Sutter and Buchanan streets in Japantown. His legal troubles preoccupied him. Richard had spent many hours on the phone. His Mountain Bell bill for October totaled $771.33. On the thirtieth, an interlocutory judgment of dissolution of marriage was filed in the county courthouse. All the bitter wrangling was over. What remained was pro forma, a done deal. The final terms were sealed and fixed. The same day, more good news arrived in a telegram from Seymour Lawrence. A second printing of Tokyo–Montana had just been ordered. “You are my sunshine,” Sam crooned via Western Union.
David Fechheimer’s fabled Halloween bash turned out to be a fortieth birthday party for Magnolia Thunderpussy. The festivities took place at Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson’s mansion on the corner of Lombard and Hyde, designed by Willis Polk and completed in 1900. Fechheimer owned the palatial home in partnership with a woman he met when they once accidentally shared a ride. She lived at one end. David occupied the other. Fechheimer’s splendid home provided the ultimate party pad.
Thunderpussy (real name Patricia Mallon) was a third-generation San Franciscan. After working in burlesque and radio, she opened a restaurant in the Haight serving erotically inspired ice cream concoctions (the Montana Banana replicated a hard-on). Late-night delivery, rapier wit, and a flamboyant style endeared her to legions of local rock bands. Ward Dunham designed the poster/ invitation for the event (“carbide tungsten kneecaps will arrive by way of the Tokyo-Montana Express”) and made a concoction he called Brautigan Punch, prepared in garbage cans with 151-proof rum, orange juice, and “ten or twenty cases of Calvados.” According to Dunham, “it went down like Kool-Aid.”
Dunham estimated six hundred people showed up for the festivities. Everybody who thought he or she was anybody in Frisco dropped by at one point or another. Governor Jerry Brown came with Richard Hongisto, former San Francisco sheriff and a city supervisor at the time. Herb Caen might have devoted his entire column to the festivities had he been there. Instead he was over at the Old Spaghetti Factory in North Beach serving as a charity auctioneer to raise money for a recreation of Henri Lenoir’s legendary bohemian studio that would keep all the original furnishings intact.
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