Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Five days later, Anne Kuniyuki wrote Richard a brief note asking, “Would you dig my coming to visit you.” Because of appointments, the approaching start of the school year, moving out of her apartment, and the demands of her job, it had to be the first two weeks of September. Brautigan never felt entirely comfortable without a woman. When her letter arrived, Richard hurried to the glass public telephone booth by the highway and called Anne to invite her up to Montana. They made plans for her to come and spend a week.

  Anne Kuniyuki flew into Bozeman early in September. Richard paid for her airline ticket and arranged for a rental car. The day Anne traveled up from San Francisco, he wrote two new poems. Armed with a set of dictated directions, she found her way over the hill to the Pine Creek Lodge and cabin number 2. Anne stayed with Richard for nine days before returning to San Francisco. She was much impressed with the area’s scenic splendors and “had an incredible super beautiful time.”

  With Anne at the wheel, they toured the surrounding countryside. She sat on the banks of the Yellowstone and watched Richard fish. They drove into Livingston and Brautigan rented an Olivetti typewriter at Gateway Echo office supply. Back in a “very foggy” San Francisco, Anne found it hard to come down from the “high” of being with Richard in beautiful sunny Montana. She kept flashing back on the experience and mailed Brautigan “a package of goodies” as a thank-you.

  Brautigan conducted many of his business affairs in the outdoor telephone booth. Most of his calls were to Helen Brann and to his secretary, Loie Weber. He needed to dictate letters. On September 6, Loie initialed seven letters on the long-running correspondence list. These were the last recorded in the compilation Brautigan began in a stenographer’s notebook eleven years earlier.

  Richard made several calls to Valerie Estes. Early in October, Brautigan phoned her four times in two weeks. She speculated about their former relationship: “He’s a good person and sometimes I think he was right—in a weird theoretical—or distanced—way, the best person for me.” Richard first called Valerie earlier in September to offer a research job. He needed work done for Hawkline. The pay was $5 an hour.

  Helen Brann stopped off in Montana for a single night on her way out to San Francisco. Helen had recently parted company with Sterling Lord and was starting a new literary agency under her own name. Brautigan arranged with the Dills to have one of the Pine Creek cabins ready for her arrival. Originally from Colorado, Brann felt an immediate rapport with Montana. When Richard came by her cabin, Helen admired the prized new dark blue cowboy hat he wore. Without a moment’s hesitation, Brautigan took it off and “popped” it on her head. “It’s yours,” he said. The hat became a treasured possession.

  The McGuanes hosted a dinner party that same night, and Richard brought Helen along to join in the fun. Buffett had left, but Charles Gaines (Stay Hungry, Pumping Iron), had arrived. A Virginia country gentleman, Gaines’s impeccable manners and courtly, easygoing demeanor nicely complemented his buffed bodybuilder’s physique. Dan Gerber was another visitor. Everyone assumed he and Richard had previously met, but somehow they had missed connecting the past. At one point during the evening, Brautigan approached Gerber, and they shook hands. “Why, I know who you are,” Richard said, “and I know you know who I am, you know, but we’ve never met.”

  The raucous crowd around the table in the McGuanes’ kitchen included Gaines’s wife, Virginia, Gatz and Marian Hjortsberg, and several attractive young women. This was the first time Helen Brann had ever observed Richard among his peers. She’d spent time with him in New York, in the company of editors and publishers, but it was not the same. “I’d never seen him with his pals. I was really struck by the difference between Richard and the other men there,” she said. “Richard was being as funny as he could be, excruciatingly funny, and the fellows loved him for his humor.” Brann found her impressions difficult to describe. “I have the feeling that he was completely out of his water,” she said. “Not his depth. These men were so alien to him he was like another being. He was not effete exactly, but if you sat there as a woman, and all these guys were sitting there, and Richard, his hands and his voice and his being, he was in fact like a poet out of some other century, with these great big he-men!”

  Much alcohol was consumed. Brann observed that Richard “got absolutely soused, and he found some broad that he really liked and decided to go off with her.” Helen was furious. She didn’t know the way back to Pine Creek, and Richard seemed ready to abandon her. “I bawled him out,” she recalled. “Get me back,” Helen insisted. “You have to get into this truck with me.” The other guests were “just thrilled” by her outburst. Brautigan behaved in a “very gallant” manner and climbed into the pickup beside her, riding shotgun and providing directions as they “rattled back” to the lodge. Once there, Richard went straight to bed.

  Helen Brann had to catch an early flight the next morning. Brautigan, always the good sport in such moments, was up at five, knocking on her cabin door. Brann stumbled out of bed, hungover, finding Richard smiling on her doorstep, a cup of hot coffee in one hand and a jigger of brandy in the other. He poured the brandy into the coffee and handed her the cup. “He was incredibly kind and dear to me,” Brann recalled.

  During her brief visit to Montana, Helen Brann was pleased to learn of Brautigan’s progress on his new novel. Richard resumed a steady writing schedule on the rented Olivetti, and Hawkline grew throughout September. He wrote no poetry in the month following Anne Kuniyuki’s departure. Two lines of the novel might have been lifted from a Brautigan poem: “Finally they came across something human. It was a grave.”

  By mid-September a number of Richard’s friends arrived in Pine Creek for a monthlong stay. Jim Harrison, Guy de la Valdène, and Bob Dattila all took up residence in adjoining cabins at the Dills’ lodge. The boys were out for a good time, which meant a lot of eating, fishing, drinking, and recreational drugs. Harrison left his wife, Linda, at home in Michigan. Guy did the same, but brought along a new girlfriend, putting some distance between himself and a complicated family situation back in Florida. Dattila, who was divorced, came with his seven-year-old son, Andrew. “It was a really mellow time somehow,” Bob recalled. He had a Polaroid camera and recorded the activities around Pine Creek, snapping instant photos of the fellows lounging on the front steps of their cabins, drinks and cigarettes in hand.

  Bob Dattila and his son had returned to New York by the time Dick and Nancy Hodge came to Montana in the final week of September. Richard arranged for a rental car to be available, but the Hodges arrived two days later. No one came to greet them in Belgrade. Brautigan sent instructions to drive to a motel in Livingston. He had rented a room to watch a football game with his friends as the Pine Creek cabins had no television. The Hodges walked into the room and encountered McGuane, Harrison, Valdène, and Russell Chatham for the first time, all laughing, drinking, and shouting. A self-described “naive little girl,” Nancy thought, “Oh, good grief! What am I in for?” She soon discovered these big loud rough-looking men were “immeasurably polite, sweet, considerate, sensitive, darling guys that completely belied the way they appeared.”

  After the game, Brautigan took the Hodges to the Sport on Main Street and then on to another bar. Dick and Nancy were not big drinkers, so they mainly soaked up the Western atmosphere. Next morning at the Pine Creek Lodge, Nancy was up at first light. “It was just so gorgeous there.” She encountered Richard stepping out of cabin number 2, coffeepot in hand. He walked her to the irrigation ditch running through the property (like all newcomers, she thought this was Pine Creek). They kneeled in the dew-damp grass and filled the pot with cold running water. Nancy asked if it might be polluted from cattle grazing further upstream. Brautigan pointed out it was clear and fast-moving, a bit of romanticism on his part. The well water in Richard’s cabin was far less likely to contain giardia.

  Dick and Nancy sported brand-new, skintight black North Beach Leather pants, party clothes bought for a Montana party s
eason. On one occasion up at the McGuanes’, Guy Valdène had coolers packed with seafood flown in fresh from Key West. Shrimp, stone crab, plump glistening oysters. Richard provided bottles of Calvados and cases of Pouilly-Fuissé. “Nothing is too disgusting!” became the party cry of the summer.

  Quieter moments included fishing trips to Yellowstone Park and tranquil soaks at Chico Hot Springs. Richard and Dick spent much time together. Brautigan had been looking at real estate and wanted his lawyer’s advice before the Hodges left Montana on the last day of September.

  The property that most interested Richard stood on the opposing bank of Pine Creek from the Hjortsbergs’ place. It had been a several-hundred-acre sheep ranch recently subdivided into ten-acre parcels, one of the first such projects in Paradise Valley. A crude new gravel road cut across the pasture. Otherwise, the landscape bore no visible changes. The lot Brautigan was eyeing contained the original ranch house, crouching squat and stuccoed under the cottonwoods along East River Road. A magnificent hundred-year-old redwood cow barn towered on the hill behind the house. Numerous dilapidated outbuildings completed the picture.

  “I think I’ve got the place next door nailed down,” Richard told Gatz over coffee one morning in the Hjortsberg living room. Knowing others had been looking at the property (including young Dr. Noteboom and his wife), Gatz asked, “How do you know that?”

  “I offered a thousand more than the asking price.”

  “It’s yours!” Gatz agreed.

  Jayne Walker returned to Berkeley from Europe in mid-September and tried getting in touch with Brautigan. Surprised to find him still “up in the wilderness,” she wrote several postcards saying she hoped to see him soon. Richard made a beeline to the phone booth, begging her to take a quick trip to Montana. He was excited for her to see the “ranch” and meet his new friends. The problem was Jayne’s standard poodle. Richard swore he wouldn’t be able to sleep with a dog padding around in his tiny cabin. Jayne found a place to board her dog and flew up early in October. A rental car awaited her at the Bozeman airport in Belgrade. The first night in cabin number 2, Jayne learned more about Brautigan’s insomnia. He couldn’t sleep with an electric blanket, claiming it made a “terrible noise” that kept him awake.

  Jayne had a “splendid” four-day weekend in Pine Creek. There were dinners with Tom and Becky and Gatz and Marian. Marian owned a gentle Tennessee walker named Sundance, and Jayne took him for a leisurely ride down to the Yellowstone. Richard set the whole thing up. “He was just like a kid. So excited,” Jayne said, “that I got to do this.”

  In the same little-kid spirit, Richard walked her over to the place he was in the process of buying and showed her the most precious kid-treasure of all, the manuscript of his just-completed novel (but did not let her read a single word).

  Richard told Jayne of his admiration for Gatz, who, unlike the other writers, actually lived year-round in Montana and had a working spread, raising pigs, chickens, and rabbits and tending a large organic garden that produced what McGuane called “mutant plants.” Richard dubbed his new neighbor-to-be “Farmer Gatz” and “raved” to her about the Hjortbergs’ fantasy farm with its saddle horses, restored root cellar, orderly flower beds, and well-tended lawn. She felt Richard held up his friend’s life “almost as a kind of model.” Walker believed Brautigan dreamed of creating just such a place for himself, “if he were strong enough, pure enough.” She knew such dreams floated on clouds of alcohol. “It was scary how much he drank,” Jayne said. “I wouldn’t have thought that anybody could drink that much and live. Much less function.”

  Jayne Walker flew back to San Francisco. Richard bought the Olivetti he’d been using to finish his novel for $212, minus the first month’s rent. He also paid Guy Valdène $175 for a .20-gauge Ithaca/SKB shotgun. Guy got the .20-gauge in a trade from Harmon Henkin, a burly bearded Maoist writer from Missoula who liked to hunt and fish and frequently drove over to the Livingston area with a carload of sporting goods to barter. Swapping vintage fly rods, shotguns, pistols, cameras, and hunting rifles had become a current passion in Tom McGuane’s circle. Valdène got swept up in the swapping energy, becoming the new owner of Henkin’s scattergun. Once he realized he would never use it, already possessing a considerable arsenal of his own, Valdène sold the shotgun to Brautigan.

  Brautigan “went racing all around town and found somebody to put a plaque on the stock of the gun,” Valdène recalled. The little brass oval was engraved with the words “Big Fish.” Richard gave the shotgun to Jim Harrison in celebration of a recently caught trophy brown trout. Before the catch-and-release ethos became universal, Dan Bailey’s Fly Shop in Livingston hung signboards on the walls, bearing the silhouettes of their customers’ fly-caught trout weighing over four pounds. These were known as “wall fish.” When Harrison earned his own spot on the wall, Richard started calling him “Big Fish.” Soon after, Brautigan wrote a story he titled “A Gun for Big Fish.”

  Jim was a frequent recipient of Richard’s spontaneous generosity. When Harrison published a new book of poetry, Letters to Yesenin, with Dan Gerber’s Sumac Press, Richard sent him The Collected Poems of Yesenin in the Russian Language, the joke being that Jim didn’t read Russian. Enclosed with the book was a big picture of a wrecked freighter christened the Yesenin in the poet’s honor, suggesting if Harrison kept at it, someday he too might have a tramp steamer named after him. Jim acknowledged Richard’s deep love of literature. “I mean,” Harrison observed, “this is a guy that spent a lot of time in the library.”

  The Indian summer days remained warm and crystal clear. It cooled off quickly once the sun went down. The nights grew chill, perfect for long conversations around a wood fire under the pines, whiskey glasses in hand. Harrison and Brautigan talked about collaborating on a Jack Spicer project. Richard urged Jim to read Ishmael Reed, especially his poetry collection, Chattanooga. The second week of October, Richard took his 228-page typescript of The Hawkline Monster into Livingston to be photocopied. He ordered four complete copies, three wrapped for postal shipment. His last task on the book was typing the dedication: “This novel is for the Montana Gang.”

  On October 17, Brautigan signed a “contract for deed” for the Pine Creek property. At first, Richard bought only the house, the barn, and ten acres, but as time went by, to protect his privacy, he acquired the surrounding lots, two south along the road up to the tree line bordering an irrigation ditch at the top of the hill, another back behind the barn. Eventually, Brautigan owned a total of forty acres, which he insisted on calling his “ranch,” although a working spread in Montana, one large enough to earn a meager living, would run several hundred acres at the very minimum.

  Ianthe arrived toward the end of October on her first trip to Montana. Unlike his absentee practice with guests and visiting girlfriends, Richard actually went to the airport to greet his daughter. In 1973, the main terminal at Gallatin Field was a small cinder-block building. There were no Jetways, and portable stairs were wheeled out for arriving and departing flights. Ianthe remembered glimpsing her father from the plane window, seeing him waiting on the tarmac, his fine blond hair blowing in the afternoon wind. From the start, Ianthe was “enchanted” by Montana, impressed by “its sheer magnificence and the size of the mountains.” The shy, skinny thirteen-year-old felt equally drawn to the rambunctious Montana lifestyle her father and his rowdy friends enjoyed at Pine Creek.

  Ianthe liked the storytelling best of all. For as long as she could remember, her father and his friends “got together primarily to tell each other stories.” As a child, she spent many long hours listening to the fanciful tales of poets and artists. In Montana, she found herself in the company of wondrous word magicians. “Jim Harrison told his tales in a very laid-back style that I loved,” she wrote, years later, in her memoir. “Tom McGuane used his deep dramatic voice to hold everyone [. . .] When my father told a story, he would usually get excited and his voice would rise in the air, leaving the last word to collapse into lau
ghter.” At night, after a delicious trout dinner prepared by Jim and Guy, snug in her cabin bed, she was “lulled to sleep by the fluid sounds of their voices drifting in through the open window from where they sat nearby on old battered picnic tables.”

  Each day became a new adventure for Ianthe. Jim Harrison gave her fly-casting lessons on the lawn beside the cabins. Richard worried that she might hook herself in the eye. After a couple long afternoons of instruction, Ianthe admitted that she wasn’t cracked up to be “a fisher person.” Even so, she accompanied her father and his angling buddies on outings to the Firehole River in Yellowstone Park, and to a series of beaver ponds on upper Mill Creek where Richard like to fish for pan-sized brookies. The highlights of her Montana trip, aside from time spent at Chico Hot Springs, all revolved around social events. Particularly memorable were a big cookout for many guests under the pines at the lodge and a party at Tom and Becky’s where, when no one was paying attention, she got drunk for the first time on the Calvados left over from the Key West seafood pig-fest. She had never before noticed that her father “drank a lot. Everyone drank, but he seemed to go one step farther.” Ianthe slugged down her first surreptitious sip “in an attempt to understand him.”

  Harrison and Valdène departed before the end of October, heading for Jim’s place in Lake Leelanau, Michigan, for the start of grouse season. Harrison immediately dashed off a couple typed letters to Brautigan. Already missing the convivial Pine Creek fraternity, he lamented, “So I suspect I shouldn’t have left Montana when we were having so much fun. Fun must dispel all residual calvinism and be sought damning the cost. Laughter. Booze. Fishing. Sweet oysters [. . .]”