Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  “Oh, no, Richard,” she replied, “you’re not a male chauvinist pig,” adding in the same breath, “Can you loan me $500?”

  “Certainly,” he said and wrote her a check.

  Throughout all of this, Beh remained faithful to Brautigan. “I trusted myself never to sleep with anybody,” she said, “and also I knew Richard couldn’t handle it.” There was someone interested in her at the time, but Siew-Hwa never mentioned it because she knew it would make Brautigan jealous. “I had no idea how deeply jealous he could be. Because he told me how so many times he would come home to the apartment and his girlfriend or whoever was in his life at that time was fucking someone else in bed. And I said, ‘What did you do, Richard?’

  “He said, ‘Sometimes I just sat there and watched them.’”

  Beh, priding herself on her monogamy, felt deep sympathy as Brautigan related one bygone betrayal after another. She stayed loyal to Richard in spite of the tensions wracking their relationship. “I have to be loved not hated,” she told him, “accepted not suspected.” Throughout all their differences, the couple continued to live the celebrity life of successful artists in San Francisco, dining frequently at Vanessi’s and the Washington Square Bar and Grill.

  One evening at the Washbag with Tony Dingman, Tony suggested Francis Ford Coppola might like to join them. Richard was ecstatic. Tony made the call and said Francis would soon be on his way. And the long wait began. They waited and waited. A couple hours went by. Coppola stood them up. Brautigan glowered in petulant fury, unaccustomed to such rude behavior from fellow celestials. On another occasion, things went better. Harry Dean Stanton brought Al Pacino over to the Union Street apartment. After a bit, they all went out to join Jack Nicholson and Angelica Huston for the evening. Siew-Hwa, a student of cinema, was away and missed the party, to her lasting regret.

  Brautigan had every reason to be annoyed when Coppola snubbed him at the Washbag. Sherry Vetter recalled their “crazy little relationship.” She remembered one evening in North Beach when Richard and Francis competed in a mano a mano marinara sauce cook-off at Tommaso’s, an Italian restaurant that opened in 1935 on Kearny, just across Broadway from Sentinel Tower, the venerable pre-earthquake building owned by Coppola and the headquarters of Zoetrope Productions.

  Brautigan continued to have breakfast and lunch regularly with Dingman, Don Carpenter, and Curt Gentry. Carpenter had mixed feelings about these meals. “Richard very much liked to call me during working hours,” Don remembered. “If he knew I was working on a novel, he might call me every day for a month to go to breakfast. He’d call between six and seven, when I was just getting started. ‘Come on over.’ And I was so deeply in his debt, financially, as well as a number of other ways, I had to do it. So, I’d drive over to the city. There he would be with a big bag of laundry or something, and we’d go by the laundry and then we’d go by the various breakfast places. He would make the decision as to where would meet, what we would do, where we would go, who would pay—he would always pay—that is how he controlled.”

  On his way to visit Richard one afternoon, Keith Abbott spotted Bob Kaufman, the Beat poet, on the corner where Stockton crosses both Columbus Avenue and Green Street. Kaufman waited for the light to turn red and started to cross the busy intersection, “exactly the opposite of what you’re supposed to do.” The city traffic screeched to a halt as Kaufman, hands trembling, “wired on whatever,” shambled erratically from corner to corner. Abbott considered this a “disgraceful performance.”

  When Abbott got to Brautigan’s Union Street apartment, he was harshly critical of Kaufman’s behavior. Richard sat his friend down at the kitchen table, pouring them both a glass of whiskey. He explained how he first met Bob Kaufman back in the early days of the North Beach poetry renaissance, relating “little anecdotes about Bob’s sense of humor, how he defused things, how he was hounded by this one cop [. . .] Sort of gave me Bob Kaufman’s history.” Brautigan launched into another story about Kaufman, a sweet man and a pacifist at heart.

  One night on the Beach in some forgotten gin joint catering to interracial couples, an enraged bigot approached Kaufman and his date and started harassing him. “This guy just pushed Bob to the breaking point.” To make his point, Brautigan mimed the action in slow motion. How Kaufman picked a wine bottle off his table (Brautigan’s hand moved slowly through the air a couple of inches) and cracked it over the loudmouth’s head. Richard’s tone grew more serious. He told Keith that he’d only seen something like that once before in his life. “It came out of left field,” Abbott recalled. Brautigan told his friend about the time one of his stepfathers (most likely Tex Porterfield) hit his mother on the head with a cast-iron frying pan and knocked her out cold.

  Earlier in the year, Richard met Klyde Young, an old friend of Bob Junsch. Young, a house-painter who lived in Mill Valley had been to Japan when serving in the Merchant Marine. Conversations about his upcoming trip to Tokyo led Brautigan to ask Young if he’d paint the Bolinas house. Klyde thought the place “was in pretty bad shape. Sometimes you couldn’t get the front door to lock because it was warped.” Noticing how badly the house was overgrown with trees and shrubs, Young suggested he cut some of them down. “Who wouldn’t want to see the ocean if you’ve got an ocean view house?”

  Richard wouldn’t hear of it. He liked the seclusion. Brautigan also wouldn’t move a number of old pine-needle-covered stoves and refrigerators in his backyard. Richard told Klyde he liked to go out and look at them because they reminded him of dinosaurs. The house painting job also proceeded in an eccentric manner. Young ended up staying a long time and living in the place. “He wouldn’t say, ‘Paint the house.’ He’d say, ‘Paint this room,’ and then he’d disappear for weeks and the next time I’d hear from him, he’d say, ‘Okay, paint this room. Okay, start painting the windows. Okay, now paint the eaves.’”

  This went on and on, the work proceeding in reverse order. During the wet winter months, Brautigan had Young work on the outside of the house. “So there were days when I couldn’t do anything outside,” Klyde recalled. During the warm months, Richard had him working inside, “because he did it backwards.” Over the long haul, they got to be friends.

  Brautigan’s passport was issued on April 4, 1976, with a photo showing him long-haired, smiling smugly, very pleased with himself. He received a Japanese visa for a stay of two months early in May and left immediately for Tokyo. Siew-Hwa stayed at Union Street for another day before moving to temporary quarters in Berkeley. She returned to Richard’s apartment several times to clean and do the laundry.

  At Brautigan’s request, Beh installed a timer for the lights in the living room, setting it to go on at 8:30 pm and switch off at 2:30 am. Richard wrote her a “long” letter, and she replied, telling him of everything she had done. Siew-Hwa made occasional trips to Bolinas, checking that “everything was okay” at Richard’s house. She cleaned the place and installed another light-timer, set to switch off at 2:00 am.

  Beh’s memory of her first visit to the Bolinas house remained vivid. Brautigan told her the story of the ghost dwelling upstairs, convinced the spirit was trapped in the building. Siew-Hwa proposed he install a mirror above the stairs to free the ghost. She recalled a Chinese folktale relating how ghosts didn’t know they were dead until they chanced to look in a mirror and saw no reflection. Once a deceased spirit recognized it had passed away, it could move on into an afterlife.

  Around the first of June, Siew-Hwa traveled to Kingston in Ontario, Canada, where her ex-husband had a teaching position in the Department of Film Studies at Queen’s University. Richard wrote a long and “formal” letter. She wished it had been more personal and intimate. After Beh arrived in Canada, Brautigan phoned her from Tokyo. Japan was “a tremendous experience,” but he felt exhausted, having stayed up all night writing. Their conversation went badly. When Siew-Hwa told him she was thinking of going to Malaysia, he replied, “That’s fine, certainly. You should do what makes you happy.”
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  Brautigan flew back to San Francisco from Japan on June 30. Tony Dingman planned to return to the Philippines and continue working on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now once the sets destroyed by Typhoon Olga were rebuilt, so Richard found himself without a drinking companion/ designated driver for the summer in Montana. He also needed some work done at his place and figured it was too late in the season to hire anyone locally. Keith Abbott recalled Brautigan literally calling him “in a panic,” begging him to come up to Pine Creek. At first, Abbott declined. “Richard, it’s summertime,” he said. “It’s my big season. It’s when I make money here in Berkeley and I just can’t do it.”

  Richard told Keith, “I’ll pay you whatever you make in a day.”

  Abbott said he liked to “write in the morning and then go out and work.” Brautigan said fine. “He just sort of badgered me into coming up,” Keith related. Richard agreed on a daily wage and gave Keith a plane ticket to Montana. Considering it a “paid vacation” and planning on staying a month at most, Abbott arrived on the Fourth of July. A Dodge rental car awaited him at the airport, paid for with Peter Fonda’s credit card. Brautigan claimed he had no plastic because writers were anathema to banks. Keith didn’t buy it, considering Richard wealthy and successful, the owner of two homes. He thought Brautigan’s unspoken pride on being denied a credit card was “one of his grandiose romantic fantasies” tinged by a “whiff of megalomania.”

  Keith arrived on the night of the nation’s bicentennial and went to the rodeo at the Livingston fairgrounds with Peter and Becky Fonda. Richard had something else to do. He was not with his friends in the bleachers. Ianthe had been competing in the Rodeo Queen Contest. His daughter’s horse, Jackie, had broken her leg and had to be put down. Distraught, she tried riding Deane Cowan Bischer’s troublesome palomino but couldn’t adequately control the mount and only appeared in the arena processional on the first day of the three-day rodeo. Perhaps Richard knew of Ianthe’s disappointment and chose not to attend. Thirty years later, Ianthe still wondered why her father didn’t come to see her if he was actually in Montana.

  After the rodeo, Brautigan connected with Keith Abbott for a tour of Livingston’s bars. At the 2:00 am closing time, they repaired to a wild outdoor Montana party gathered around a telephone pole bonfire. Driving home in the rental car, Richard told Keith, “Put it up to a hundred.” Alarmed, Abbott accelerated to seventy. Brautigan demanded he go faster. Keith eased the sedan over the century mark. Abbott was puzzled by his friend’s request because he knew Richard’s sense of caution. In California, Brautigan never wanted speed and always made Keith drive on the inside lane of the Golden Gate Bridge, fearing a head-on collision. That night, Richard bragged how Montana was a renegade state, extolling the virtues of “Cowboy Freedom.” Abbott felt Montana provided Brautigan “license to override some of his strongest taboos.”

  The Fourth of July proved a true Independence Day for Timothy Leary, many miles to the south in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was finally released from federal protective custody. Leary’s initial freedom from prison in 1974 came the old-fashioned way. He ratted out all his old friends. The ex-professor cooperated fully with authorities. Among the names he named were those of his former attorneys and his ex-wife Rosemary, currently hiding underground.

  Leary later moved to L.A., hanging out with the Hollywood B-list. While a steady contributor to Larry Flynt’s low-brow skin magazine, Hustler, he went on tour “debating” his old nemesis, fellow ex-con G. Gordon Liddy. The psychedelic guru and self-proclaimed “neuronaut” promoted the wonders of the Internet, extolling space travel to colonize other planets.

  A couple days after the bicentennial, Richard Brautigan came over to the Hjorstbergs’ for a late breakfast. He arranged the gathering himself, sly and mysterious when pressed for details. Marian baked a coffee cake and got out the homemade jam. Richard approached formally along East River Road. He wore an obi-belted, block-printed white cotton yukata, the summer kimono used by both men and women, his long hair flowing around his shoulders. He carried a colorful stack of exquisitely wrapped packages. Ianthe followed many yards behind, a distance suggesting that she had no connection to the strange-looking man farther up the road.

  Following coffee, toast, cake, and genial conversation, Richard, with elaborate formality, gave a gift to each member of the Hjorstberg family, complete with head bows above his prayer-folded hands. The presents were not elaborate (a scarf, a mechanical tin toy, some stationery), but the gift wrapping was extraordinary, each box an extravagant example of tsutsumi, the Japanese art of wrapping. It was Brautigan at his finest, thoughtful, generous, a connoisseur of the perfect moment.

  Across the creek, Keith Abbott observed the other side of Richard’s personality, finding his old friend “harried, manic and humorless.” Brautigan had several projects requiring Abbott’s immediate attention. Having bought thirty acres to the south (three adjoining subdivision lots) to protect his privacy, Richard wanted the irrigation ditch at the upper end of the property cleared out so he could get some water on his new pasture, maintaining his deeded water rights, liable to forfeiture if not used. He also needed the fences repaired and the tall grass around the house cut down before it became a fire hazard. Raised on “a stump ranch” in Washington, Keith was familiar with the tools of the trade. Up at the crack of dawn, Abbott “really wanted to get out of the house,” and away from Brautigan. His old friend seemed “in an extremely volatile state.”

  Keith borrowed Tom McGuane’s old Dodge Power Wagon, rented a field mower in Bozeman, and cut down the tall dry grass around the house, revealing a large swampy area in the front yard under the cottonwoods. Water seemed to percolate up from beneath the surface, puddling a short distance from the house. When Abbott told him, Brautigan erupted in a furious tirade, damning the phone company for the problem. Earlier in the year, Mountain Bell laid a new cable through the valley, cutting a trench along the length of the borrow pit along the road on the other side of Richard’s house. Brautigan felt sure this had caused his water problem.

  In what Keith Abbott described as a “vendetta” against the phone company, Richard spent the next several days haranguing various Mountain Bell executives and supervisors. A telephone crew was dispatched to line the ditch across from Brautigan’s place with bentonite, a clay formed from the decomposition of volcanic ash capable of absorbing considerable volumes of water. When this didn’t solve the problem, Richard resumed his tirade in between calls to Richard Hodge, who advised him to contact local lawyer Joseph Swindlehurst. Joe told Richard he had a legal right to protect his property.

  Richard hired a backhoe to dig out the borrow pit. Keith Abbott tried to talk sense, taking his friend for a walk to the top of the neighbor’s sloping pasture across the road. An irrigation ditch ran along the side of the hill. Abbott explained gravity caused the water to flow down the slope toward Brautigan’s house. “You got it wrong, pal,” Richard replied, insisting he was within his rights to dig out the ditch. “My lawyer will handle this,” Brautigan said.

  The backhoe arrived the next morning to dig up the ditch. Before long, the operator severed Mountain Bell’s cable, knocking out telephone service to every home in the valley on the east side of the river south of Brautigan’s place. The phone company dispatched a repairman to deal with the problem, and Richard’s paranoia kicked into high gear. Fearing confrontation, he sent Keith out to talk with the man, who said it was no big deal, backhoes often accidentally cut phone cables in rural areas. Brautigan didn’t buy this, convinced he would be hit with a massive lawsuit. He stewed over this until four in the morning, when he called Richard Hodge in San Francisco.

  Earlier in the year, Richard had phoned his lawyer in the middle of the night from Japan. Dick Hodge had not been amused. He was trying significant murder cases and had to get up early in the morning. “Richard,” he sternly told his client, “the next time you call me after midnight, there better be a body on the floor and a smoking gun in your hand
.” Mindful of Hodge’s prior admonition, Brautigan said, “I remember what you told me. I want to know if you think this qualifies? I just caused the power to go out in three states.”

  Richard settled down after the hysteria of the Mountain Bell fiasco subsided. Taking a break one afternoon, Keith offered to sight-in Richard’s pride and joy, and old .22-caliber gallery gun from the twenties. Brautigan okayed the project but declined to accompany Abbott to the dump behind his house, where piles of rusted junk provided convenient targets. “No, I don’t like to go shooting with anyone else,” he said cryptically. “I had an accident when I was young.” He remembered Donald Husband’s death when he was fourteen, weaving the accidental shooting of a classmate by someone else into the fabric of his personal mythology.

  Keith tried hard to be sympathetic to his old friend’s eccentric behavior. Brautigan had just broken up with Siew-Hwa Beh but continued to have angry long-distance “shouting matches” over the phone. Lingering jet lag exacerbated his insomnia and increased his alcohol consumption. Knowing Richard eschewed all drugs but booze, Keith was “shook” to discover his buddy had a prescription for Stelazine, “which knocked him out for two or three dreamless hours.” Brautigan drank between one and three liters of wine with dinner, finishing every evening with copious quantities of whiskey. Abbott warned mixing alcohol with drugs might prove to be a lethal combination.

  Richard ignored this advice, and Keith took matters into his own hands. Knowing Brautigan didn’t enjoy drinking alone, Abbott started making long afternoon explorations into the surrounding canyons, delaying the start of the cocktail hour. On his shopping trips to town, he would “forget” to buy any brandy or whiskey. Instead of the 1.5-liter wine jugs Richard favored, Keith brought home the smaller 750-milliliter bottles. This undisclosed intervention, along with a pleasant fly-fishing trip, cooled Brautigan down for a time.