John F. Barber (who had graduated from Boston University in 1974) was one student who would have given Brautigan high marks. Older than the others in the class, Barber had seen a bit of life, working in Yellowstone Park for several years before entering a graduate program in history at MSU in 1981. He withdrew after a year, maintaining his friendship with some of his professors. Knowing his ambition to be a writer, they told him about the upcoming Brautigan residency.
Barber’s job, driving buses for the Karst Stage Company, provided a flexible schedule, allowing time to attend Richard’s seminar and hang out at the Eagles with him after class. Again Brautigan compartmentalized, never introducing John Barber to his other friends or extending an invitation to the Friday night burger roundtable. Barber’s final writing project for Richard was a narrative about his experience working as the purser aboard the paddlewheel steamboat hotel Mississippi Queen during her 1976 maiden voyage between Cincinnati and New Orleans. Brautigan liked his piece very much, phoning Barber to praise it. He told John he’d show it to Helen Brann but never did.
The next week found Richard back home in Pine Creek. The long cold wet spring had turned bright and sunny by mid-June. Snow still crowned the jagged peaks of the Absarokas, but the surrounding foothills were green, lively with wildflowers. Too late for a get-well card, Brautigan sent a telegram to Nikki Arai in her hospital room. “WORDS ARE FLOWERS OF NOTHING,” he wired. “I LOVE YOU.” Richard hoped “it would make her feel peaceful.”
On Father’s Day, Ianthe phoned Richard from New York. He had not spoken to her since the previous November. There had been no communication between them at Christmas or on either of their birthdays. “It was not a pleasant conversation,” Brautigan recalled. He blathered on for fifteen minutes about his teaching experience while she listened patiently, “probably bored.” More succinctly, Ianthe told her father about her own recent life. Richard confessed to definite boredom.
“Well, I guess we’ve spent enough time talking on your dime,” Brautigan said, hoping to bring their conversation to an end without offering any invitation that might include her husband.
“I guess so,” Ianthe replied. After a long, uncomfortable pause, she said, “We’ll have to have lunch sometime.”
Richard awkwardly replied that he might be in New York “sometime in December or later next year, maybe in the spring.” He’d been invited to France. Maybe they could get together either on his way over or upon his return. When they hung up, Brautigan “felt very disturbed and wished she had never called.”
Late in June, Brautigan typed a letter to his agent. In his barn rafter office, he crafted a book proposal to the Dell Publishing Company, complying with the option clause in his So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away contract. Brautigan had shown his work in progress to Becky Fonda. She didn’t like the title “Investigating Moods,” making some “appropriate suggestions.” Richard listened to her advice. When he wrote Helen Brann, the working title for his proposed new work had become “An Unfortunate Woman.” The book would contain “four long sections.” The first, his unfinished novella, would “examine the varieties of human existence revolving around a tragedy.”
The second section, “Japanese UFO,” would contain stories “about contemporary Japan” written during his last trip to Tokyo, ranging “from humor to tragedy.” The third part was to be “American Hotels.” Rounding out the quartet, Richard proposed a final section of short stories set in Montana, none of them yet written. He proposed calling these tales “Waiting for the Deer.”
The same afternoon, Brautigan sat on his back porch, watching a distant thunderstorm gather as he started writing again in his Unfortunate Woman notebook. Richard did not pick up where he left off. He itemized all the calendar days he’d missed (“MARCH 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8”—all the way through to “19, 20, 21” of “JUNE”) and followed this odd countdown with a long digression about breaking his leg. After a brief attempt to get back on track regarding the tragedy of the unfortunate woman who hanged herself in Berkeley, Brautigan remarked that at the beginning of his “journey,” he counted all the words on every page after each day’s writing “because [he] wanted to have a feeling of continuity,” a practice abandoned after twenty-two pages.
Following a three-day break, Richard returned to work on Friday the twenty-fifth, filling twenty more pages in his Japanese notebook. That night, after a long phone conversation with a depressed drunken friend, Brautigan called Nikki Arai. He had only recently learned she had a private telephone in her hospital room. Nikki’s sedated voice sounded “very delicate.” Richard heard “a gentleness” that had never been there before. She said she was feeling better and didn’t mention her cancer. Arai told Brautigan “how much she liked the telegram,” asking him to keep in contact. “It made me feel good,” Nikki said. “It was beautiful. Please write me more.” Richard thought she was “getting used to the idea of dying.”
Too much tragedy and solitude took a toll on Brautigan. He headed back to Bozeman on Saturday in a futile search for the Great American Good Time. As usual, he “did a lot of drinking” and failed to find a willing female partner before the bars closed. The Range had nothing available at that hour. Richard, without the aid of his abandoned cane, limped almost a mile east of town to the Alpine Motel (“very modest and clean”), where he rented a room for $9.95.
The next morning, hangover throbbing, Brautigan phoned John Barber for help. “Meet me for breakfast,” he said. “I’ll buy and then you can give me a ride home.” Barber was driving a Karst bus over the hill that afternoon to pick up a group of kids who’d spent a week at Luccock Park, a United Methodist Church camp directly above Richard’s place at the head of the Pine Creek Trail. Richard had never been the only passenger on an old-fashioned yellow school bus before. He traveled in one of his own short stories. Barber stopped at the Safeway in Livingston while Brautigan bought a week’s worth of groceries.
On June 28, 1982, Richard Brautigan came to the end of his 160-page Japanese notebook. His little excursion into experimental fiction was over. Brautigan left the last line blank. “I’ll leave it to somebody else’s life,” he wrote, having filled the little book with “so many inconclusive fragments, sophomoric humor, cheap tricks, endless detail.” Richard promised his future audience, “You have read the book. I have not.” After stating, “writers are notorious liars,” Brautigan emphasized that he had only reread his book to see where he’d left off during his many lapses. “Iphigenia, your daddy’s home from Troy!” he wrote in conclusion.
Richard closed the cardboard covers, “like a door,” on the most extraordinary literary adventure he’d ever embarked upon. Brautigan, a poet who reworked each word and line over and over until he got it right, abandoned his precision, returning to the old beat mantra “first word, best word.” He promptly gave his handwritten manuscript to a professional typist and sent the fair copy off to his agent in New York.
Brautigan wanted to celebrate finishing another book and finagled a ride into Livingston. He wandered from bar to bar, hoping to luck out and get laid. At closing time, Richard was dead drunk and alone. Instead of calling a cab, he took a cheap room at the Murray Hotel. At the time, the establishment was a bit down at its heels. The turn-of-the-century lobby had been divided in half, with a short-order grill occupying the Park Street side. There was no one available to operate the ancient elevator. Brautigan limped up the stairs and collapsed on a narrow bed in a drab cubicle with no toilet or TV. He checked out early the next morning.
Just before the Fourth of July weekend, Dennis Lynch descended on Rancho Brautigan with his pal Danimal “like a plague of drunken, farting locusts.” Richard made them welcome. They proceeded to drink him “out of house and home” as promised. Brautigan arranged for rodeo tickets at the Livingston Roundup for Friday, July 2, calling the Donovans to come over and join the fun. Lynch wore an Arab burnoose into the fairground temple of ten-gallon headgear. Upping the ante, during the intermission show, when the featu
red performer with a trained bison pretended to sleep while his enormous shaggy animal bent over him, Dennis shouted, “Make it good for the buffalo too!”
Rip Torn also came out to Montana over the Fourth of July weekend to visit his three children, all working at Chico Hot Springs. After visiting Joe Sedgwick, his cowboy rancher pal, Rip gave the kids a lesson in stick-shift driving in the rental car on the way back from Two Dot. They lurched and bumped down East River Road, stopping at Richard’s house. Finding no one home, Rip left a brief note saying he was at Chico.
Brautigan phoned the resort, inviting Rip and his kids for dinner on the third. Dennis and Danimal were off on their own. Richard launched back into “American Hotels,” digressing into a long reminiscence about his relationship with Sherry Vetter a decade earlier. He fit this to his theme by describing all the motels with swimming pools in northern California where they had stayed together.
Rip Torn and his three children drove down to Pine Creek from Chico. When they arrived, Brautigan descended from his nest in the barn, blinking “like an owl” in the sunlight. “Your dad’s timing is still good,” Richard told Rip’s kids with a grin. “Let’s jump in your car and get some groceries. [. . .] I was finishing my novel. It’s done. I’ve turned into a hermit, but I want to celebrate.”
After a quick trip to Safeway, Brautigan told Torn he didn’t fish anymore. “I’ve given my gear away.” Rip went out alone on the river and caught a couple nice trout for dinner. Richard came up with champagne and a can of mushroom soup. “Let’s poach these beauties in this soup,” he said. “And how about a dash of champagne?” They had a feast. Brautigan also produced a couple bottles of “hootch—Daniels or Dant.” They drank until dawn. Richard’s “excitement made him a kid again.”
“Brautigan took his parties seriously,” Brad Donovan observed. When Richard phoned to say he was throwing a wang-dang-doodle for Rip Torn, and “bring some food,” the Donovans headed straight for the supermarket with their food stamps. It was a big shindig. The Fondas were there, and Marian Hjortsberg. Brautigan dispatched Brad to the kitchen to work on the spaghetti sauce with Dennis Lynch. Donovan thought Lynch was “typical of Richard’s friends: fun loving, witty, tactful.”
While Brad chopped onions, Dennis pulled a slip of paper from a softcover book. “Look what I found,” he said. “It’s a bookmark. An edible bookmark. Try it.” Dennis tore the paper in half, eating one piece. He gave Donovan the other half. It was stamped with a purple dragon. Brad chewed it down and rode the dragon into fantasy land for the rest of the night.
The party raged on until dawn. Richard, not tripping on acid, told a long story about Baron von Richthofen. After a long day dueling it out in the skies over France, the Red Baron liked to head into the Black Forest alone at night, hunting wild boar with a knife to relax from the rigors of being an ace. Dennis Lynch greeted the sunrise on the roof of the chicken coop, shouting, “I’m a morning person.” Rip Torn had left long before, heading back to Chico with his sleeping kids. It was the last time he ever saw Richard Brautigan, who drove back over to Forest Park with Brad and Georgia Donovan.
Ed and Jenny Dorn had been out of touch with Brautigan. Dick Dillof had recently moved an antique railroad caboose onto Marian Hjortsberg’s property, parking it not far from his sheepherder’s wagon. He invited the Dorns to come and stay in it. They drove up from Boulder with their kids for the Fourth of July weekend, stopping off first to visit the Donovans. When they pulled into Forest Park in their station wagon, the Dorns were “surprised and delighted” to see Richard sitting on the trailer steps at number 66, working his way through a quart of Dickel early in the afternoon.
Kidd, the Dorns’ son, wanted to go fishing. Brad rigged a fly rod with a streamer and walked the boy over to the river behind the mobile homes. Before long Kidd’s younger sister, Maya, ran back to announce that he’d hooked a big one. Everybody hurried to the riverbank to watch him play his fish. Richard laughed as Kidd eased a beautiful two-pound trout out of the Gallatin. Georgia Donovan’s snapshot captured the young angler holding his trophy. Everyone grinned with delight.
Over in Pine Creek that night, Dillof settled Ed and Jenny into the caboose, setting up a small tent for the kids. The next day the whole gang, including Brautigan, went to the Sunday rodeo in Livingston. Richard was “pissed at Dobro Dick.” Learning of the Dorns’ impending arrival, Brautigan stormed over to the Hjortsberg place, raging, “I want no house guests. NO house guests!” Even though Ed and Jenny were his friends, Richard considered Dillof’s invitation an unacceptable intrusion into what he considered his territory.
Bud Swearingen was up from Texas. After a day’s fishing he stopped by Rancho Brautigan late in the evening with a “bunch of trout” as a gift offering. The Fourth of July had been overcast. By rodeo time it poured rain. Delighting at the discomfort of his friends camping down at Dillof’s compound, Brautigan stood on his back porch “guffawing at them” through the stormy night. Before long he blasted away into the darkness with his powerful .44 Magnum. Swearingen beat a hasty retreat over to the Hjortsbergs’.
Marian “could see it coming, like a tornado building in the Midwest.” She turned off all the lights, hoping “to stay completely out of this situation.” When Bud knocked on her door, she went downstairs to face the music. “It’s just crazy over there,” Bud said. “I thought I’d come over and say hi.” They decided the best course of action would be to head into town for a drink. Marian hurried to get dressed as distant gunshots boomed like thunder in the storm.
Paradise Valley and Livingston were famous for the howling wind funneling down off Yellowstone Park plateau. On the night of the fourth, it raged at gale force. As the shooting started, a violent gust demolished the tent where the terrified Dorn children huddled, unable to sleep. Ed, Jenny, and the kids took refuge in the creek bottom, weaving between the dark trees as bullets crashed through the storm-tossed branches overhead, heading for shelter at Marian’s.
Brautigan got to the Hjortsberg house before them. Marian and Bud were about to clear out when Richard came through the kitchen door. “Damn that Dobro!” he fumed. “Damn that Dobro.”
“Come on in and sit down,” Marian said.
Looking bedraggled, the Dorns and their kids straggled in from the tempest, followed in short order by Dick Dillof and his girlfriend. Pandemonium ensued. The decibel level escalated. “Richard and Ed were having this fight,” Marian remembered, “and everyone was down on Dobro.” Tempers calmed. “They hashed it all out and made up.” Brautigan invited the Dorns to spend the night at his place. After a quick nightcap, they all trooped out into the night.
The next morning, chagrined by his nocturnal fusillade, Richard showed the Dorn children his guns, carefully explaining firearm etiquette and safety rules. After lunch, he took the kids down to the dump below his barn and “set them up for the afternoon,” plinking away at beer cans. Brautigan rejoined the adults on the back porch and resumed drinking, “laughing with that high-pitched sequence of hoots and howls.” Jenny thought “life was a very simple progression for Richard.” She and Ed returned to Colorado the following morning.
Fourth of July weekend was the last time Richard ever saw Bud Swearingen. The Texan left his mark on the grounds of Rancho Brautigan. A couple years before, Bud’s two sons had abandoned a 1956 Ford Victoria by the fence off to the side of Richard’s barn after a futile effort at getting it running again. The derelict car became a useful platform for viewing the night sky. The hood remained warm after sunset and was wide enough to accommodate two Brautigan-sized adults reclining along its length, their backs resting against the windshield. Richard stargazed with Masako from this vantage point. Greg Keeler spent many evenings perched on the junker Ford, staring at the heavens and bullshitting the night away with Brautigan.
A letter from Masako Kano arrived from Tokyo. Richard had written her from Bozeman during his teaching stint at MSU. Masako wrote to say her father was in the hospital, dying after surger
y for intestinal cancer. She told Richard he’d known of the illness when he came to America in the fall of 1980. “I don’t know the reason why, but there are only two adult men I can talk [to] like a true child of nature in this world,” she concluded. “I’ll lose one of them within three months (at most). Dear Puma, How could I lose you, too?”
Brautigan wrote back the same day, thanking her for her sensitive letter. “I’m very sorry that your father is ill,” he scrawled. “Words often fail me, so I do not know what else to say.” He changed the painful subject by writing about the weather (“Storm follows storm”), signing off “Richard,” without any affectionate valediction.
Nikki Arai died on July 8. She was thirty-eight years old. Brautigan didn’t get the news until a couple days later, when a mutual friend called from San Francisco. He felt “deeply shocked” and sat staring at the telephone in stunned silence. Not wanting to be alone, Richard dialed Marian Hjortsberg. He had a watermelon he’d bought when Rip Torn took him shopping a few days before. It hadn’t been eaten at the party. Brautigan asked Marian if she’d like some watermelon. She said okay. “Bring it in half an hour and have dinner with me and my friend Todd.”
Richard said he’d be right over. He carried the watermelon down the road to the Hjortsbergs’. Gatz had moved with Sharon to the Big Island of Hawaii in January, and his kids were visiting him for the summer. Marian seemed strangely agitated when she greeted Brautigan in her kitchen. He’d interrupted a romantic moment with her new boyfriend. She’d been too embarrassed to say anything about it on the phone. He wanted to tell her about Nikki Arai’s death but felt uncomfortable. The watermelon had been “just some kind of funny excuse to talk about my grief.” Brautigan apologized and went back to his place.
To avoid solitude, Richard started calling his friends. Nobody was home. He got lucky when John Barber picked up. “My friend just died,” Brautigan said. “Why don’t you come over. Bring a bottle of whiskey.”
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