Richard dated his application January 9, 1984, mailing it off, along with his passport, to the Japanese Consulate in The Hague. Approved by the ambassador’s office, Brautigan was granted a six-month visa “for cultural activities,” valid within three months of the date of his application. The day after submitting the paperwork, Richard sat in his hotel room, outlining a plan of action in one of his little notebooks. He was in his element, making lists, yet desperation haunted every word. His prospects in February looked bleak. This time around, Brautigan tallied a wishful compendium of dream options.
“1984,” Richard wrote at the top of the page. “Plans to make $.” In descending order he listed: “Screenplay: Trailer / Finish: The Complete Absence of Twilight / Sell property / Write articles (very little money) / Can I borrow more money? doubtful / Perhaps making of Hawkline Monster?” Looking at his immediate future, Brautigan contemplated his planned trip to Japan and compiled pluses and minuses. On the plus side: “I’m writing again: love book with Takako / Soup book / I’m happier / Masako?” The minus column included “It’s very expensive and where am I going to get the fucking money / How do I live in Japan / Ask Takako of [illegible].”
Richard asked Brad Donovan to send a copy of Trailer so they could get to work and finish the project. He’d made inquiries at Dutch Playboy, and they expressed interest in his work. The future looked bleak, but Richard held onto a dreamer’s impossible hope that somehow his writing would provide some salvation. If not, he already knew how to solve all his problems.
Addressing his present needs, Brautigan prepared a third catalog of “ifs,” headed “A Plan of Action—Amsterdam.” Richard decided to stay in Amsterdam at least until the end of the month, and his designated “ifs” included “Assignment from Playboy / Transatlantic Tokyo piece / Perhaps Tokyo / Money from Hodge / Reading / Screenplay arrives and I finish it / If I get a Japanese Visa.” He ended the if list with the pluses of living in Amsterdam: “I can get a lot of work done,” and “I can live cheaper here than in Japan.” Brautigan didn’t need his accountant to remind him of this.
During his first weeks at the Owl, Richard had no trouble sleeping through many nighttime storms. The rain became his “Amsterdam babysitter.” When the white noise of rainfall gave way to the haunting silence of snow, Brautigan’s insomnia returned, and he lay awake, his brain wandering “all over the place without duration or plot.” Richard didn’t like sleeping in the dark, leaving a light on in the bathroom with the door partway open to allow muted penumbral shadows to permeate his bedchamber. His difficulty falling back to sleep arose out of a fear of the “horrible nightmares” he knew awaited him.
In the daylight, everything looked different. A working copy of “Trailer” arrived from Montana and Brautigan went straight to work. He phoned Brad Donovan half a dozen times to collaborate on the project. Once, Donovan’s phone rang at three o’clock in the morning. “Will you accept a collect call from Amsterdam?” the operator asked. There was something odd in her voice. Brad had no idea what she and Richard had been talking about.
“Sure,” Donovan said.
“You will?” The operator sounded incredulous.
“Yeah,” he said. “I really will.”
Richard and Brad hashed out the details of the final unwritten scenes in the screenplay, and Brautigan set to work typing a clean reading copy. Richard had previously farmed this sort of secretarial work out to professionals. Economic considerations now demanded that he undertake the task himself. A skilled typist, Brautigan spent hours every day laboring on the script. His busy work schedule did not prevent him from further exploring Amsterdam. Long walks became Richard’s only recreation. He took a break every afternoon, searching for “different things to look at.” Brautigan found his way into bookstores and outdoor markets, buying “some fruit, a passport holder, two candy bars.”
His leisurely strolls led him to new fiction. The few stories Richard wrote in Amsterdam (as well as ideas saved for later fiction) all arose from wandering around bleak unexplored side streets. “Real winter” raged into Holland at the end of the third week in January. Full-blown snowstorms replaced the insistent cold rain. The streets were “either icy or slushy.” Every time Brautigan ventured out he found himself involved in a snowball fight. “One look at me,” he wrote, “and kids want to start throwing snowballs.”
Soon after the weather turned frigid, Richard changed his room at the Owl, moving to number 15 on the bottom floor near the stairs leading to the dining room, where he ate breakfast and wrote in his notebooks. He made no detailed compilation of this room’s contents. With the first winter snowstorm, Brautigan was surprised to see citizens of Amsterdam break out their umbrellas. “It had a dreamlike, almost musical quality,” he wrote in a story called “Umbrellas in the Snow.” Richard had written about umbrellas before. They seemed to fascinate him. He featured “Umbrellas,” one of the stories in The Tokyo–Montana Express, on the book’s rear inside dust jacket flap. Three other umbrella stories, “Walking Mushrooms,” “The Umbrella Photograph,” and “Last Words About What Came and Went Yesterday” (about piles of shattered umbrellas in the aftermath of a typhoon), all from his 1979 Japanese notebooks, remain unpublished.
The umbrella story was one of four pieces of new fiction Brautigan took with him on his birthday to a meeting with an editor of Dutch Playboy. (The others included “Mussels,” “The Habitue,” a story about getting his shoes repaired in Amsterdam, and “Sandwalker,” a fantasy of wanting to reach through the wall of the Owl and kill a young boy in the next room who was keeping him awake.) Three days before, Richard had mailed Jonathan Dolger a fair copy of “Trailer,” asking his agent to make additional copies and send one to Brad Donovan in Montana.
Brautigan’s passport stamped with a Japanese cultural visa arrived back from the consulate in The Hague. His plan had been to leave Amsterdam at the end of January. After trudging around the slushy streets, he came down with what he called “a very bad flucold” and decided to stay until he got better.
Richard Brautigan spent much of his forty-ninth birthday sick in bed. After meeting with the editor at Playboy earlier in the day, he mailed his agent a copy of “The Fate of a West German Model in Tokyo.” In spite of coughing and sneezing, Richard got his work done. Ill and alone in a strange city, low on funds, he had neither the means nor the energy to go out and party. Back home, his friends might have planned a celebration. Adrift in Amsterdam, he was on his own.
The two primary local pleasure providers, coffeehouses selling pot and streets lined with prostitutes displayed in shop windows like frosted cakes for sale in patisseries, held little appeal for Richard, who didn’t smoke and had no interest in whores. Brautigan made at least one excursion into Amsterdam’s red-light district, riding there in a taxi with a new friend whose “huge black dog” hulked in his lap. Richard went to a brothel for a drink at the bar. His companion wanted to get laid and had his eye on a blond working in the establishment, but he had forgotten his wallet and had no money. The whorehouse accepted MasterCard. Richard’s new friend only had Visa. He asked Brautigan to pick up the tab. “I don’t have a credit card,” Richard said.
“I thought all Americans had credit cards.”
“I don’t.”
Wracked by fever sweats in his hotel bed, Richard gave little thought to brothels, credit cards, partying with friends, or even drinking whiskey. Nothing seemed like fun. A passport-sized photograph taken a few days before (perhaps for his Japanese visa) portrayed Brautigan as a doleful owl, mustaches frowning downward, hair parted to expose a head going bald, his mournful stare burning into the camera lens. “Yes, Europe has been good to me,” Richard wrote Greg Keeler when he sent him a print of the picture. Brautigan’s final birthday held little joy.
During his last week in Amsterdam, Richard climbed from his sickbed and returned to work. He’d labored hard all his life. Ever since picking beans as a kid in the fields outside Eugene, Brautigan never stopped believing h
ard work would see him through. Even as the curtains of doom drew darkly about him, he peered into the shadows for a gleam of hope. Avenue magazine, one of the biggest publications in the Netherlands, had reprinted sections from Tokyo–Montana in three issues the previous year. Richard made an appointment with an editor at Avenue. The magazine agreed to publish the German model article later in the year.
All his European business concluded, Brautigan departed for Japan, flying KAL on the eighth of February. He left no record of his long, arduous journey, no notebook sniveling about jet lag and lengthy layovers. Richard had passed beyond such petty complaints. He looked deep into the well of nothingness, and mere trials of the flesh no longer seemed so important. Teetering with empty pockets at the edge of the abyss, Brautigan acted as if nothing had changed.
Richard checked back into the Keio Plaza as always. Money he expected to be wired to the hotel had not arrived. Unable to afford a room, he called Takako Shiina, who had first arranged his reduced rate back in 1976. She agreed to pay for Brautigan’s lodging, considering it a loan. Takako believed in her soul brother’s talent and had not the slightest doubt that he would pay her back. As a measure of her trust, Shiina borrowed the money needed to cover Brautigan’s Keio Plaza bills.
Richard did not rent a typewriter during his last stay in Tokyo, an economy move equivalent to skipping breakfast. He wrote all his letters by hand. Recovering from jet lag, Brautigan suffered a weary depression. His first creative efforts were several bleak poems written on Keio Plaza stationery. The day after his arrival, Richard penned “Reflections,” nearly as brief as a haiku, in which he speculated about “all the shit” that would be written about him after his death.
Two days later, Brautigan wrote several drafts of “Death Growth,” a grim meditation on mortality revealing the bleak nihilism of his innermost thoughts: There was a darkness
upon the darkness,
and only the death
growth
was growing. It
grew like
the darkness upon darkness
growing.
Richard followed this stark lyric with another somber poem called “Death My Answering Service” and worked his way through four drafts of “Hopeless Candles.” (“The light of hopeless candles / illuminate the vocabulary of dying roots / under freshly-burned trees.”) Brautigan had come to the end of a long road stretching back to the playfulness of “Xerox Candy Bar.” A poet delves deep inside for inspiration, and the Toonerville Trolley energy infusing much of Richard’s early poetry gave way to a long mournful midnight dirge. Brautigan rode on the death train now.
Only writing new fiction provided solace from his morbid thoughts. Working in a notebook, Richard sketched out a piece about his friend, painter Russell Chatham, incorporating off-kilter thoughts on Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. A few pages later, he began “The Same Story Twice,” an odd sequel to Dreaming of Babylon narrated by C. Card’s son. “My chief character flaws have been alcoholism, insomnia and eternal (illegible) desire.” After five short pages, Brautigan ran out of steam and abandoned the story.
In the same notebook, Richard recycled a line about Amsterdam having the best light in the world for looking at diamonds. He liked the image, having used it first a couple times in “Wear Out and Die,” a screenplay treatment he began in the Owl Hotel but never finished, giving up after only four pages. Brautigan got less done this time around, quitting after the next sentence, “Diamonds to me are like very cold flowers that only grow in winter.”
Shortly after Richard’s arrival in Tokyo, something odd provided a momentary distraction from darkness. Two weeks before Brautigan checked into the Keio Plaza, Alcatrazz, an American heavy metal band founded the previous year, gave a concert in Nagoya. The lead guitar player was twenty-year-old Swedish virtuoso Yngwie Malmsteen. Only moderately successful in the States, Alcatrazz gained an enormous following in Japan. For reasons forever unexplained, Richard received two fan letters from young Japanese women written to Malmsteen. Both were in English. One was dated the day after the Nagoya performance. The other, composed on Keio Plaza stationery, suggested the impassioned fan, who’d spent the night with Yngwie in Nagoya, wrote it in the hotel lobby, believing the rock star was a guest.
The rocker never got the letters. The hotel manager gave the impassioned correspondence to Richard as a curiosity after Malmsteen’s departure. Brautigan was a connoisseur of such cultural detritus, saving everything from an uncashed 10¢ check from Pacific Bell to a poster advertising a Denver foosball tournament. Brautigan had never heard of Yngwie Malmsteen but held onto the imploring, undelivered fan notes for the rest of his life.
Always a creature of careful habits, Richard resumed his familiar life in Tokyo after sleeping off his jet lag. Mornings were spent writing in his room. In the afternoons, Brautigan explored the city’s obscure back streets. Nighttime after dinner meant drinking and literary conversation at The Cradle. Knowing Richard’s financial situation, Takako picked up his bar tab as well as his hotel bill.
To increase his nearly nonexistent income, Brautigan phoned the USIS office at the American Embassy soon after his arrival, informing them of his return to Japan. A letter from the assistant program development officer arrived at the Keio Plaza before the end of February. Both Nagoya and Fukuoka had expressed interest in having Richard present programs. Nagoya was looking at late March, while Fukuoka preferred late May. In both instances, the USIS offered to pay all transportation costs, plus a $117 per diem and a $100 honorarium for each program.
Earning money on his mind, Brautigan turned his creative attention to new screenplay ideas. “Cliché,” intended as “an imitation B-movie,” was inspired by the mediocrity of the 1950s. Working on loose sheets of Keio Plaza stationery, Richard envisioned “a horror-murder comedy that could be cheaply made like ‘Trailer,’” with a “very strong role for a woman and a good solid role for a man to play opposite her.” At the same time, Richard sketched out another screenplay notion on his hotel writing paper. He called this one “The Killer.” Brautigan described his lead character, Barbara Frederick, “a sort of attractive, very worried looking woman in her early thirties,” pushing a supermarket shopping cart and wondering if she should kill a total stranger, a Chinese woman in the next aisle. “Cliché” and “The Killer” were likely variations of the same idea.
Brautigan always found unexpected objects of interest on his long walks through remote Tokyo neighborhoods. When he first came to Japan, Richard was fascinated by the new: pachinko parlors, acres of neon, plastic food displays in restaurant windows. By his seventh trip, he’d come to appreciate the older aspects of the city. He wandered the back lanes looking at old handmade wooden shop signs. Brautigan recorded them in a Japanese notebook, filling several pages with annotated drawings. Many of the signs bore carved images of the products sold in the shop (red peppers, fans, knives) or of symbols representing the store’s name (crane, tiger, temple). Other weathered signboards bore only old painted kanji characters. Brautigan had someone translate these unfamiliar ideograms (sake, vinegar, wasabi).
Early in March, the Tokyo weather turned wet and nasty. Richard caught a bad cold tramping about the narrow cobbled lanes in search of interesting shop signs. His phlegm-filled head felt like a swamp. Washington Review published the two Brautigan pieces brought to them by Toby Thompson in its February/March issue. Toby mailed Richard a copy. Brautigan liked the layout, looking the magazine over in his hotel room. He had no idea this was the last time he would ever see his work published in English.
One thing troubled Brautigan. He’d asked Thompson to make sure the publication assigned the copyright for the material in his name. This had not been done. Richard wrote back to Toby at the end of the first week in March. “No big deal,” he said in his letter, “but please take care of it.” It was a far bigger deal for Brautigan than he let on. As much as he needed the money, Richard decided not to cash the Washington Review check until he cleared up the copy
right problem.
The details of Brautigan’s last three months in Japan, like much of his time in Europe, remain obscured. He wrote very few letters and only a handful of short stories. In the past, these provided an unintended journal of his life. Without “specific information,” Richard’s day-to-day movements were lost. Like most lives, Brautigan’s remained primarily one of habit, each new day an echo of the past. Richard followed his usual routine, repeating yesterday again and again, another life measured out in coffee spoons.
Early in April, Brautigan received a letter from Jonathan Dolger. Richard had been feeling out of touch, not knowing his last letter to his agent had been misdirected to Jakarta, Indonesia. He responded in the middle of the month with a cramped handwritten six-page reply, one of the longest letters he ever wrote. Along with discussing current publishing strategies and his screenwriting ideas, Richard launched into an extended lament about his current status in the publishing world. “My last royalty statement from Dell for A Confederate General from Big Sur showed that it did not sell a single copy in the previous 6-month royalty period.”
Brautigan expressed concern that “at this point in my ‘career’ I’ve been pretty much written off.” He quoted from Chénetier’s book that he’d been “systematically refused recognition as a major novelist.” When they spoke on the phone in January, Dolger repeated his conviction that An Unfortunate Woman was not the right book for Brautigan to publish next, suggesting another omnibus edition of his earlier work. Richard agreed with him, even though he’d fired Helen Brann for expressing the same opinion. Brautigan liked the omnibus notion but didn’t think he had “enough coin in the marketplace to pull it off,” suggesting instead, “I want to publish a hard, lean piece of machinery.”
Unlike most of his terse, humorous correspondence, Richard’s lengthy letter to his agent became curiously confessional. This most private and guarded of individuals opened up his innermost thoughts and feelings as honestly as a man reclining on a therapist’s couch. “Book sales are not paying the rent,” he wrote. “It’s sort of sad to publish a book that is overpriced and looks like a piece of shit and is doomed from the beginning. [. . .] The publication of So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away was a fucking nightmare.” Brautigan called himself “a youthful 49” and concluded on an optimistic note. “Anyway, there are eight months left in this year, and I want to take good writing advantage of them.”
Jubilee Hitchhiker Page 148