Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Having Dingman around would have been good for Brautigan. He was running out of his longtime Bolinas friends. He’d temporarily been eighty-sixed from Smiley’s for grabbing a guy by the balls and grope-walking him to the bar. “Mickey Cummings was a great big motherfucker,” Bill Brown recalled. Brautigan was drunk and wanted to fight, “trying to assume the role of a bruiser a little bit,” according to Brown. Richard got lucky when Cummings laughed the whole thing off.

  Both Joanne Kyger and Bobby Louise Hawkins lost patience with Brautigan during his final summer, tired of his rudeness and drunken behavior. “Richard was starting to feel pretty stale to me,” Kyger said. “There was very little playfulness in him. It was like he’d used himself up.”

  All sorts of stories circulated about Brautigan’s presumed misdeeds. An anecdote about him picking up a young woman bartender at Smiley’s became a tale of bondage that evolved into a lurid rumor concerning attempted murder. Magda Cregg claimed she’d heard Richard “made some chick give him head in front of the jukebox” in Smiley’s. Unpleasant gossip proliferated. Don Carpenter recalled Kyger and Hawkins bad-mouthing Brautigan. “Those two old whores would sit down at Smiley’s and insult Richard constantly. Talk about what a bastard he was.” Simone Ellis–Okamura remembered Bobby Louise Hawkins making a point of going around to people and telling them to stay away from Brautigan.

  Amid the swirling scuttlebutt, Richard’s inherent paranoia kicked into high gear. He’d had a misunderstanding with a man named Russ Trevira, a Vietnam vet who worked in the tree-trimming business. An old-timer in the Bolinas area, Trevira charged Richard $300 for taking down a dead tree on his property. Brautigan didn’t have the funds to pay him, offering writing lessons instead or editing a manuscript Russ had written. Trevira demanded his money. “No, this is barter,” Richard insisted.

  Their misunderstanding escalated into verbal threats. Brautigan already had Jim Sakata’s gun in his house but sought additional firepower and borrowed a 9 mm automatic from Bob Junsch. “My wife didn’t want it in the house,” Junsch said.

  Klyde Young told of an episode involving gunplay one time when Bob Junsch visited Richard’s house in Bolinas. “They both had pistols,” Young reported, “and got drunk and fired them a few times in that same room where he killed himself.” A couple days later, Andy Cole limped in from the kitchen and saw the bullet holes. “Hey, buddy,” he said, “what’s all this?”

  Brautigan just laughed. “Oh, sometimes it gets kind of exciting around here,” he replied with a suppressed giggle.

  Richard and Andy often had nostalgic discussions about the old days in North Beach. Brautigan kept referring to the halcyon days of the past. He pronounced it “hal-i-con.” After several repeats, Cole said, “Richard, don’t take offense. We’re old friends. I’ve known you for twenty-five years. However, there’s a certain word you’ve mispronounced constantly in the last three days, and I want to call it to your attention.”

  Before Andy got any further, Richard grew angry. “Did I misuse the word?” he demanded.

  “No.”

  “Was there anything in the context that indicated I didn’t understand how the words were used?”

  “No.”

  “Is there any possible way that anyone could have interpreted this word any other way than I meant it?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” Brautigan had worked himself into full imperial mode. “Then who are you to tell me about it?”

  Soon after their indoor shooting spree, Junsch asked Richard to return his 9 mm. Bob phoned Brautigan one day and said, “I don’t think you need that thing. I wouldn’t mind getting it back.” Richard told him to come and get it. Around this time, Brautigan started packing Jim Sakata’s .44 Mag wherever he went, even on trips into the city.

  Enrico Banducci remembered one night about 2:00 am when Richard carried the gun into his restaurant. “He was drunk,” Enrico recalled, “and he scared the shit out of me. He pulled this fucking cannon out of his pocket and said, ‘I’ll put this to my head and I’ll blow my head off. Don’t you want to see?’”

  “Don’t do that,” Banducci said, pushing the revolver aside. Enrico remembered exactly where they’d been sitting. “He had a big gun and he had it at his head, about a month or so before the accident.”

  Sometime around the middle of August, Brautigan finally had a telephone installed in his Bolinas house. He’d become obsessed with the notion that writing screenplays might provide the yellow brick road to financial salvation. Knowing everyone in the movie business spent his life glued to a phone, Richard figured he’d better have one if he wanted to be a player.

  Brautigan called Brad Donovan in Bozeman, asking if he wanted to come down to California and work on the Trout Fishing screenplay. Brad’s son, Joe, had just been born, so he said no. “I’ll see you up here in the fall.”

  Next Richard called Gatz Hjortsberg, who had returned to Montana from London in mid-July. His troubled marriage to Sharon collapsed within days of his return, and he moved to a three-room log cabin without running water on a hill overlooking the Boulder River in Sweet Grass County. Working on two contracted screenplays at the same time, Hjortsberg made sure he had a phone line hooked up before his plumbing was connected to the new well. When Brautigan called, all previous difficulties dissolved in the onrush of conversation.

  Richard wanted to collaborate with Gatz on a screenplay. The idea he pitched was about an average midwestern housewife and mother, married to the local sheriff and normal in every way except she happened to be a serial killer. Gatz didn’t know it at the time, but it was a retelling of “Cliché” and “The Killer,” a notion Brautigan had been toying with for most of the year. Film ideas either hold a kernel of something that will work or they are duds. This one caught Hjortsberg’s fancy, and he agreed to join the team. Over the course of several phone calls, the two men sketched out an outline for the opening scenes. Gatz suggested a new title, “Skeletons in the Closet,” which Richard liked. It seemed they were on to something. And then the phone calls stopped forever.

  During this period, Klyde Young became Brautigan’s most dependable designated driver. One of the tasks Richard assigned Klyde was hauling away his garbage. Brautigan became paranoid about his trash. He didn’t want people poking through it for souvenirs as someone had done to Bob Dylan, but he wouldn’t pay for professional rubbish removal either. Security and economy combined in the same neurosis. After removing anything from the garbage with his name on it, scraps and letters that might identify him, Richard had Klyde take the trash away in the dead of night and dispose of the bags in dumpsters behind supermarkets and fast-food joints on the other side of the hill.

  Young often went to Bolinas on a Saturday or Sunday and spent the day with Richard, laughing, drinking, and telling stories. They’d always have dinner together. Klyde thought Brautigan’s ironic tales were very funny. At one point Young said, “Richard, there’s enough material here to put into a book,” indicating that he’d lose the energy “if you keep telling stories about yourself like this.”

  Brautigan’s voice grew deep and decisive. “Not in my lifetime,” he said forcefully. “Not while I’m alive.”

  Klyde took this to mean “that he at least considered the possibility that he might not be alive that much longer. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be divulging these things.”

  Richard seemed preoccupied with death during his last weeks. A large dead sea lion had washed up on the Bolinas beach. The rotting corpse stank, keeping sunbathers at bay. Brautigan strolled down the path from his house almost every day and stared for hours into the seal’s deliquescent eyes, watching them decay into vacant sockets. He took long solitary walks along the beach toward Duxbury Reef. On one of these lonely excursions, Richard came across the bleached rib of a long-dead whale. Hoisting it over his shoulder, he staggered back toward town.

  Bill Brown spotted Brautigan coming up the path to his house “with that whale rib on his back.” To Brown, “he
looked like a comical crucifixion, carrying a cross to Gethsemane.”

  “Where do you want this?” Richard asked Bill.

  “Put it in the whale rib locker,” Brown said, pointing to a corner of his garden. Brautigan carefully propped the arched bone against an ivy-covered hedge. It remained there, a curving white grave marker, long after his death.

  On another reclusive beach walk, Richard paused at the mouth of the Bolinas Lagoon as the tide swept in, bringing with it a huge school of herring. Millions and millions of fish poured in from the ocean “like a solid stream of silver,” Brautigan told Klyde Young. When the tide went out, the fish were trapped in the lagoon. There wasn’t enough oxygen in the water to sustain them, and they suffocated.

  About a week after this event, Klyde spent the day with Richard and gave him a ride over to Stinson Beach in the afternoon, along the narrow two-lane road winding around the lagoon. The stench of dead fish was overwhelming. “There was no way to get out of it,” Young recalled. They reached a spot where the receding tide had left millions of dead fish on the mudflats. Brautigan insisted they stop for a look. “Richard,” Klyde said, “let’s just keep driving and get out of this fucking stink. You can look at it another time.”

  “No,” Brautigan insisted. “I want to look at it now.”

  Young pulled over. Richard got out of the car and stood at the edge of the lagoon, staring at acres and acres of dead fish. When Brautigan returned, he said, “Klyde, we’re seeing something that neither of us has ever seen before . . . total war.”

  They were on their way to Bob Junsch’s house, where Klyde planned to drop Richard before continuing over the hill to Mill Valley. The plan included stopping at the Sand Dollar to have a beer and chat with Kendrick Rand. They pulled in by the firehouse, looking for a place to park, and Richard spotted a toddler, a little girl maybe a year and a half old, just barely able to walk, all by herself in the middle of the street. No adults were in sight. “Wait a minute. Slow down,” Brautigan said. “Drive very carefully. Something’s going on.”

  Klyde parked the car and Richard stepped out. “You might have to talk to the little girl,” he told Young, “because sometimes children are afraid of me.”

  Approaching the child, Richard spoke softly to her, reaching forward to pick her up. She appeared very comfortable in his arms. “Well,” Brautigan said, “now we have to find out where this child came from.”

  They opened the nearest gate and walked into the yard, hearing a party going on in the house. “Now I know what’s happening,” Richard said. “These people are all inside the house snorting cocaine, and they’re too fucking stupid to take care of their children. I’m going to talk to this child’s parents.”

  Klyde rang the bell, and the owner of the house came to the door. Seeing the little girl, he immediately realized what had happened and thanked the stranger for saving the toddler. Brautigan accepted the man’s gratitude but refused to relinquish the child until he had words with her parents, wanting to “heat their asses for being careless.” The householder didn’t care to make any more of it, and they started arguing. “They got into a pretty good argument,” Young remembered.

  All the while, Richard did not let go of the little girl. Finally the man convinced him that the baby would be safe and that he wasn’t going to bring the parents out for a lecture. That was the end of it. Brautigan surrendered the child, and he and Young walked to the Sand Dollar. Seated over beers, Klyde told Richard, “I know that guy. I’ve seen him around.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know,” Young said. “He seemed like some kind of a goon character.”

  Brautigan became alarmed. “Is he in the mob? Is there any chance that he might be violent?”

  “It’s a possibility,” Klyde admitted. “I don’t think that the guy, if he was going to, I mean, he would have been.... It’s over with, but I don’t think you should push that guy.”

  “I don’t want this to go any further,” Richard said. “Would you please go back and straighten it out?”

  “What can I straighten out? I can’t—”

  “Just go back and tell him something,” Brautigan instructed. “Smooth it over.”

  According to Young, “it couldn’t wait a minute longer,” and he went back to the man’s house to explain that Richard was okay. He didn’t mean any harm but was only looking out for the kid’s welfare. He didn’t mean anything personally. The stranger wasn’t angry and held no grudge against Brautigan. “I had to go back and report that it was all taken care of,” Klyde said.

  Brautigan’s final two weeks became a sequence of unintended farewells. The last time Simone Okamura ever saw Richard was just before she flew to Grand Junction, Colorado, to visit her father on his deathbed. Simone was downtown in Bolinas and spotted Brautigan sitting on the curb in front of the Gibson House restaurant, half-drunk with a gallon of wine by his side. He waved her over, and they wrapped their arms around each other. Richard told Simone he’d sent for Teddy Head. “Promise me one thing,” Brautigan asked, sounding very dramatic. “Promise me. Promise me.” Simone agreed.

  “Anything I ask?”

  “Anything, Richard.”

  “From this day forth, he shall always be called Teddy Head.”

  Simone gave her word, and they parted. When she returned from Colorado after her father’s death, Brautigan had also died. Simone found Teddy Head waiting for her at home.

  Dr. John Doss remembered seeing Richard in the Bolinas post office. Brautigan had “picked up a lot of stuff off the counter.”

  “From my publisher,” he told Dr. Doss.

  “Is it good news?”

  “Yes,” Richard said. “She’s going to publish something.” And they went their separate ways.

  The last time he saw Brautigan, John was walking along Wharf Road with his wife, Margot. Fishing boats moored here in the lagoon. At the time, before Fish and Game regulations changed the practice, it was possible to buy fresh salmon off the boats. They ran into Richard, walking with a tall European stranger, a Dutch reporter in town to interview Brautigan for his newspaper in Amsterdam. Klyde Young had picked Richard up at the bus stop in Stinson Beach, bringing him back to Bolinas in time to make his press appointment.

  Dr. Doss told Brautigan about having “discovered the joys of a Macintosh computer.” Knowing that Richard had trouble with spelling, John bragged how his new machine checked his spelling and grammar. Brautigan said he planned on waiting for the computer’s next generation, sauntering off with the Dutch reporter.

  Richard continued working on the IBM typewriter during his last two weeks. He continued revising his long piece on Russell Chatham and composed a rough draft of a letter to Paul Ferlazzo at MSU. Even asking for a job, Brautigan dictated his own terms. “I would like to teach one class of fifteen students each term in writing prose.” The letter was riddled with misspellings and awkward construction. A Macintosh might have come in handy.

  Richard worked in the margins with his pen, adding words, altering words, attempting different spelling variations. It was at best a haphazard effort. In the end, he never finished or mailed his letter to Ferlazzo. Did Hemingway become a second-rate professor? At the deepest level, Brautigan believed in his lasting fame. A great writer didn’t drop everything to go teach at some rube cow college. “Richard was never, ever, ever going to come down off his high horse,” Don Carpenter observed.

  Jim and Karly Zeno, knowing Brautigan to be alone and nearly friendless, invited him over to their house next door for dinner one night. While attempting to remain perfect neighbors, the Zenos were “a little bit frightened of Richard.” According to Klyde Young, “he was like a monster to them” because of his strange behavior. Brautigan lived up to their worst fears, rewarding the Zenos’ hospitality with a taste of monstrosity at the end of the meal. Having consumed a great deal of wine, Richard got on the phone and called Klyde. “Gee, I’m just over here at the Zenos, and they’re so nice to me,” he told Yo
ung. “They cooked me this fabulous, delicious meal, and they’ve given me so much of their wonderful wine, and after dinner Jim Zeno just made the most gracious offer because he offered his wife to me. It was quite sweet of him, and he really just wanted to watch. It was a totally wonderful experience. In fact, Karly Zeno got three of her fingers up my rectum, and she did it so beautifully and joyfully. I always thought this would not be something I’d like, but when I saw what love she did it with, I can’t think of any greater happiness than to have Karly’s hand up my butt.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Zeno looked on in disbelief, listening with utter horror as their esteemed dinner guest insulted them in their own home, spewing vile slander with a wicked smile on his face.

  Richard Brautigan spent much of his free time with Bob Junsch during his last two weeks of life. On the eighth of September, he was over at the Junsches’ house in Stinson and gave Bob and Shallen a number of signed books. He included a copy of The Galilee Hitch-Hiker, among the rarest of Brautigan’s early books. He inscribed it: “‘wishing and concerned one more week. Let’s see what happens. Why not?’ (happiness + happiness).” Richard signed his name in full, his tiny signature pinched and cramped like engraving on the head of a pin.

  “These are going to be worth a lot of money someday,” Richard said when he gave the couple his books. Brautigan had never played the role of a literary big shot around Bob, but Junsch thought it an “awfully pompous thing to say.”

  A week later, the Junsches gave Richard a ride into the city in Shallen’s new Peugeot. “He called for some reason,” Bob recalled. “He had to go over.” Junsch was on his way to the airport to fly down to Morro Bay. On the drive, Brautigan talked a lot about Japan. He also asked about Kevin Clancy, a bartender at the Washbag that he liked. Clancy was a friend of Bob’s. Junsch told Richard that Clancy was a good guy, “but you have to watch him if you’re out and about. He kind of likes his fisticuffs.”