When Richard Brautigan arrived, he read “a bunch of new poems” to the milling throng. Afterward came frequent refills of his eponymous punch. Sometime in the evening, Richard needed to “bleed his lizard” and went looking for a bathroom. Finding none available in Fechheimer’s half of the house, Brautigan wandered over to the neighbor’s portion. He discovered the woman in the WC. When he knocked, she would not come out. Richard stuffed newspaper under the door and set it on fire. “She was out in a flash,” Fechheimer recalled.
The party of the century. An epic, manic affair. “I have never seen a party like that,” Ward Dunham recalled. “That was the party!” Brautigan returned late to the Kyoto Inn.
Near the end of the night, David Feccheimer stood at the top of the stairs, “looking down on the carnage” clad in his T-shirt and socks. “Never again,” he said, shaking his head. “Never again.”
The next day, California Living, the magazine section of the Saturday Chronicle, ran “Five Stops on the Tokyo–Montana Express” with accompanying photographs. The excerpts were “California Mailman,” “The Beacon,” “Open,” “The Butcher,” and “Sunday.”
Richard Brautigan’s book tour began on the evening of November 2, when he flew up to Seattle/Tacoma to get “a good night’s sleep.” The following afternoon, Richard signed copies of the book at Walden Books in the Tacoma Mall. Around thirty-five were sold, along with some paperbacks.
That evening at 8:00, Brautigan read at Tacoma’s University of Puget Sound. He was paid $1,500 (plus expenses, minus Lordly & Dame’s commission) for the event. After the reading, Richard was interviewed by Jim Erickson, a reporter for the Tacoma News Tribune. Once his tour was over, Brautigan said he planned “to just drift.” He’d eventually wind up in Japan, where he hoped to spend an entire year. The next morning, Richard departed Seattle for St. Louis, the first leg of a long travel day.
After a short layover, Brautigan took off for Memphis. An hour after arrival, he was on a flight bound for the Hattiesburg-Laurel Regional Airport in Mississippi. Bill Thompson of Lordly & Dame’s travel department, who handled all the arrangements, advised Richard to “get some food along the way or eat after reading.” Forty-five minutes after landing, Brautigan stood on the stage of Bennett Auditorium entertaining a group of students from the honors college at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg.
Richard was up at first light the next day to make a 6:37 flight for Atlanta, where he waited almost four hours before catching a nonstop Delta flight to Los Angeles. After a three-and-a-half-hour layover, Brautigan was off again on Hughes Airwest, bound for his hometown, Eugene, Oregon. The flight touched down at 7:43 pm. The timing was even tighter this time, only a quarter of an hour remained before his scheduled appearance.
Someone from the University of Oregon waited at the airport and raced Richard over to the campus. Long ago, he hunted night crawlers on the lawns here with Peter Webster. At eight o’clock, Brautigan was introduced to a group of students at the EMU Cultural Forum. The attendance was lower than the Delacorte rep had predicted. Richard had a good rapport with his audience, taking his enthusiastic listeners for a ride on The Tokyo–Montana Express.
After the reading, Richard was signing copies of his earlier books when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He looked up. It was Ken Kesey. The two writers had not seen each other in three years. “Sixty-cent whiskies at the Eagles,” Kesey said. Brautigan took this as “a literary kind of compliment.” They set out together soon after for a night of drinking. This was the first time Richard had been back in Eugene since he left for good twenty-five years before. He did not call his mother on this return trip. Nor did Mary Lou make any effort to get together with the son she had not seen in a quarter century. She knew all about his reading. “He was at the university making speeches,” she said.
In the late hours after midnight, Mary Lou Folston was awakened by a loud knock at the front door. Frightened, she made no move to see who was there. The insistent knocking continued. Only bad news announced itself in this fashion. When she got out of bed at last, Mary Lou still did not open the door. She pulled back a curtain and peeked out the window just in time to see “the mysterious stranger” climb into the passenger side of a car. She watched whoever it was drive away. She didn’t recognize the man, but Mary Lou remained convinced her son had come home at last to say hello to mom.
No matter how late he partied the night before, Richard Brautigan was up in time for a university bookstore book signing “party” at nine the next morning. About thirty-five copies of The Tokyo–Montana Express were sold to his student fans. Brautigan’s royalties from these sales totaled $57.49. Not a princely sum but a fair wage at the time for two hours of autographing and small talk. At 10:49 am, Richard flew back to San Francisco nonstop on United.
November 6 was the official publication date for The Tokyo-Montana Express. There had been problems with the advertising for the autographing party at Enrico’s. Delacorte wanted to run an ad in the Sunday Examiner & Chronicle featuring photographs of both Banducci and Brautigan. Richard had advertising design control. Seymour Lawrence wrote at the end of August, asking him to prepare the ad. Richard provided his publisher with Enrico’s phone number only in September.
On the twenty-second, Lawrence wrote that Tokyo–Montana had gone into a third printing, a total of thirty thousand hardback copies in print. Sam requested that Richard send his ad copy for the signing party “with cameo photos of you and Enrico.” Preoccupied with Masako’s impending departure, Brautigan did nothing. Over the next two weeks, Delacorte made numerous calls to Banducci and his wife, asking for a photo. A picture of the restaurant arrived on the first of October. The ad ran on the tenth with just Brautigan’s photo. Four days later, a picture of Enrico came in the mail. It was published at last, along with Richard’s photograph, early in November, the official start of the book tour, in the weekly San Francisco Chronicle Review, along with Steve Chapple’s interview. Both photos were also used on the printed invitations.
The party at Enrico’s began at three in the afternoon and lasted until seven. Sam Lawrence flew in from Boston. Richard and Nancy Hodge, for whom Brautigan had also dedicated the longer version of his book, were among the gathered friends and well-wishers. At one point Richard talked with Keith Abbott about the progress of his promotional tour. Keith gathered he was “dismayed at how badly his audience had shrunk.” Students, always his fan base before, no longer seemed to know who he was. “They don’t read,” Brautigan complained to Abbott. Keith took that to mean “they no longer read [me].”
Eunice Kitagawa, a young Hawaiian woman who worked at a local Benihana, was among those who turned out to buy a book and have a drink with Richard. Although she lived just up the hill on Vallejo Street above the Kearney steps, Eunice hadn’t planned on attending the event. A friend, visiting from Honolulu, was dating Tony Dingman and kept calling from the bar, urging Eunice to come down. She relented and headed for Enrico’s. The moment they were introduced, Brautigan and Kitagawa felt an immediate attraction. “We became friends from there,” Eunice recalled.
Richard didn’t have much time to spend with his new friend. Three days later he was on an afternoon flight to Boise, Idaho, arriving in time for a committee dinner before an 8:00 reading at Boise State University. The university bookstore had not expressed any prior interest in a book signing but rounded up a number of copies through a wholesaler and sold them after Brautigan’s presentation. On the morning of the tenth, Richard met with an undergraduate class. He went later to the Book Shop on Main Street for an official autographing party. Perhaps thirty books were sold. The Delacorte rep believed the university’s unauthorized session the night before cut into their sales.
That afternoon Brautigan caught a flight to Denver, connecting to Newark, New Jersey. He spent the night in New York. The next afternoon he boarded a Conrail train at Grand Central Station and traveled up the Hudson to Poughkeepsie. At eight in the evening, Richard read
in the Dutchess Hall Theatre at Dutchess Community College as part of its Lyceum Performing Arts Series.
Brautigan was on a commuter plane to La Guardia in the morning, flying on to Chicago that afternoon. He had every reason to be in a good mood. It was the twelfth of November, the date when the final judgment of dissolution of marriage was filed at the San Francisco courthouse. Richard was single again.
At 8:00 pm, Brautigan read in the Ironwood Room at Triton College in River Grove, Illinois (a Chicago suburb). Not only was his audience shrinking, he now appeared at much smaller schools. Triton instead of Northwestern. Not Vassar but Dutchess Community. USM in place of Ole Miss. His lecture fee was $1,500, plus expenses, so he remained well paid, no matter how small the venue or turnout.
The next day Richard signed copies of The Tokyo–Montana Express at Barbara’s Bookstore in Oak Park (Hemingway’s hometown) from noon until one. A couple hours later he was off to Lincoln, Nebraska, for five days in residence at the University of Nebraska. This was not a Lordly & Dame booking but something Brautigan had arranged on his own. Richard stayed at the Hilton Hotel on the edge of Lincoln’s rough side. His room looked down on a jesus saves sign.
At 11:00 am on the fourteenth, Brautigan sat in the Nebraska Book Store for two hours, signing copies of his new novel. Several in line with books jokingly referred to him as Mr. Robbins, saying how much they enjoyed his work. Michael Zangari, a student reporter for the Daily Nebraskan, the university newspaper, had been assigned to write an interview. After the signing party, they went back to Richard’s room at the Hilton. Brautigan talked about Japanese literature and its influence on his work. He said he might go alone to Hong Kong or Haiti (where the Hjortsbergs spent the winters of ’78 and ’79) to finish a novel he’d been working on for two years.
Richard washed several pairs of underwear in the bathroom sink (just like long-gone Hotel Jessie days), telling Zangari the fast pace of his book tour made laundry service impossible. A long Lincoln layover provided plenty of laundry time, but Brautigan’s needs were dire. He couldn’t wait a couple days for clean skivvies. Life on the road got lonely, Richard told the young reporter, assuring him that he had a pretty girl waiting in San Francisco.
When cocktail hour rolled around, Brautigan put on a down jacket and his Elmer Fudd hat (he called it his bonnet) and set off with Zangari for the Green Frog, a local bar. Young Michael had “never seen anyone drink like that before, tumbler after tumbler of Jack Daniel’s and never got drunk.” Richard gave the aspiring writer some sound advice. “Any success in the marketplace is luck,” he said. “If you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, don’t do it.”
Zangari hosted a midnight show at the student radio station. Brautigan went along with him to the studio but declined to go on the air. Richard spent half the night banging out time on a tabletop to the rock-and-roll sides Michael played. Thirty years later, Zangari still remembered how, walking across campus, Brautigan made him look at a leaf in the snow, calling it one of the prettiest things he had ever seen.
The rigors of the book tour began again on November 16. Richard returned to Chicago from Lincoln in time to catch a 10:15 am flight to Seattle. He arrived at 12:20 and was met at the airport by the assistant director of student activities at Everett Community College, who drove him thirty-five miles north to the waterfront town on Point Gardiner Peninsula. Halfway along, they pulled off I-5 at Lynnwood, heading for the B. Dalton bookstore in the Alderwood Mall, where between 1:00 and 2:30 pm Brautigan signed forty copies of The Tokyo–Montana Express.
After meeting with a class in the late afternoon, Brautigan stood before a small student gathering in the Bookstore Conference Room at Everett Community College at 7:30. Richard had his presentation down pat. What to read, what went over, recycled lines that got laughs. Once finished, Richard signed copies of his novel at the college store.
Brautigan climbed back on the merry-go-round around 5:00 the next morning. He stumbled from bed and into his clothes in time for a ride back to Sea-Tac Airport. Richard caught a 7:00 Northwest flight to Missoula, arriving a little after ten. Time for settling in and a leisurely lunch before a scheduled 3:00 book signing at B. Dalton in the Southgate Mall. About thirty-five copies were sold.
This event caused a typhoon in a teapot among local independent booksellers. Their bluster blasted all the way to the Dell/Delacorte offices in New York. Bill Thompson of Lordly & Dame had inserted a clause in Brautigan’s contract, giving B. Dalton an exclusive when he read at the University of Montana. Fred Rice, manager of Freddy’s Feed and Read in Missoula, was outraged. Freddy’s always stocked Richard’s books, “since its inception in 1972,” and one of the store’s founders was Brautigan’s good friend (and fellow Dell author) Harmon Henkin, recently killed when his pickup rolled over on I-90 sixty miles east of town in August. Sam Lawrence, trying to calm the waters, suggested “Richard return to Missoula for another book signing party” in January or February 1981.
Brautigan spoke and read at 8:00 pm in the University Center Ballroom at the University of Montana. The crowd was larger than usual this time. After the presentation, the Associated Students’ Store sold about thirty-five more copies of The Tokyo–Montana Express, all of which Richard signed. Three dozen books seemed the average sold at Brautigan’s various signing parties.
At nine the next morning, Richard was off to Denver to do the whole routine all over again. He was met at the airport and driven fifty miles north to Greeley, where he gave an 8:00 pm reading at the University of Northern Colorado, meeting informally with classes during the afternoon. Ed Dorn drove up from Boulder with some of his students to hear his friend’s presentation. The next day Brautigan flew down to Little Rock, Arkansas, at noon. A representative from Hendrix College drove him thirty-five miles north to Conway for an 8:00 pm presentation in Staples Auditorium. No book signing parties were scheduled at either venue. It was the only let-up in Richard’s schedule.
On Saturday, Brautigan was on a 12:55 pm American flight from Little Rock to La Guardia. Richard decided not to call Masako Kano, just across the East River on Long Island, while he was in the city. She’d been gone from his life for two months, an eternity in the realm of heartbreak. Instead Brautigan made arrangements for Eunice Kitagawa to fly out from San Francisco and meet him for the weekend. Richard booked into a suite in the Gramercy Park Hotel at the bottom end of Lexington Avenue.
Built in 1925, the hotel maintained a shabby elegance, offering spacious quarters at reasonable rates. Like the Mayflower, uptown on Central Park West, it was popular with actors, musicians, and writers. The humorist S. J. Perelman had died in his room there the previous year. Gatz Hjortsberg stayed in the hotel just the month before on his way back from Europe.
Being with Eunice Kitagawa compelled Brautigan to call Masako Kano from the sanctity of his hotel suite bedroom. Stretched on the king-sized bed with Eunice by his side, Richard dialed Professor Turgeon’s number on Long Island. Masako was happy to hear from him until she detected a voice in the background. Kano knew it was another woman. The woman was laughing.
“Was she listening in our conversation from the beginning?” Masako demanded.
“Yes,” Richard said. “We were listening to you. We’re listening from our bedroom.”
“Why did you do this to me?” Kano pleaded. “I don’t want to talk to you again.” Upset, she hung up the phone. Masako didn’t communicate with Brautigan until after she returned to Japan.
Kitagawa flew back to San Francisco in time for work when the weekend was over. At 8:00 on Monday evening, November 24, Richard Brautigan read at the Poetry Center of the YMHA. The Y, located at Lexington Avenue and Ninety-second Street, had long enjoyed a reputation as an urban Parnassus. Dylan Thomas had read there to great acclaim during his American tours in the early 1950s. The list of other poetical heavyweights headlining at the YMHA included Robert Frost, T. S. Elliot, and e. e. cummings. In the past six months, Lillian Hellman, Margaret Mead, Allen Ginsberg, Joseph H
eller, James Dickey, Ted Hughes, Norman Mailer, Stanley Kunitz, and Jules Feiffer, among many others, had stood at the podium in the Y.
Robert Creeley traveled down from Buffalo with his pregnant third wife, Penelope, to introduce Richard’s reading at the YMHA. He thought of the place as “hoary with tradition.” Before the reading, Richard, Bob, and Penelope “had a very pleasant meal.” Brautigan seemed withdrawn. Creeley felt Richard’s reception was not altogether welcome. Bob remembered the crowd as “not a pleasant audience. A very dead audience. It was there to see what [Brautigan] looked like. By no means sympathetic.” Richard was tired and the reading did not go over well. Afterward, swarms of people lined up to have books signed. “Every book dealer I knew in the city was there,” Creeley recalled. Brautigan dutifully scribbled his crabbed signature in each copy, all the while thinking, “Geez, I’ve got to get out of here.”
Richard’s low-key performance stemmed not from lack of enthusiasm. He was coming down with something. By morning Brautigan felt very ill. A book signing party was scheduled at Brentano’s on University Place in Greenwich Village for 1:00 pm on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth. Richard felt too sick to make it. His truancy ignited a furor in the Delacorte offices. When someone phoned the hotel, Brautigan’s petulant feverish attitude was interpreted as “insecurity and prima donna behavior.”
Charles Taliano, the Dell trade sales manager, wrote an indignant letter to Sam Lawrence the same day. “Should another incident arise as what happened in New York this morning, and Brautigan fail to appear for one scheduled autographing, or should he not be on his best behavior,” Taliano fumed, “I will recommend to the management of this company that we cancel immediately any further autographing parties at book stores for the duration of his tour.”
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