Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Sam Lawrence gave Brautigan a leather-bound copy of So the Wind for Christmas. One night, after turning his inner rage on Greg Keeler, Richard inscribed it for him. Greg was headed for his car. His friend rushed out after him. “I have something for you,” he called. “It’s a book.”

  “Just what I need,” Keeler said, “another book.”

  Brautigan explained that this copy was special, one of a kind. Greg asked why he wanted to give it to him. “Because I am drunk,” Richard replied, “and I have just insulted my friend.”

  Richard flew down to San Francisco in mid-January. He took a room at the Kyoto Inn. Having a hundred grand in recently acquired credit made Brautigan feel he had real jack in his jeans again. Feeling flush, he decided to make a quick trip to Tokyo. On the nineteenth, the day of his scheduled reading at Stanford, Richard went to the Japanese Consul-General and obtained a ninety-day visa. His university contract provided for transportation from the airport and back. He arranged to be picked up at his hotel instead. At 8:00 pm, Brautigan stood before an audience in Palo Alto, singing for his supper. It was no different than standing on the balcony at The Place a quarter century before. Richard had first read at Stanford fifteen years earlier. His audience shrunk noticeably in reverse proportion to the size of his paycheck.

  Having only a week to spend in Frisco, Brautigan was out for a good time, determined to pack as much fun as possible into a few days. He hooked back up with Richard Breen, his old comrade in larceny. Breen was staying with a friend, attorney Sam McCullough, who had a house up on Telegraph Hill. Richard had observed the former parking valet making a dinner engagement at Enrico’s with a beautiful woman a couple nights before and on the afternoon of the big date, Brautigan dropped by McCullough’s place. Breen bought a new shirt for his assignation and was taking a shower while Richard and Sam enjoyed brandy and coffee in the front room. Brautigan took note of Breen’s glad rags carefully laid-out for the night ahead.

  Later, at Enrico’s, Richard sat at one end of the bar while Breen enjoyed a cocktail at the other with his lovely date. “I was running shit on this broad,” Breen recalled, when his conversation was interrupted by one of the night waiters, who’d been sent over by Brautigan. “Richard wants to know if you have so and so’s business card.”

  Breen looked down the bar to see Richard staring at him “with this weird grin on his face.” He told the waiter, “Yeah. OK,” and pulled out his wallet, opening it to reveal a large foil-wrapped condom sitting front and center. The young woman took one look and got up and left, her cigarette still smoldering on an ashtray, her perfume lingering in the air. “The fucker had slipped a rubber into my wallet while I was in the shower,” Breen fumed.

  Brautigan walked over grinning. “You were going to buy somebody dinner,” he said. “It might as well be me.” They took a table on the terrace and ate swordfish. “$11.50 a pop.” Years later, Breen still remembered the tab he picked up that night. “And, of course, [Richard] was ordering snifters of Calvados. They look like flower vases.”

  On his way to Japan, Brautigan phoned Klyde Young from the airport. He was worried about the Bolinas house. Richard told Klyde the porch railing was weak. “Someone could lean against it and fall over the side.” He asked Young to “please go out and fix it immediately.” Richard was thinking of renting the house and wanted it to be safe. It bothered him. He was leaving the country and didn’t want to think about it.

  Brautigan wheedled and pleaded. Young promised to go to Bolinas the next day and take care of things, but he was busy with his own projects and ended up hiring a carpenter he knew to do the job. Klyde paid him $100 out of his own pocket for the work. “Then, he didn’t rent the house,” Young said, “and nobody walked on the porch for a year and a half after that, but it had to be done the next day because in his mind it was something that was bothering him.”

  On January 22, Richard landed at Haneda Airport and had his passport stamped, entering Japan for the fifth time. Brautigan checked into the Keio Plaza Hotel on his shortest stay in Tokyo, slightly less than four weeks. Richard had no pressing business in Japan. His impromptu winter trip was fueled by a romantic desire to see Masako Kano. As soon as he arrived, Puma got in touch with Puck. Masako still lived at home with her mother. She had received her MA in June 1981 and had been accepted into the PhD program at Columbia University. Her hopes of returning to the States had been delayed by tight finances after her father’s death. He’d been a scholar, but his primary income came from a translation agency he owned. He was the brains behind the whole outfit, and his passing marked the end of the business.

  Masako had a day job as a financial systems analyst for Nippon Motorola, Inc., in Tokyo. When Brautigan called, she agreed to meet him after work. It was a cold winter afternoon. Masako wore her mother’s black mink coat as she stood outside, waiting for Richard to pick her up. He arrived by taxi. Noticing the expensive coat, he nodded with displeasure as she got in. “You changed,” Brautigan said. “Look at you. You’re wearing fur. You’ve changed so much.”

  In truth, Kano had matured considerably since Richard had last seen her more than two years before. She’d had an affair with a journalist, spending time with him in Saigon and Phnom Penh, and was no longer an innocent virginal schoolgirl. Brautigan assumed the mink coat had been a gift from some rich paramour. Masako let him stew in his jealousy for a bit before telling him the mink belonged to her mother. Richard didn’t believe her, so she took off the coat and let him smell the mothballs. Masako never forgot Brautigan’s “relieved smile.”

  They went straight to The Cradle, which was not yet open for its evening business. Takako had arranged to unlock the place for Richard. He led Masako inside and they sat down “in the corner padded seat together,” totally alone. They talked and talked, catching up on lost time. Masako felt “perhaps disappointed that he looked older and a bit overweight.” He wasn’t the man she remembered from Boulder, but he was her first man and the chemistry still boiled.

  Kano and Brautigan started meeting after her work “to stroll around the town.” Richard knew of “amazing authentic Japanese restaurants,” where they stopped for refreshment before it grew dark and it was time for Masako to head for home on the Keio Line. One evening she took him to an okonomiyaki place for the inexpensive savory pancakes, known as Japanese pizza. Topped with meat, fish, or shredded vegetables, okonomiyaki had originated in Osaka and was popular with students and others on limited budgets. They went to a restaurant crowded with junior high school boys, who all wanted to practice their English with Richard. “He liked it” and “repeated some phrases from his poems,” Masako recalled. “And he just laughed so much. Being called Lichard.”

  Business followed Brautigan to Tokyo. Helen Brann forwarded a letter from Günter Ohnemus, Richard’s German translator. He had news. Transatlantik (Germany’s New Yorker) planned to publish some stories from Tokyo–Montana Express in “their February or March issue” under the generic title “News from Tokyo.” The magazine also wanted to “print something” new by Brautigan. Also, Radio Bavaria hoped to present a dramatization of Dreaming of Babylon. “One more step to Fame in Germany,” Ohnemus enthused.

  On the twenty-fourth, Brann sent a “machine copy” of a letter from Richard’s French publisher, officially inviting him to spend a week in Paris (beginning April 11) for the publication of the French edition of So the Wind. Brautigan had asked for his return ticket to go via Tokyo instead of New York. Brann wrote to Michelle Lapautre, his French agent, forwarding the request. An answer came before the end of the month. Helen informed Richard that Bourgois would buy his ticket to Japan.

  With a return to Tokyo assured, Brautigan felt confident he’d see Masako Kano again not long after his imminent departure. “I kind of tormented him for a while,” Masako recalled. No longer “naive,” she delayed going to bed with him right away. Richard’s horny approach was “too straightforward” for Kano’s new, more sophisticated tastes, but they instinctively knew
one another’s mischievous side. “We were kind of T. S. Eliot cats to each other,” Masako said. Playful and adventurous, they found many amusing things to do together aside from lovemaking.

  One cold Friday evening, Kano took Brautigan to Hanayashiki, the oldest amusement park in Japan, riding the subway to Tokyo’s Asakusa District. Founded as a “flower park” in 1853, the year Commodore Matthew Perry and his fleet of four steam frigates arrived in Japan, Hanayashiki was, in Masako’s description, “the funny Coney Island place with haunting castle and shabby merry-go-round.” Crammed with corny carnival rides encircled by a dinky roller-coaster, the minuscule park also boasted a Ferris wheel. Richard and Masako saw only a few teenagers hanging around, “petting” outside in spite of the winter weather. The place appealed to their “Fellini-esque” sensibilities. “Kind of suited for Mountain Cat and Puck the Liar in cold Asakusa,” Masako recalled.

  After a painfully abrupt parting in a snowstorm (“Why did everybody in Japan want a cab at that place, at that time?” Richard wrote Masako six days later), Brautigan flew back to San Francisco on February 18. Surprised to discover the innocent grad student he had seduced two years before wasn’t as young as she’d claimed to be (Masako confessed she had lied about her age during his visit), Richard felt much more distress upon learning that his poetic Yeats scholar had transformed into a sophisticated businesswoman.

  Brautigan had only four days to frolic in Frisco. On the twenty-third, he was back on a plane, off to South Bend, Indiana, where a representative from the University of Notre Dame du Lac met him at the airport and drove him north of town to the campus. At 7:00 pm, Richard stood on the stage of the Memorial Library Auditorium, reading his frequently blasphemous and often ribald poetry to an audience of presumably devout Catholic students. At the reception following his presentation, two lovely young coeds came on to Brautigan. Richard was hot to trot, but an outbreak of his persistent STD foreclosed on any sexual adventuring. “If it weren’t for these damned herpes we could have done a tricycle!” he remarked to Greg Keeler when he returned to Montana.

  The next day, after an informal morning Q&A session at Notre Dame and several airport connections, Brautigan was back rambling around his forty-acre “Rancho.” In so many ways, it was the end of the line. Nobody wanted An Unfortunate Woman. He lived on borrowed money. His sex life had festered to a leprous end. Europe offered a chance for salvation. They loved him in France. Possibilities were opening up in Germany. Richard had a chance to put it all back together. Like a heavyweight training for the main event, he made a determined effort to get back into top form.

  Brautigan quit drinking “for about six weeks” and went on a diet, eating mostly carrots. Tom McGuane remembered “a refrigerator full of carrots.” Marian Hjortsberg believed he “felt committed to cleaning up his act.” Richard came over to her house “two or three times a week” to “pedal furiously” on her Exercycle for forty minutes at a stretch. “The effects were miraculous,” McGuane said. “The greatest I’ve ever seen abstinence produce. He became a machine of energy. He lost one-quarter of his body weight. He became more creative than he’d been since he was in his twenties.”

  “He was trying to get into shape,” Marian recalled, but “he got squirrellier and squirrellier and squirrellier.” One evening they had a discussion. Brautigan told Marian, “You see, every day I get worse. I get more and more irascible and peckish and I start finding fault with everyone. I become one of those little kind of perfectionists, and drinking makes me human. That’s why I do it.”

  Richard understood the root of his problem. He also knew the only path to salvation meant staying sober. He worked at it, day by day, a one-man twelve-step program. Sobriety did little to alleviate his irascible peckishness, and he brooded on the unfavorable reactions to An Unfortunate Woman from trusted professional advisers. Early in March, Brautigan had a long phone conversation with Helen Brann about his most recent novel. The matter had simmered between them, ticking away like a time bomb ever since Brautigan had sent his agent the manuscript back in September.

  Brann read it immediately but waited “three or four days” before calling Richard. Priding herself “on being honest with her clients,” she broke the bad news to Brautigan as gently as she could. Helen felt the new book was “very much related to that god-awful time with Akiko.” It struck her as more “autobiographical” than fiction. She had offered it to Sam Lawrence. Richard had declined both his identical lowball offers. After that, the issue lay dormant for almost six months, a winter snake, venomous and waiting to strike.

  “I had to tell him it simply was not going to work,” Helen Brann recalled. “There was no revising it. There was nothing to do with it in my opinion except put it to one side and go on with the next work.” This was not what Brautigan wanted to hear. Always loyal to his friends, Richard demanded unflinching loyalty in return and severed all contact with anyone (such as Gatz Hjortsberg) he perceived as having crossed him. Brann skated on extremely thin ice. “I knew if I told him that he would probably leave me,” she said.

  Hoping to forestall this possibility, Helen sent Brautigan a telegram the next morning. “I want you to know that whatever you decide to do in sending the new novel, I will follow through despite my misgivings about this work,” she wired. “Believe me I am very unhappy at having this reaction to the novel and hope you know that I continue to think of you as one of the best and most important writers writing today.” Brann’s message came too late. Richard’s “irascible nature” took control. He had already mailed her his final word on the matter, ending their thirteen-year business relationship in two terse sentences.

  “Dear Helen Brann,” Brautigan began (instead of the usual “Dear Helen”). “After our last conversation about my new novel An Unfortunate Woman, I realized that our views on this work are so vastly different that it would be very difficult to continue our working relationship because this novel is one of the main directions of my future writing.

  “So I am terminating my relationship with the Helen Brann Agency effective as of March 11, 1983.” He signed off with his full name (not his customary “Love, Richard”), “Regretfully, Richard Brautigan.” A carbon copy was mailed to Joel Shawn.

  Even as he severed one long-standing connection, Richard reestablished another troubled friendship. At Marian Hjortsberg’s house one night, Brautigan expressed regret over the schism between him and Tom McGuane. He decided to make amends and phoned McGuane. “I want you to come over here,” he said. “I think it’s time we let bygones be bygones.”

  “Tom came racing over,” Marian recalled.

  Brautigan asked her to stay. “I want you to be the arbiter,” he said.

  Marian hung around downstairs, ready “to ameliorate in case anything went wrong.” In short order, “they had sort of a pas de deux around each other” in Hjortsberg’s living room, “hugging and kissing and weeping.” Marian remembered it as “a very special moment,” recalling the two men “both professing undying love and telling me I was the most wonderful woman in the world and quack, quack, quack, and it was very touching.”

  To cement their renewed friendship, McGuane invited Brautigan to dinner a week later at his new ranch on Barney Creek. Barry Hannah, a forty-year-old Mississippi novelist, currently writer-in-residence at the University of Montana, was a houseguest. Tom thought he and Richard should meet. Hannah’s first novel, Geronimo Rex, had won the William Faulkner Prize in 1972. In the following decade he published two more novels and Airships, a book of short stories (1978) that McGuane liked very much. A new novel, The Tennis Handsome, was about to be published by Alfred A. Knopf. Brautigan greatly enjoyed his conversation with the younger writer. They exchanged addresses. Upon parting, Hannah gave Richard an advance copy of his new book.

  Brautigan’s travel plans ran into an unexpected snag. His cultural visa to Japan, issued on January 19, had been stamped “VOID” when he departed the country on February 18. Applying for another visa after such a short
time presented problems. Richard needed to jump through various diplomatic hoops. The Japanese Consul in Seattle demanded signed letters from his Tokyo publisher. In a panic, he phoned Takako Shiina, and she agreed to help. It would be easy, he told her. Only four lines, he said.

  A control-freak nitpicker, Brautigan proved overly demanding in his detailed instructions. Their conversations grew heated. Richard hung up on Takako twice. She thought he was “just impossible.” Brautigan “upset [her] terribly,” making her “so angry,” but Shiina went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the necessary information. Afterward she “spent all [her] precious evening” writing two long documents: an “affidavit of support” and a letter of invitation from Shobun-sha, detailing Richard’s relationship with the Japanese publisher and how his visit would “contribute to Japanese culture.”

  The next afternoon, after Mr. Zuno of Shobun-sha said he had no time to see her, Takako tracked him down at a Shinjuku coffee shop, interrupting a meeting. She begged him to type the two letters and affix the Shobun-sha seal. The publishing company didn’t have a typewriter, further complicating matters. Shiina still managed to get everything done. She sent the signed, typed letters and copies of Shobun-sha’s company registration and corporate history off to Brautigan by registered express mail.

  Takako posted a separate indignant letter to “My nasty brother, Richard.” She signed off, “Your mad, mad, mad, sister.” Brautigan received the documents and sent them, along with his passport, to the Japanese Consul in Seattle. Shiina’s dogged hard work paid off. Richard was approved for a stay of six months. The consulate stamped the visa (valid entry for ninety days) in his passport on March, 24, 1983.

  Aside from letters, Brautigan did no writing in March. He wrote Masako Kano four times, emphasizing how busy he was (“Work! Work! Work!”), but what exactly occupied his time remained a mystery. Richard revised the typescript of An Unfortunate Woman in a minimal fashion. He changed the gender of the shoe in the opening sentence. Aside from a couple other minor adjustments, his biggest alteration involved erasing the words “short novel” throughout his text and penning “journey” in their place. Brautigan finished these slight modifications in the first week of April.