Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Helen had often spoken with her needy client at odd hours, but she was in no mood to deal with Richard on this particular night. Her “dear, dear friend” Pat Hemingway, someone Brautigan had met and liked, had been diagnosed with cancer two and a half months earlier. The day before Thanksgiving, Pat had been released from the hospital and came to stay with Helen Brann, who was nursing her when Richard called. She was in no mood to set aside her friend’s medication to deal with Brautigan at this late hour. Their curt conversation ended abruptly. Richard said he would not speak with her again until after the new year and hung up.

  Deeply insulted by his agent’s continuing “lack of communication,” Brautigan sank deeper and deeper into a melancholy funk. Three days later, he sent a telegram to John Hartnett, who had joined Helen Brann as a coagent: “Cancel hotel reservations. Not coming east.” Richard had told Helen he would call “next week concerning business,” but made no mention of his recent marriage to Aki. Helen knew “something [had] gone terribly wrong” and “searched for a clue to what [she] might have done to offend him.”

  Brann wrote Brautigan a heartfelt handwritten letter, apologizing for her lack of communication and explaining her current painful situation with Pat Hemingway. Helen asked Richard to call her. “I am worried and anxious to hear from you.” Richard did not call. Neither did he write back to Brann. Instead, he sent a comforting letter to her friend Pat, perceptively describing Hemingway’s “special qualities.” Subsequently, Brann placed several phone calls to Brautigan, all answered by his wife. Her partner, John Hartnett, also failed in several attempts to reach Richard directly. Akiko was running interference.

  Soon afterward, the newlyweds returned to Montana and resumed their low-key life at Pine Creek with Tony Dingman as their unofficial resident jack-of-all-trades. December days were short and often gloomy in the Northwest. Freezing weather canceled the fishing possibilities, although the Yellowstone River remained legally open to anglers year-round. Housebound, surrounded by acres of frozen snow, Richard, Aki, and Tony all looked for amusing ways to pass the time. Brautigan had his morning writing schedule. Dingman wrote poetry, but had no long-range projects under way and mostly worked in short bursts. Tony turned his attention to a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle.

  The picture on the box cover showed a harbor scene, boats bobbing at anchor beneath a cloudless blue sky. Dingman set to work on the dining room table. After three days of solitary concentration, the puzzle remained 80 percent complete, everything done except the sky. Dingman avoided the puzzle. He sat in a rocking chair in the front room, staring in mournfully at the dining table. “I can’t finish it,” he said. “The blue sky is hopeless.” Brautigan got the vacuum cleaner, plugged it in, and vacuumed the puzzle, piece by piece, off the table. Tony had never seen his friend look happier. “He loved it,” Dingman recalled. Richard returned the vacuum cleaner to storage. “There was just too much blue,” Tony said. Soon after, Brautigan wrote a short story he called “Blue Sky.”

  Richard and Aki went back down to San Francisco for the Christmas holidays. After a spell of rural solitude, Brautigan welcomed the energetic bustle of city life. The Hjortsbergs had left to spend the winter in Haiti; Tom McGuane and his new wife, Laurie, were off in Key West; Russell Chatham had departed for parts unknown. None of the Montana Gang was around, and the weather had turned bitterly cold.

  Brautigan’s San Francisco friends all greeted Akiko warmly. John and Margot Doss thought the world of her. Don Carpenter sounded enthusiastic albeit sexist. “A very beautiful, very accomplished, very intelligent woman,” he said. “The best pair of tits in Japan, bar none.” Jack Thibeau remembered Aki as “very pleasant.” Although Ron Loewinsohn liked Akiko, he adopted a more pragmatic view. Richard “thought he had gotten the archetypical geisha, who would walk three feet behind him,” Ron said. “But Aki was really very modern and very tough.”

  The Brautigan’s new friends, Fumio and Mieko Wada, hosted a grand New Year’s Eve party in their honor a month after the wedding. They had entertained Richard and Aki several times previously, “a number of wonderful evenings,” parties including Japanese film stars, models, and Nō theater actors. The Dosses, who lived across the street, were among the New Year’s guests and remembered a ceremonial dinner “on a tremendous big tray, a big fish in the center surrounded by smaller fishes surrounded by even smaller fishes.” All the specialty seafood had been hand-carried to San Francisco from Japan by friends of the Wadas. “Richard loved this,” Margot Doss recalled. “It had been done especially for his benefit. That was an enchanted night. We all had such a good time.”

  Don Carpenter recalled a drunken evening spent at the Wadas’ place with Richard and Aki. Fumio’s job involved working with a computer in a closet. Don thought he might be a Japanese spy. When he mentioned this to Brautigan, “he sort of didn’t deny it.” As the evening progressed, Carpenter got very drunk and blacked out. “As I did when I was a drinking person,” he confessed years later.

  Don woke up about four in the morning in the spare bedroom of the Brautigans’ apartment. After an hour of lying in the dark, “eaten by guilt,” he got up and left the building. Outside on the street, not seeing his car anywhere, Carpenter reached into his pocket, coming up with “a huge bunch of keys that did not belong to me.” Don left them under the doormat and went home.

  Later in the morning, after coffee and reading the Chronicle, Carpenter called the Brautigans’ number. When Richard heard Don’s voice on the line, he hung up. Don called back, “wondering what dreadful shit” he had caused. This time, Akiko picked up the phone. “I wanted to tell you about the keys under the door,” Carpenter said.

  “You broke Richard’s glasses and you bit me,” Aki shrieked.

  “What! I did what?”

  Brautigan grabbed the phone from his wife as Carpenter stammered in “this guilt paroxysm.” Before he could utter a word of apology, Richard said, “I don’t want to talk to you, goddamn you, asshole!” and slammed down the receiver.

  Don immediately wrote Richard a letter “of abject apology with no literary attempt to palliate my evil.” He literally begged for forgiveness. During his “guilty hangover,” another friend, Bill Hamilton, the cartoonist, phoned him. Carpenter told the story, and the artist laughed. Hamilton made a drawing of the episode showing an obviously hungover man on the telephone. The caption read: “I did not break your glasses. I did not bite your wife.” It ran in the Chronicle and a number of other newspapers in Hamilton’s feature, “The Now Society.”

  Brautigan got a big kick out of the cartoon. He had long since forgiven Carpenter for his louche behavior. “I think Richard thought that Hamilton had class,” Don observed, “because Hamilton is always telling people or hinting that he is related to Alexander Hamilton.”

  In January, J. D. Leitaker, principal of the Anderson Union High School in Shasta County, California, removed five of Richard Brautigan’s books (A Confederate General from Big Sur, Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, The Abortion: An Historical Romance, and Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt) from the shelves of the school library and from the classroom of V. I. Wexner, who, for the past eight years, had taught Developmental Reading in Anderson, a small lumber mill community twelve miles southeast of Redding in the Siskiyou foothills. Wexner, a 1963 Princeton graduate, had been having great success encouraging his students to read by offering complete freedom of choice and providing a wide and varied cross-section of literature from which to choose. A native New Yorker who had attended an experimental high school, V. I. must have seemed an unconventional teacher in conservative Shasta County. For his part, Wexner considered Principal Leitaker to be a “bully.”

  Leitaker’s “suspicion” arose the previous month when Wexner ordered new books for his class and a discrepancy appeared between the titles as written on the purchase order and the full titles printed on the receipts received by the head of the school’s reading program. Wexner had shortened two o
f the titles to The Springhill Mine Disaster and An Historical Romance. “I think the instructor could find works of a similar nature without the sexual references and the profanity that is in these books,” Leitaker said.

  This wasn’t Brautigan’s first brush with censorship. Two years earlier, in April of 1976, Stefanie Rose, a Long Island high school teacher (Carmel, New York), wrote to Richard asking for his help. She had been teaching In Watermelon Sugar as part of her literature of fantasy course for three years. A month earlier, “a rather outspoken member” of the community had pulled his children out of the Carmel School, citing Brautigan’s book as the reason. In an official complaint, this parent claimed “the explicit sexual passages” and “the completely aberrational behavior depicted” led to “the criminal corruption of my son’s morals.” Although a teacher’s committee, formed in response to this complaint, found nothing “wrong” with In Watermelon Sugar, Rose thought the “fireworks are still flying.” In the end, the Carmel School District took no action against Richard’s novel, but clearly trouble was brewing from coast to coast.

  Unaware of the controversy swirling about his author’s work in Shasta County, Seymour Lawrence made a business trip to San Francisco. Among his many appointments, an invitation to 1349 Kearny Street came as a pleasant diversion. Richard Brautigan greeted Sam with a bottle of top-shelf bourbon. The other guests were Richard and Nancy Hodge. Lawrence and Hodge met for the first time, qualifying the occasion as a business deduction. Akiko prepared a “fine dinner” and charmed everyone with her considerable talents as a hostess. The recent marriage seemed destined for success.

  When Richard and Aki returned to Montana at the end of January, their pleasant insular life with Tony Dingman picked up again without missing a beat. “Some very, very good times,” Tony recalled. “Lots of cooking, lots of drinking, lots of laughs.”

  Occasionally, their isolation was interrupted by the arrival of a guest. One frozen day with the snow very deep and the temperature locked at thirteen below zero, Tony drove Richard over the hill to the Bozeman airport to pick up Harry Dean Stanton, who was flying in from Los Angeles for a short visit. Brautigan imagined the look of shock on Harry Dean’s face when he first saw the frozen landscape after having left the palm trees of L.A. only hours before. They drove the stunned actor back to Pine Creek along a road Brautigan described as “an icy sword cutting starkly through country that wore winter like a suit of albino armor.”

  On the way, they encountered six huge crows eating an abandoned truck tire in the middle of the road. Black and insolent, they made no move to fly as the car approached. Tony swerved around them, their double-ply dinner uninterrupted. “You’ve got some winter here,” Harry Dean said. “Those crows are hungry.” Brautigan later recorded the incident as a short story in The Tokyo–Montana Express.

  Early in February, Tony got the impression that Richard and Akiko “wanted to be together on a honeymoon or something,” so he boarded the Northern Pacific at the Livingston depot and took the train back east to visit his sister in Boston. His timing left something to be desired, his arrival coinciding with one of the worst New England blizzards of the century. He got stuck in New York and, with much effort, finally made it to Boston. Montana now seemed a balmy paradise to Dingman.

  Brautigan spoke on the phone with his agent early in February. He told Helen Brann he had decided it would be better to publish June 30th, June 30th in mid-October, rather than in March, as previously scheduled. If the book was published in March it would have only a couple months to catch on with college and university students, Richard’s strongest audience, before the summer break. A mid-October pub date provided almost the entire school year for Brautigan’s market. Richard wanted all of Jim Harrison’s letter used as the jacket copy instead of cutting it down to a blurb. Brann conveyed Brautigan’s wishes in a letter to Sam Lawrence in Boston.

  Helen planned to leave for a vacation in the Virgin Islands. On the eve of her departure for St. Thomas, she spoke by phone with Richard. Her client had changed his mind once again about the dust jacket copy for June 30th, June 30th. Brautigan still wanted to use the Harrison letter in its entirety but asked that the publisher cut a long praise-filled paragraph (“the most intimate book Richard Brautigan has ever written [. . .] a unique look at Japan as seen through the eyes of one of America’s most popular poets”) he had composed himself, substituting a simple biographical statement.

  The same day, V. I. Wexner sent an open letter to members of the Anderson High school board. He asked to appear before the board when they met to discuss the banning of the Brautigan books. Wexner told the board members, “Richard Brautigan is a serious writer” and that his books were “no more bawdy than Shakespeare or Chaucer.” Intuiting most of the board might be unfamiliar with Brautigan’s work, he urged them to read In Watermelon Sugar, the title he “would recommend first, if a student wanted an unusual book.”

  The Anderson Union High School District Board of Trustees, which eight years earlier had banned J. D. Salinger’s A Catcher in the Rye, held a public meeting on Wednesday, February 22, to deal with the issue of the Brautigan books. Forty-four people, mostly parents, teachers, and former students, were in attendance for the ninety-minute discussion. The faculty Professional Relations Committee and the school administration’s Administrative Council, acting under a district policy on resolving disputes over instructional material, both recommended that three of the books, Trout Fishing, The Pill, and The Abortion, be removed from the high school shelves. The committees differed on the acceptability of In Watermelon Sugar and Revenge of the Lawn and left the final decision on these books to the board of trustees.

  After a comment period where one parent said, “We are sick of people teaching our children barnyard morals,” and an impassioned plea for academic freedom by V. I. Wexner, Trustee Frank Yanger made a motion to prohibit the three books, stating, “I read one of them and, frankly, thought it was garbage.” The board agreed with his assessment and voted to ban the three, citing Brautigan’s work as “unfit” for Anderson High School. The next day the news broke in the San Francisco Chronicle. He didn’t know it yet, but Richard Brautigan had just joined an exclusive and distinguished club. At one time or another, 1984, The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn, and The Diary of Anne Frank had all been banned in America.

  At the time, Brautigan was more concerned with the status of his foreign editions. How many were still in print? Had any of the rights reverted back to him? Spurred on by Akiko, he wrote Tom Mori of the Tuttle-Mori Agency in Tokyo, his Japanese representative, asking these questions. Receiving no reply after two months, Richard had Dick Hodge handle the matter for him.

  Brautigan continued working on his Montana stories during this period. Richard’s short fiction often explored the poetic possibilities of the mundane. He wrote about buying lightbulbs and the much-anticipated spring opening of the Tastee-Freez, whose fast food he loved (the Big Tee burger, crispy onion rings, milk shakes in fifty flavors). Brautigan read each new short story aloud to Akiko, always first to hear them. “At that time, I have to be like a kind of a secretary,” she said.

  Margot Patterson Doss wrote a weekly Sunday column, “San Francisco at Your Feet,” for the Chronicle, and on March 5, it took the form of a letter to Richard. She began with a quote from Trout Fishing and thanked Brautigan for his $39.97 check covering the last phone call he made to Aki in Tokyo while her houseguest the previous year. Margot used the money to buy a new umbrella. The column described the Fish Roundabout at the Academy of Sciences (Steinhart Aquarium division) in Golden Gate Park. The Roundabout, “a surreal indoor ocean surrounded by wall-to-wall carpeting,” swirled upward like an aquatic Guggenheim Museum. The display struck Doss as an ideal Brautigan environment. “If you get any inspirations on how to fish this place, please let me know,” she wrote.

  The morning the column appeared, someone read it to Richard over the phone. Brautigan so enjoyed the piece, he called t
he Dosses and said, “Margot, I’m going to go out and catch you a trout, and I will bring it to you on ice.” Richard proved true to his word. He caught the fish, flew the next day with it in a hand-carried cooler down to San Francisco, “put it on this beautiful tray of ice,” and proudly delivered it to 1331 Greenwich Street, a grand, extravagant Brautigan gesture.

  Richard spent most of March and April in San Francisco. The art department at Dell didn’t like the June 30th cover design based on Erik Weber’s passport stamp photograph. They planned on not using it and refused to pay Erik for his work. Richard still had complete design control, and his friend appealed to him for help. Brautigan intervened, insisting the publishing house follow his original instructions.

  Dell went through the motions. They paid Weber for his pictures, but graphic designer Walter Harper modified Erik’s original concept of a centered passport stamp resembling an ancient Japanese seal. Harper used a more realistic image of the stamp, setting it off-center and turned at a slight angle. Weber hated this but demanded a design credit on the dust jacket. The Dell art department had the last laugh. Weber’s credit read: “Jacket illustration adapted from photograph,” misspelling his name “Eric.”

  On April 6, Emmett Grogan’s body was found on a New York City subway car at the Coney Island–Stillwell Avenue station, the last stop on the Brighton Beach Line of the old BMT. He had died from a heroin overdose. The fast-living Digger outlaw had come to the end of the road. Brautigan had lost track of Grogan over the years since they hung out together in the Haight but retained an interest in his old friend. A copy of Emmett’s crime novel, Final Score, published two years before his death, was one of the few books Richard kept in the small built-in bookshelf at Pine Creek.