In mid-January, Ken bought a $47 round-trip ticket on AirWest and traveled to Redding, a forty-minute flight from the Bay Area. He rented a Budget car, driving twenty-five miles east to Shingletown, where he located the rural home of V. I. Wexner, who put him up during his two-week stay. Ken talked with V. I. (Ken’s host went only by his first initials) about his teaching techniques in the developmental class, focusing on how the censorship of Brautigan’s work deprived some of his students of the only books they’d ever shown any interest in reading. “I think,” Wexner told him, “the library has room for six books by Richard Brautigan.”
Identifying himself as a reporter, Kelley roamed across the school district, interviewing a wide range of participants in the case, including superintendent Frank Robertson; Albert Davis, president of the school board; various students; Leonard Neutze, operator of Anderson Glass Company; and boat mechanic Morton Giesecke (the latter two Christian fundamentalists who supported the book ban and gave John Birch Society publications to Ken). “It’s poison,” Giesecke said of Brautigan’s writing. “It will destroy the minds of the kids.” After admitting all he had read of Brautigan were the excerpts published the previous November in the one-shot eight-page “Concerned Citizens” newspaper, Giesecke remarked, “You don’t have to explore every corner of a septic tank to know what’s in it.”
Ken Kelley had his own secret undercover methods when it came to investigative journalism. If the subject of an interview objected to being taped, Ken made a point of turning off his machine and scribbling away in a reporter’s notepad, with another active recorder hidden under his clothing. Kelley always got every word on tape. When Albert Davis left the quiet of his trustee’s office, Ken followed him into a noisy basketball game in the high school gym and everything Davis said came through loud and clear above the clamor. Back in San Francisco, Kelley turned his research findings over to Richard Brautigan, who was so pleased he promptly extended Ken the promised invitation to Montana.
On February 15, Judge William H. Phelps of the Superior Court for Shasta County overruled the defendants’ demurrer to the ACLU complaint, ordering that Brautigan’s books be returned to the Anderson High School library. He appended an opinion that the books “could be placed in a restricted area, inaccessible to minor students unless they provided evidence of parental consent.” Both the plaintiffs and the defendants immediately appealed Judge Phelps’s decision.
It took ten years, long after Richard Brautigan’s suicide, for the book-banning case to be finally decided. On April 25, 1989, the California Court of Appeals for the Third District, in a two-to-one decision, ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and the ACLU. The prior judgment restoring the banned books to the school library was affirmed while the provisions “addressing restrictions on the classroom use of the Brautigan books and a system of prior parental consent for access to them” were struck from the ruling.
The court’s opinion strongly rebuked the school district for claiming their authority to remove books from the high school library, even those not deemed obscene, on the grounds that their contents were not “socially acceptable to the people of the district.” The concurring judges ruled, “The problem is all the more serious because the type of action, book-banning, is the archetypical symbol of repression of free speech and because it occurs, in a manner of speaking, ‘in front of the children.’”
The Court of Appeals noted that allowing the school board to remove nonobscene books based on “the nebulous terminology ‘pervasive vulgarity’ and ‘educational unsuitability’” would upset the “complex and closely balanced questions of state and federal constitutional law.” Such action “would afford a disruptive and divisive focal point for pressure groups to politicize the public educational system. Every book in the library would be a litmus test of the Board’s adherence to conventional views” and “the narrowing of the breadth of school library collections to the blandest common denominator.” Poetic justice enhanced the court’s opinion with a footnote quoting, in its entirety, Richard Brautigan’s poem “Education” (from The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, one of his banned books), saying that it “foreshadowed [. . .] this state of affairs.” This would have delighted Richard had he been alive to read the final decision.
fifty: rashomon
EARLY ONE JULY morning when dew glistened on the ripening grass and the mountain air retained a chill memory of the previous night, I wandered over to visit my neighbor Richard. In an hour or two, the relentless summer sun would burn the deceptive freshness out of the day and send all creatures in search of shade, but for the moment, the crisp, crystalline clarity seemed like a sneak preview of paradise. Usually it was Brautigan who came calling at breakfast time, coffee mug in hand, looking for a hot “cup of joe” and the latest gossip. Since his recent marriage, he’d grown more domestic, preferring to stay home with his delicate Japanese bride.
I recalled a moment on Richard’s back porch a week or so earlier. My friend sat on the rail, leaning against a support post as he watched Akiko picking wildflowers under the cottonwoods. She wore a flowing, patterned kimono, her dark hair immaculately coiffed, and moved with such grace that every delicate step seemed choreographed. Brautigan’s mooncalf grin revealed his unrestrained joy. “Isn’t she beautiful?” he whispered, a teenager in love.
The front door stood open when I stepped up under the archway onto the recessed alcovelike porch. A screen door obscured the interior of the house. Hearing voices, I called out a greeting and let myself in. This was standard procedure in Montana at the time. No one ever locked his door, and a certain casual informality prevailed. Before I got halfway across the narrow combination living/dining room in front, a bizarre tableau framed by the kitchen doorway stopped me dead in my tracks.
Just beyond the unintended proscenium, Richard Brautigan knelt on the linoleum floor. He was shirtless and barefoot, wearing only a faded pair of blue jeans. Shockingly pink and bristling with curling blond hairs, he appeared almost larval, an enormous golden caterpillar. His potbelly pillowed over the waistband of his jeans. He clutched a serrated bread knife in both hands, pressing the tip against his navel, staring pleadingly up at Akiko. His wife seemed to tower above him in spite of her slight stature. She wore the same kimono, the obi belted tightly about a narrow waist. Her hair sprang in a wild Medusa-like disarray around a pale oval face contorted with rage. “You no commit seppuku,” she shrieked. “You got no guts!”
I stood transfixed by embarrassment, not quite comprehending what was going on in the kitchen, and found myself eye to eye with Aki, her beautiful face transformed into an inchoate demonic mask. Backing silently to the door, I felt certain Richard had not noticed my intrusion in the intensity of the moment. The air of unreality seemed so tangible as I walked home it felt like I was floating above the ground. I wondered what exactly I had seen. A melodramatic domestic dispute? Inexplicably intense sexual game-playing? The rehearsal of an amateur Nō play? None of it made sense. No matter what the truth, I knew for certain I would always remember the unexpected moment as something abstract: a dream fragment, an image projected on smoke, a terrifying glimpse into the unknown.
fifty-one: trouble and strife
IN MID-FEBRUARY OF 1979, the Brautigans started looking for another new apartment. Things hadn’t worked out at the place on Lombard Street. A quiet single lady rented the flat below them, and Richard’s constant pacing in his heavy cowboy boots disturbed her tranquility. Complicating matters, the landlord’s daughter lived right upstairs, always available to receive the frequent complaints. The night Ron Kovic came to visit provided a final lease-breaking fiasco.
Kovic, a decorated (Purple Heart, Bronze Star with a “V” for valor) Vietnam vet, had become one of the leading opponents to the war after he was paralyzed from the chest down during his second voluntary tour of duty with the Marines in Indochina early in 1968. His powerful memoir, Born on the Fourth of July, was published in 1976, the same year Kovic addressed the Democratic Na
tional Convention. Ron and a lady friend arrived at 1264 Lombard by taxi. Brautigan and the cab driver carried him up to the second-floor apartment in his wheelchair. Kovic was also a heavy drinker. Richard wasted no time in uncorking a bottle of whiskey.
Loud music and laughter-punctuated conversation reverberated through the Brautigans’ apartment. “Heavy discussion,” Akiko recalled. Increased whiskey consumption took the hilarity up a notch. Richard and Ron started throwing eggs at the wall. Aki decided it was bedtime and dimmed the lights, “a hint that they should be a little bit quiet.” The hint went unnoticed. Akiko headed for bed with “big music still going on.” When she awoke a couple hours later, the racket in the other room had not diminished. “It’s time for sleep, babies!” Aki shouted. This did the trick. The carousing ended. Ron Kovic and his companion spent the night. In the morning, everyone nursed hangovers when the phone rang. The landlord’s daughter was calling. There had been one too many raucous nights.
Ianthe remembered “a hysterical evening” at the Lombard Street apartment when her father brought Dennis Hopper home with him from North Beach. At nineteen and hoping to study acting, she was intrigued by Richard’s Hollywood connections. Ianthe had gone with Richard to a screening of Apocalypse Now at Francis Ford Coppola’s house and met the actor portraying a drug-addled photojournalist in the film. Hopper’s character was partly based on legendary British war photographer Tim Page, celebrated for his reckless courage in Vietnam. After a traumatic head wound, Page became a caregiver for amputees and other gravely injured veterans during his yearlong recovery in the United States. One of those wounded soldiers was Ron Kovic.
Akiko went to bed early the first time she met Dennis Hopper. Brautigan headed out alone to a party. “I’m going to kidnap Dennis Hopper,” Richard told his wife when he phoned later, interrupting her sleep. Aki awoke to find her husband and the actor standing beside her bed. “Here’s Dennis,” Richard said. “I kidnapped him.”
“He knew I admired [Hopper] so much because of Easy Rider,” Akiko remembered. Richard “always asked me to cook some noodle, the ramen. Hot noodle. Chinese type of a noodle to the guest. Middle of the night. Very late.”
Richard Brautigan loved hearing Dennis Hopper quote from Shakespeare, especially the Hamlet soliloquies. Drunken snatches from the Bard resonated through the apartment when Ianthe went off to bed. In the morning, she found her father asleep and Hopper raging about the kitchen, hunting for something to drink. Dennis recruited Ianthe in his search. He and Richard had consumed nearly all the booze in the house. Ianthe uncovered a bottle of a peculiar Chinese liqueur “with a small pickled lizard lying in the bottom.”
Furious at her husband and his friend for staying up all night, Akiko had left much earlier. She grew more angry when she returned and discovered Hopper still in the apartment swilling down lizard juice. “Shit, shit, shit!” Aki shouted. Ianthe had never heard her “classy stepmother” swear before. Another morning, Akiko sat her stepdaughter down at the kitchen table to discuss Richard’s alcohol problem. Ianthe was unable to provide any help. The child of an alcoholic, she had become a classic codependent. She thought things had gotten “much better” since her father married Aki.
Rude, drunken behavior inevitably takes a toll on love. One night during this period, Robert Briggs witnessed the Brautigans’ marital discord firsthand. Briggs had gotten married a year or so before and his wife, Diana Saltoon, was “rather a Zen zealot.” Richard invited them over for dinner to meet Akiko. From the moment they entered the apartment, they knew the Brautigans “weren’t getting along.” Aki, “a wonderful cook,” had prepared a gourmet French meal. Richard worked his way through a bottle and a half of George Dickel, growing increasingly abusive with every swallow. “Diana did not like the way he treated Akiko,” Briggs observed.
“They might have had a lovers’ quarrel or something,” Diana Saltoon recalled. “She was a little bit sensitive and a little bit uptight. She was obviously younger, much younger than he.”
“He didn’t know what to make of her,” Briggs said. “She was far too sophisticated for him and yet he was very much in awe of her.” This was the last time Robert and Diana ever visited with Richard and Akiko.
Aki soon discovered the new apartment of her dreams on the second floor of 2170 Green Street. Situated between Webster and Fillmore on the lower slope of Pacific Heights, a district known as Cow Hollow, it had once been the home of Lotta Crabtree, who began as a pint-sized red-haired child entertainer dancing in mining camps and went on to a notable career in the American theater. Crabtree commissioned the famous “Lotta’s Fountain” at Kearny and Market in 1875. Her fountain once kept company at this intersection with the statue of Benjamin Franklin, which was moved to Washington Square, where it became part of Richard Brautigan’s personal mythology.
Brautigan had never lived in such a classy neighborhood. The grand sunny apartment had sweeping views of the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge from the rear windows. Ianthe described the living room as “cavernous.” Their building stood next to the Leander Sherman mansion, built in 1876 with a three-story ballroom where Paderewski and Lotta Crabtree both performed.
The Brautigans moved in to the palatial Green Street apartment by the first of March. The place was much more spacious than any previous residence, and their possessions weren’t sufficient. Akiko had the perfect solution: time to go shopping. She bought rugs and lamps and big black imitation leather couches. Richard left all the interior decorating decisions to her.
Brautigan got a phone call from James D. Houston, hired by Bantam Books to edit an anthology, part of a paperback series on American literary regions. Jim signed on to oversee the volume covering West Coast fiction. He wanted to include excerpts from Trout Fishing in America. The other authors accepted $300 or $400 for reprint permission. Brautigan’s publisher “wanted something like $1,800.”
Jim told Richard this was “going to be a one-of-a-kind collection, and it’s going to define West Coast literature, and I want you to be in it.”
“How much can you pay?” Richard asked.
“Well, they wanted $1,800. We’re looking at three or four hundred.”
“You call them back and tell my agent that we’ll take whatever you can pay,” Brautigan said, “because I want to be in that collection.”
“He greased the wheels,” Houston recalled, “and we settled on, I think it was $350. The money wasn’t as important to him as being in that [book]. He knew that this was going to put his work in the context that was important to him.”
“It was something he did as a favor,” observed Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Jim’s wife. The book was published later in the year. Richard’s work was included alongside selections by John Steinbeck, Raymond Chandler, Tillie Olsen, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Tom Robbins, Ishmael Reed, Thomas Sanchez, and Wallace Stegner.
Brautigan’s residency at Montana State University began the second week in April, his first public appearance since 1971. Richard, always a scrupulous guardian of his image, gave careful thought to what he would do and say before the gathered students. Greg Keeler recalled that week (April 9–13) as “all sort of a blur.” The faculty found Brautigan a place to stay in Bozeman so he wouldn’t have to commute over the pass from Paradise Valley. Aki had remained behind, decorating their new San Francisco apartment.
The Keelers hosted a party for Brautigan. Other nights, Greg and Richard hit the local bars, evenings lost in a fog of booze. One afternoon, Brautigan phoned Marcia Clay in Frisco. She was startled to hear his voice. She recognized it instantly, although he didn’t announce himself by name. Richard sounded “cloudy” on the long-distance line, but Marcia thought “his voice was so real, just the same as ever.” Brautigan wanted to know if Clay had “gone to bed with such and such.” Angry, Clay said no. Even if she had, it was her own business. “Right,” Richard said.
She was happy to hear from Richard. A month earlier, Marcia wrote in her diary, “I miss him. I want his company lat
e at night when there is only solitude and I know there is no one, before or since, but Richard that I can talk to.” Anxious to go out for a swim, Clay knew Brautigan was capable of talking for hours, so she said goodbye and headed for the pool.
Brautigan’s duties as poet-in-residence included giving a formal poetry reading in the Student Union. He donned a sport jacket for the occasion and attracted “a small audience.” A larger crowd turned out for his performance at Cheever Hall, where he interspersed his readings and anecdotes with recordings by Pink Lady, an all-female Japanese pop group. Richard went fishing on his last day in Montana. Greg Keeler drove him to an irrigation dam on the West Gallatin River north of Four Corners. David Schrieber, an MSU senior writing a novel as an independent studies project, came along. Keeler described it as “an impromptu trip.” They had no waders and brought only a couple fly rods and several Woolly Worms flies.
Deep windblown snow banks piled against the edge of the irrigation ditch. Greg led them toward his favorite spot. Another fisherman saw them and started running to get there first. “Look at his little feeties go,” Keeler said. Richard loved this, repeating “little feeties” with great pleasure. They beat the interloping angler to the chosen hole, and the stranger sulked off with what Brautigan called “a crumpled Charlie Brown mouth.”
The three anglers were after mountain whitefish, a species native to Montana but not favored by fly fisherman because of their sluggish fight and small suckerlike mouths. Richard wanted three big whitefish for a special dish Akiko prepared. By day’s end, Brautigan’s departure time fast approached and they had only landed two. Keeler rose to the occasion, “walloped” his Woolly Worm on the surface, “and caught a large stupid whitefish.” Quota in hand, the fishing trio hurried back to town. Greg filleted the whitefish and packed them in rock salt (a requirement for Aki’s recipe) before driving Richard to the airport just in time to make his plane.
Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan Page 117