Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Richard called Eunice Kitagawa in San Francisco, asking her to come to New York and spend Thanksgiving with him. After work on Wednesday night, she jumped on a plane and flew cross-country for the second time in three days. She traveled first class because all the coach seats were booked. Eunice found Brautigan not feeling well. The next day he didn’t want to go out to a restaurant. Ianthe came over to the Gramercy Park Hotel with her boyfriend, Paul Swensen, who also worked at the Roundabout Theater Company, located in a converted movie theater on Twenty-third Street. Their Thanksgiving holiday dinners were ordered up from room service. “Four adults sitting on a bed having turkey,” Kitagawa recalled. “How sad.”

  Brautigan’s health improved by the weekend. Norman Mailer invited him to Brooklyn Heights for dinner on Saturday night. Excited by the prospect of meeting the literary giant he’d once used as a fictional character, Richard and Eunice took a cab at the appointed hour over the East River to 142 Columbia Heights. They climbed the stairs in the old brownstone to Mailer’s fourth-floor apartment with its crow’s nest, catwalks, ship ladders, and an incredible view across the Promenade. At night the lights strung along the Brooklyn Bridge cables and glittering in the dark distant towers of lower Manhattan turned the scenic skyline into an enormous carnival fairyland. Far off in the harbor, bathed in floodlights, the Statue of Liberty glowed like foxfire.

  Mailer’s place, with its overflowing bookshelves, mismatched furniture, and haphazard collections of mementos and memorabilia, seemed like a more magnificent version of Brautigan’s shabby Museum, the sort of palatial pad Richard imagined for himself if his income magically increased one hundred fold. What Brautigan never envisioned, and what most delighted him, was Mailer’s role as the happy paterfamilias. His varied brood included nine children from six marriages. They ranged in age from a college girl to his two-year-old son, John Buffalo, whom Mailer bounced happily on his lap.

  In recounting the evening much later to Sherry Vetter, Richard “thought that was so incredible that the family life was so beautiful and that the kids loved each other.” Little John Buffalo’s mother was Mailer’s sixth wife, Norris Church, a portrait painter, fashion model, and former high school art teacher, much closer in age to some of her husband’s adolescent children. Born Barbara Jean Davis in Arkansas, she reinvented herself when she moved to New York in 1976 to live with Norman. He came up with the name Church. She appropriated Norris, her former spouse’s last name. Norman and Norris were very recently wed. Mailer had just married his fifth wife, jazz singer Carol Stevens, in Haiti on November 9, to legitimize the birth of their daughter, divorcing her the next day.

  The evening went well. Mailer was intrigued by a blue cloth wallet with Velcro fasteners that Brautigan had recently purchased. Richard gave it to him. Norman reciprocated by gifting Richard a bottle of Moët et Chandon champagne. Mailer “thought it quite heroic” that Kitagawa would fly coast-to-coast twice in a single week to be with her man. Before the couple left and returned to Manhattan, Mailer autographed the label, signing it, “To Eunice and Richard from Norman Mailer.”

  Kitagawa flew back to San Francisco the next day with the champagne bottle in her carry-on. Between eight and nine that night, Spencer Vibbert, a reporter from the Boston Globe, came to Brautigan’s hotel room to interview him. Richard was flying to Boston the following evening, and Vibbert wanted a story for Tuesday’s morning edition.

  At 10:45 Monday morning on the first of December, Brautigan stepped off the elevator on the thirty-fourth floor into the offices of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation at 125 Park Avenue. Fifteen minutes later, Richard sat in a CBC studio taping a telephone interview with David Cole for his “slightly surreal” radio series Here Come the Seventies.

  After a break for lunch, Brautigan was over on the West Side at the ABC Radio studios on the fifth floor of 1926 Broadway. At 2:00 pm he taped a fifteen-minute interview with newsman Gil Fox. After 2:30, Richard was on his own. He had an open ticket on the Boston shuttle and was free to make his own reservation. Once he arrived later that evening, Brautigan checked into the historic Ritz-Carlton Hotel in the heart of the Back Bay. Winston Churchill and JFK had both been guests of the hotel overlooking Boston Public Garden.

  After a late breakfast in the hotel, Richard met with Joe Fisher, a reporter for the Toronto Sun, for an interview at 1:00 pm. They talked in Brautigan’s room. At eight that night, Richard gave a reading in the offices of the Harvard Advocate, the oldest continuously published college literary magazine in the nation, whose past undergraduate editors and contributors included Malcolm Cowley, Conrad Aiken, Wallace Stevens, e. e. cummings, James Agee, Leonard Bernstein, and T. S. Eliot. Brautigan’s Harvard appearance was not booked by Lordly & Dame. He arranged the details himself. Consequently, he received only $80 plus the cost of his lodging.

  At 8:15 the next morning, Brautigan was on an American flight to Detroit on his way to the University of Toledo in Ohio. He had been advised by his sponsor that this route was more convenient than using the Toledo Airport. Richard’s 8:00 pm appearance had been arranged by the Toledo Poets Center Arts Council. Brautigan’s contract specified: “Poet will be available for an afternoon informal activity, travel permitting.” He received his standard $1,500 fee and was on his way back to San Francisco at 2:45 pm the next day, flying nonstop on United from Detroit.

  Brautigan moved in with Eunice Kitagawa once he returned to the city. Her Vallejo Street apartment was convenient, close to both Enrico’s and his new office above Vesuvio. After a grueling month on the road, alone in hotel rooms almost every night, a solitary stay at the Kyoto Inn lost its appeal. He felt exhausted. Brautigan believed his tour had been successful. That’s what he told Keith Abbott in Enrico’s one afternoon after getting back to Frisco. The bar provided familiar company and a place to recharge his energy. “Apropos of nothing,” Richard turned to Keith and said, “You know, there are two people I wouldn’t ever fight: you and Tom McGuane.”

  Abbott realized his old friend had been thinking about the possibilities of an altercation. “Richard had been exhibiting such contrary and contradictry behavior that I knew it was only a matter of time.” Unnerved and feeling sad, Keith got up and walked out of Enrico’s, the end of an eighteen-year friendship.

  Cash poor after his divorce, Richard faced a year’s worth of $1,400 monthly spousal support payments to Akiko. He’d earned $1,500 for each of eleven college appearances, but after Lordly & Dame’s commission, the total fell short of what he needed. Healthy sales figures for The Tokyo–Montana Express remained Brautigan’s best hope. When he picked up the bundle of mail waiting in his tiny office, batches of clipped reviews were of particular interest.

  In the Chronicle Review, Don Carpenter called Brautigan “a great writer,” going on to say, “Not since Ernest Hemingway has anyone paid so much attention to the American sentence. [. . .]

  ‘The Tokyo–Montana Express’ is Brautigan writing at the peak of his powers.” In the Santa Barbara News & Review, Tom Clark, another old acquaintance, called Tokyo–Montana “a train that travels faster than the speed of light—at the speed of mind, in fact.”

  Other reviewers weren’t quite so enthusiastic. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Barry Yougrau dismissed Brautigan: “[His] instrument is the penny whistle. So either he’s trilling cutely [. . .] or he’s tweeting melancholically under the bedclothes. [. . .] [His] frail pipings are only random marginalia, quotes without a context.” Darryl Ponicsan (The Last Detail; Cinderella Liberty) came down even harder in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. “The best that can be said for these wee snippets is that they are harmless and inoffensive, occasionally even cute,” he wrote. “The worst that can be said [. . .] The writings are probably too lightweight to register on even the most aerated of consciousnesses.”

  By the end of the year, the first sales reports were in. The Tokyo–Montana Express had sold twenty-seven thousand copies in hardcover. With royalties of $44,374 (plus $5,000 from the Qual
ity Paperback Club), Brautigan had more than earned out his Delacorte advance. To celebrate, Richard took Eunice on a trip to Mendocino over Christmas. He failed to make restaurant reservations, and after “waiting forever for a table,” they ended up heating two servings of Cup O’ Noodles in their motel room microwave for Christmas dinner. “Typical,” Kitagawa observed.

  fifty-four: shinola

  SEEKING GREATER PRIVACY for his love nest on wheels, Dick Dillof asked Marian Hjortsberg if he might park the sheepherder’s wagon on her property, out of sight across Pine Creek below the house. She immediately consented, liking Dick and finding him agreeable company. When Richard Brautigan learned of this arrangement, he stormed over to his neighbor’s place to protest. “I don’t want to smell Dobro shit all day long.”

  Marian assured him the wagon would be too far away for anyone to sniff out Dick’s presence. Besides, Dobro would doubtless use the bathroom facilities at her house or up at the store. In the end Richard relented. Brautigan liked Dillof, and there was nothing he could do about it in any case. He thought of Dick as his younger “little buddy.” Having emerged from a bitter divorce, Richard enjoyed regaling Dick with horror stories of love gone wrong. Sometimes he’d appear outside the wagon window, comically pleading, “Dobie, throw me your sexual scraps.”

  A confirmed practical joker, Brautigan manifested his affection for Dobro Dick by playing elaborate tricks on him. Counting coup, he called it.

  “Counting pickled turkey gizzards” was Dillof’s assessment, recalling an afternoon at the Eagles in Bozeman when Richard slipped a pickled turkey gizzard (a curious bar snack favored by two-fisted Montana drunks) into his glass of ginger ale when he wasn’t looking. Everyone sat around waiting to see Dick drink it.

  Perhaps the most beau coup of all occurred when Dick arranged an important date with an attractive coed from MSU that Brautigan had also been eyeing. Richard came across the pair in Martin’s Café. Dillof mentioned he planned on bringing the girl to visit his wagon the next day. “How nice,” Brautigan said with the straightest possible face. “Dobie’s going to show you his wagon.”

  Dillof skillfully arranged his camp like a stage set, creating the atmosphere Richard called “quaint bait.” Every detail looked straight out of a vintage L. A. Huffman photograph. A tin cowboy bathtub sat next to the campfire. Cast-iron skillets and Dutch ovens stood scoured and neatly stacked. An ax stuck at a rakish angle out of a log. Eager to create a wholesome initial impression, Dick did his laundry that morning, hanging a half dozen pairs of snow-white boxer shorts to dry on a clothesline in the bright spring sunshine, vivid proof that a guy who lived in a sheepherder’s wagon need not be some musty old codger who never bathed or changed his underwear.

  When Dick drove over the Bozeman Pass to pick up his date, Richard Brautigan snuck down through cottonwoods behind his house, a can of brown shoe polish in hand. Dillof’s camp was deserted, not a soul in sight. With the artistic flair of a frontier Rembrandt, Brautigan dabbed a realistic stain down the backside of each pair of boxer shorts. By and by, Dick reappeared, guiding his intended by the hand through the green meadow grass toward his romantic campsite. There to greet them, flapping in the breeze like soiled flags of surrender, the besmirched undies could not be denied, dead rats rotting atop a lemon meringue pie.

  The sweet young thing pretended not to notice the unsanitary display. Dick wisely herded her straight into the wagon. They sat side by side on the bed as he proceeded to show her some of his scratchboard sketches. Turning over the third or fourth drawing, he uncovered a neatly folded set of instructions for Kwell Shampoo, profusely illustrated with pictures of prancing body lice. Beneath the bold caption kills the crab louse on contact, Brautigan had carefully printed, “Directions for Mr. Dillof.” The last dim hope of romance faded. “She suddenly remembered, or pretended to remember some chores she’d forgotten about,” Dick wrote. “The date was over. Sabotaged.”

  Later that week, Richard invited Dick to dinner, and he discovered a can of brown Shinola on Brautigan’s coffee table. No mention was made of shoe polish or the aborted date until the food was served. Years later, Dobro Dick Dillof set down their subsequent conversation in a brief unpublished memoir: “So,” he said, dumping pasta on my plate. “How was the wagon tour?”

  “Splendid,” I said.

  “Splendid,” he repeated with the faintest grin under his mandarin mustache. “I’m glad for you.”

  We ate, toasting our friendship. Nothing was ever said of the Shinola.

  fifty-five: blowing in the wind

  THE START OF 1981 found Richard Brautigan in a financial bind. His first Tokyo–Montana Express royalty payment wasn’t due until June and big bills kept rolling in. On the first of January, Richard sent a $1,400 support check to his ex-wife. He deliberately made it out to her maiden name, “Akiko Nishizawa,” emphasizing that they were no longer married, while she endorsed the back as “Akiko Brautigan,” rubbing his nose in her continuing capitalization on his famous name. Along with other expenses, Brautigan wrote a $3,255 check to Joel Shawn’s law firm on the twelfth. Anticipating more debt, early in the month Richard sent Helen Brann the first forty pages of his revisions of The Pond People of America, retitled So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away. Richard had written very little on the project prior to his divorce, not wanting the novel to become part of his settlement with Aki.

  Brann found the opening pages “very strong” and sent them on to Sam Lawrence, asking to negotiate a new contract as soon as he read the manuscript. Lawrence wasted no time getting down to business. He thought Richard’s book was both “beautiful and evocative,” believing it might “prove to be one of the finest things he will ever do.” Helen Brann asked for a $50,000 advance, half payable on signing.

  Sam took these numbers up with the Dell hierarchy on January 15, sending Brautigan a telegram the same day. “What a beautiful childhood memoir,” Lawrence enthused, “may it go on and on.” Not knowing where to find his author, he wired it in care of Richard Hodge.

  Negotiations with Helen Brann proceeded swiftly, and by the twenty-third they had worked out the details. The advance would be $45,000, half up front. All the other terms would be identical to the Tokyo–Montana contract. Richard assured his agent that he would finish a final draft “within the next two months.” Brann confirmed this potential delivery date with Lawrence. The final Delacorte contract was dated February 18, 1981, and duly signed by all parties within a few days.

  Brautigan never let his short-term fiscal problems interfere with his social life at Enrico’s, Cho-Cho, Specs’, and the Washbag. He made no move to economize aside from moving into Eunice Kitagawa’s place on occasion or sleeping on a twin bed in his narrow office above Vesuvio, where he collected his mail. Feeling a bit more flush once the first half of the Dell advance arrived, he booked a room at the Kyoto Inn whenever he wanted the comforting anonymity of a hotel.

  Marian Hjortsberg and her sister, Roz Mina, were in town to escape the harsh Montana winter. Richard did his best to show them a good time. This meant frequent drinks at Enrico’s. One afternoon he asked the sisters to a barbecue at Nikki Arai’s apartment on Windsor Place after they finished “trucking around the city.” Don Carpenter had also been invited. By the time Marian and Roz got there, “everyone was very drunk.” The boisterous drinking continued into the night. At one point, Carpenter and Brautigan began arguing over “who was a better writer.”

  The disagreement escalated into a physical fight. Richard and Don grappled on Nikki’s back balcony. It looked to Marian like Brautigan was about to push his old friend over the railing. The women “sort of galvanized” themselves and broke it up. Being most sober, Roz was delegated to drive Don Carpenter home to Mill Valley in Marian’s VW Rabbit. “I was too drunk to fuck her, but I had to ask anyway because I figured she’d be insulted if I didn’t,” Carpenter recalled. “So I did, and she laughed and said, ‘Thank you for the offer but no.’”

  Richard told Eunice ab
out his altercation with Don. He “was remorseful after the fact,” she said. “Very much like him.” Brautigan introduced Marian Hjortsberg to David Fechheimer not long after the incident at Nikki Arai’s. The private detective and the admiral’s witty daughter hit it off right from the start. One evening they went up to Kitagawa’s place on Vallejo Street with Roz for a quesadilla dinner. Another night the trio started out at Cho-Cho drinking Calvados with Richard. They all got plastered. “I was just drunk enough to walk,” Fechheimer remembered, “and we decided to go up to Enrico’s.”

  Crossing Broadway, a baby blue Cadillac brushed against David. Acting with the incautious instincts of the inebriated, he banged his hand against the car and spat at the driver. “A big mistake,” Fechheimer recalled. About two minutes after they had all settled in at the bar, David was pulled from his stool by four angry Chinese gang members, not pleased at being disrespected by this bearded white guy. Before coming around to face the intruders, Ward Dunham told Marian to get in the bathroom and lock the door.

  Marian did as instructed. She heard a lot of scuffling outside as Ward and the other bartender sent the Chinamen “flying through the door.” Within five minutes, the rest of the tong, “a hundred Chinese guys with guns, weapons, knives,” lined the sidewalk in front of Enrico’s. “Like in a movie,” Fechheimer observed. The cook came running in from the kitchen. “They’re out back too,” he cried.

  “I know what to do,” David said. He picked up the bar phone, dialed 911, and demanded to be arrested. It took three squad cars to get the soused private eye out of the bar. They booked him into Central District Police Station a few blocks away in North Beach. While Marian, Roz, and Eunice scrambled about the neighborhood trying to raise bail money, Brautigan went down to Central Station with a book of his stories and sat outside his friend’s cell all night long reading to him. “He stuck it out with me until six in the morning,” Fechheimer recalled.