Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Kelley had passed some unwritten test, and Brautigan agreed to a formal interview.

  On the first of August, the two men sat down with a tape recorder running and drinks in hand. They began by talking about poetry.

  “I love John Donne,” Richard said, his voice unnaturally precise.

  “Byron?”

  “Too fucking romantic,” Brautigan shot back. “Blake I love,” adding emphatically after a pause, “I love Milton.” Lapsing into “Imperial Mode,” Richard made a solemn pronouncement. “I have tremendous problems with Byron, Keats, and Shelley.”

  Ken Kelley changed the subject, posing a typical journalistic query: “Who’s your favorite writer of the twentieth century?”

  “I’m too old for that question,” Brautigan demurred.

  “Favorite Shakespearean play?”

  “Hamlet.”

  As the conversation continued, Richard loosened up, further expounding his personal opinions about modern literature. “Hemingway is the best short story writer in America,” he declared. Asked about books he liked, Brautigan listed On the Road; They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?; As I Lay Dying; Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby stories; and The Sea Wolf. Richard called Jack London “an extraordinary writer,” immediately pronouncing Martin Eden to be even better than The Sea Wolf. Flannery O’Connor and Henry James were two writers Brautigan didn’t care for.

  The discussion turned to Richard’s recent teaching stint at Montana State, an experience he hoped to repeat, only next time he wanted to work with grade school through high school students. “One week,” he said, “get in and get out. I’m going to teach William Carlos Williams, the early Eliot. I’m going to teach Stevens.” Kelley ended by asking Brautigan what he thought of certain popular modern writers. Richard said he hated Carlos Castaneda and didn’t like Gabriel García Márquez. “I’m not interested in neurosis,” he said. “I’m not interested in dramatic epics. I’m interested in specific information.”

  Within days of Ken Kelley’s interview, Richard and Nancy Hodge, along with their three-and-a-half-year-old son, Aaron, arrived in Montana for a short stay with the Brautigans. Around this same time, Fumio and Mieko Wada, Richard and Aki’s friends from San Francisco, also came to visit. An immediate party celebrated the arrival of the guests. Jim Harrison, staying at the Pine Creek Lodge, and Becky Fonda joined in the fun. The festivities began at Chico Hot Springs. Nancy Hodge remembered that “they played pinball and drank at the bar, and we swam.”

  “It was a two-tiered thing,” according to Ken Kelley. “There was the official party and the unofficial party. The official party was to welcome the Hodges. That was held in Chico.” Richard and Nancy left the hot springs early with Aki because they had to get their son to bed. Things got rolling when the others returned to Brautigans’ house. Tony Dingman warned Kelley that “word is spreading there’s a Richard Brautigan party, and anything could happen because he doesn’t do this very often.” Before long, a variety of scruffy locals arrived, looking for a good time.

  Ken’s “unofficial” party included playing a game of Go with Akiko and a one-legged Vietnam vet acid dealer on crutches. Kelley swallowed a tab, assuming Brautigan had done the same. Before his memories of the event grew “more and more psychedelic,” Kelley clearly recalled being humiliated by Aki at the Go table. “She was, ‘I beat you again, ah hah hah hah!’

  “Great,” Ken said. “I was hoping all of us could play an American game like Ping-Pong.” Pent-up emotions boiled over. Ken resented Akiko for demanding he work in her garden. His ensuing diatribe included repeated use of the word “Jap.” Aki fled in tears into the kitchen. Brautigan watched the entire episode, saying nothing to Kelley in the moment.

  Ken staggered outside, tripping under the stars, while the Hodges’ “official” party continued on another wavelength in the kitchen. Unlike the journalist, Dick and Nancy did not drop acid. Neither did their host, in spite of what Kelley believed. Brautigan preferred his enlightenment straight from the bottle. By midnight, booze had taken him to a new level of satori. Richard had a thing about perfection, whether crafting a line of prose, reviewing a contract, or concocting his spaghetti sauce. Earlier in the evening he’d regaled his attorney about the craftsmanship and harmonious beauty of a pistol owned by a friend. A phone call had been made, and the loyal pal drove the acclaimed gun over to Brautigan’s place for everyone to examine and admire.

  Around midnight, while the group in the kitchen debated the merits of heading into town before the bars closed versus calling it a night and simply going to bed, Richard declared Dick Hodge had to cement their friendship by shooting into the ceiling with the perfectly crafted pistol. Hodge declined. He didn’t like guns and wanted no part of drunken six-gun shenanigans. Brautigan insisted. If Dick wouldn’t fire the revolver, he’d do it himself.

  Hodge grew politely aggressive with Brautigan. Dick never drank much and was the most sober person in the house. Little Aaron lay fast asleep in the room directly above their heads. “I love you, you know,” he told Brautigan, “but I really don’t want to shoot this gun. I don’t want to wake my son.” Richard still didn’t get it. Tony Dingman and the pistol’s owner had to wrestle the weapon away from him, removing the bullets.

  “The next morning, Richard Brautigan was all apologies,” Nancy recalled. “He was all over me for an hour the next morning about how sorry he was.” Ken Kelley beat a strategic retreat earlier, heading across the creek to the Hjortsbergs’. He introduced himself with effusive Irish charm. Soon, he was begging for asylum. “Look guys,” he said, “give me a break. Please help me. You won’t even notice I’m here. I’ll sleep outside.”

  Aki came over a bit later, seeking sympathy from Marian. “Oh, that monster Richard,” she wailed. “That monster, Richard.” Akiko had already confided in Nancy Hodge, who arrived soon after to go riding with Marian. Afraid of horses, Ken Kelley hung around the barn overhearing mutterings about bondage while the women saddled up. That evening, Dick and Nancy discussed moving in to the Hjortsbergs’, but there was no more room at the inn. Kelley was already ensconced on the couch in the library alcove next to the spare bedroom where Gatz’s mother stayed.

  Brautigan “comes over, very grandly” Kelley remembered, “to show this is just a big cosmic joke.” Richard proposed “a joust,” a Ping-Pong tournament to be held in his barn. He stewed over Ken’s racist comments to Aki: an insult demanding revenge. Brautigan’s wife had been a junior high school Ping-Pong champion. Kelley challenged everyone to play the game. A public humiliation seemed in order. Richard asked Ken to oversee the construction of a regulation-sized Ping-Pong table and provide a spaghetti dinner for the spectators and participants. Kelley pleaded poverty.

  “So,” Brautigan asked, “how much money have you got in the bank?”

  “Quite a curious question,” Kelley replied, “but I’ll answer it: $12,000.”

  “All right, then,” Richard said. “You can afford it.”

  Brautigan wanted a spaghetti feast like the one Kelley hosted for fifty people at his Larkin Street flat the night they met five years before. Ken said he’d make enough to feed everybody.

  The next morning, Kelley enlisted Sean Gerrity to take charge of the Ping-Pong table project. They went to the hardware store in town and bought a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood, several two-by-fours, brushes, cans of green and white paint, everything they needed, before setting to work in the barn. Knowing Brautigan’s perfectionism, they double-checked the accuracy of their measurements, making sure their plans conformed to rule book specifications. Sean and Ken finished the table in a day. “It was perfect,” Kelley recalled.

  Avoiding the construction project, Richard Brautigan took Aaron Hodge fishing at Armstrong’s Spring Creek. His parents, Aki, and the Wadas all went along, “a whole entourage,” turning the event into a picnic. “It was just wonderful,” Nancy Hodge recalled. “That was something Brautigan did spontaneously. He was the one that suggested taking Aaron.”
r />   Akiko spent the afternoon shooting photographs. Richard wanted to teach his wife to fish and had bought her a seven-and-a-half-foot Scott fly rod, a Hardy Lightweight reel with a five-weight double-tapered line, and a pair of chest waders. Aki thought the baggy waterproof boots were very funny, like something a clown would wear, and she did not bring them to the spring creek. Aaron was having a wonderful time in Montana, excited about his first fishing trip. Neither Dick nor Nancy knew or cared anything about trout fishing. Richard knelt beside Aaron, carefully explaining the knots and which fly was the best. “He did everything for Aaron, step-by-step,” Nancy said. “He was just a sweetheart.”

  Aki recorded it all with her single-lens reflex Nikon. Richard made the cast for the little boy and set the hook on the strike, handing Aaron the rod. The kid thrilled to the electric action of the fight. Brautigan helped him play, land, and release the trout. Richard Hodge thought of it as his friend’s “idea of perfection. Richard wanted to catch the perfect fish and take it through like a little set piece.”

  The next afternoon’s Ping-Pong tournament provided drama performed on a bigger stage. Everyone gathered in the cavernous redwood barn, and the teams were selected. Aki, Sean Gerrity, Ken Kelley, the Wadas, Marian Hjortsberg, and the Hodges all signed up for a round-robin elimination contest with quarter- and semifinal rounds. Richard Brautigan did not play. He appointed himself the judge of the event. One round of the semifinals pitted Ken against Aki, a true grudge match. “It was vicious playing,” Kelley recalled. In the end, Mrs. Brautigan prevailed.

  The final game for the championship matched Richard Hodge against Akiko. Brautigan wanted his wife to win. “He didn’t like a loser at all,” Aki recalled. “So, I have to be his hero all the time. As a wife, as a secretary, or the friend. I have to be perfect for him.” It was not to be. Akiko lost to Dick. Richard, acting as an impartial judge, called the final point against her. Aki’s loss put a damper on the spaghetti party.

  Greg and Judy Keeler came over from Bozeman with Dave Schrieber. They brought along a bright, attractive MSU student as a date for Tony Dingman. When Greg first arrived, he spotted Ken Kelley in the living room and thought him “a loud smart-ass.” Keeler, “still fascinated with the newness of knowing Richard,” didn’t notice his host’s sour mood. Richard seemed playful, bouncing two-hundred-pound Greg on his lap “like a baby.” A little later, Brautigan took Keeler and the MSU coed up to his barn-loft office and gave them “a wonderful but sad reading” of “Shrine of Carp,” one of his recent Japanese stories.

  The trouble started after serious drinking got under way. Brautigan, insulated by the private sanctuary of booze, refused to talk about his wife’s defeat in the recent round-robin tournament. Late in the night, when the Wadas and the Hodges had gone off to bed, Richard staggered out to the barn with an ax. Accompanied by Dave Schrieber, he laid waste to the offending Ping-Pong table, smashing it into splinters.

  After revenging himself on an inanimate object, Brautigan returned to his house. He found his .45 and threatened to shoot a hole in the floor. “Richard, there are children sleeping upstairs,” Aki protested, trying to stop him.

  “It’s my floor, and I’ll shoot it if I want to,” Brautigan raged. In the end, he was talked out of indoor gunplay, “so the kids could sleep in peace.” Schrieber gathered up all the ammunition he could find and snuck it out of the house, and all the survivors (not including Richard) went over to the Hjortsbergs’ for a hot comforting sauna.

  In the morning, the wrecked Ping-Pong table provided novel breakfast conversation. “It didn’t look like anything you’d ever seen before,” Ken Kelley recalled. “It was a giant rubble.” When Aki observed the destruction, she took a piece of white chalk and drew a circle around the wreckage, like a cop outlining a homicide victim. Greg Keeler came over later, and Richard said, “Pardon the mess. We had to deal with a rude houseguest this morning.” Brautigan told Keeler he’d thrown Kelley out because he’d broken Akiko’s favorite lamp.

  Ken related a different story, claiming he wasn’t sleeping in the room when “the little Japanese toy lamp” was broken. “It got knocked over by somebody I’d never met,” he whined, “so because I wasn’t sleeping there to protect it, and should have been, that was my fault.”

  Richard and Nancy Hodge left early that day, driving off to the Bozeman airport with their son. Later in the afternoon, Ida Hjortsberg, Gatz’s mother, came to the back door, with a large shard of shattered Ping-Pong table she’d found in the woods while hunting mushrooms with her five-year-old grandson, Max. “Does this belong to you?” she asked. Akiko accepted the fragment, knowing her husband had hurled it out into the cottonwoods, possessed by his incomprehensible demons.

  Soon after the Hodges’ departure, Jimmy Buffett showed up in Montana. The Brautigans were recovering from houseguest overload, so he stayed at the Pine Creek Lodge with Jim Harrison. Richard and Akiko planned a dinner party to welcome their friends. Aki prepared a huge pot of borscht, one of her specialties, slaving in the kitchen for most of the day. Harrison, Buffett, and their group arrived very late, long after most of the other guests had already eaten. They’d spent the day floating the Yellowstone with a fishing guide and lost track of time, often the case when the trout are rising.

  Brautigan was not pleased. He watched the late arrivals, silently furious, as Buffett wandered about his kitchen, drawling, “Hi, I’m Jimmy,” to everyone he encountered. After wolfing down a couple bowls of borscht, Harrison, Buffett, and their entourage abruptly departed for Chico Hot Springs. Richard and Aki “felt snubbed.” Cleaning up after the last guest departed, the Brautigans decided it might be a good time “for a sort of second honeymoon.”

  The next morning they booked a room at the Bozeman Holiday Inn, heading over the hill in the evening for dinner with Greg and Judy Keeler. The Brautigans arrived at the Keelers’ with Richard “sullen” and in full “Imperial Mode.” The previous evening’s perceived insult remained foremost on his mind. It was all Brautigan could talk about, “before, during, and after” the dinner. Richard repeatedly whispered, “Hi, I’m Jimmy,” muttering “popular culture” as a disgusted assessment.

  Later in the evening, Brautigan instructed his wife to go on ahead to the motel room “and prepare your body for me.” Aki complied, but not without a sardonic dismissive rolling of her eyes. The night wore on. Richard, unable to let go of the perceived Buffett/Harrison snub, kept returning to the topic, over and over again. He called this “tracking.” Keeler wondered if his friend believed the process of repetition might somehow “exorcize” his demons.

  Close to midnight, after hours of “tracking,” Brautigan announced it was time to drive over to Pine Creek and “settle some business.” Greg Keeler had grave misgivings about this endeavor but fell dutifully into line, chauffeuring Richard over Trail Creek Road in his Mazda station wagon. Outside cabin number 2 at the Pine Creek Lodge, Brautigan instructed Keeler to “push this cabin with your car. I want it moved.” Although he was a Buffett fan and hoped someday to meet Harrison, Keeler complied, easing his car up against the log structure and giving it a little bump. “Now flash your lights and honk your horn,” Richard instructed. When Keeler hesitated, Brautigan did it for him, having immediate second thoughts about his act of retribution. “These guys are big and can be pretty mean,” he said. “They could sue me for all I’m worth. Quick, let’s go to my house and hide on the floor.”

  Back at Rancho Brautigan, supine in the dark kitchen, they lay staring at the ceiling while discussing the impact of Japanese films on Richard’s work. Around two in the morning, Brautigan remembered his wife waiting in a room at the Holiday Inn and suggested a return to Bozeman. As a conciliatory gesture, the delinquent husband had Greg stop at Denny’s and ordered fried shrimp to go. “She loves them, and they should be a perfect peace offering.” The order took so long, they both had a burger and fries while waiting. Keeler dropped Brautigan off at the motel at some ungodly hour, wishing him good night
and speeding off toward home.

  The next day, Richard and Aki pulled up in front of the Keelers’ home on Linley Place. Greg watched as she slammed the brakes, sending Richard’s head thudding into the dashboard. Greg had a vision of Akiko bouncing the “measly shrimp [. . .] off his face and chest, one by one” as he begged for forgiveness. Richard stopped by the Keeler’s place just long enough to tell Greg his wife had been pulling the dashboard stunt all morning.

  With the house quiet after all the guests had gone, Brautigan returned to the novel still called “So the Wind Won’t Blow It Away.” Richard planned a mid-September trip to Japan to continue working on his sequence of short stories. When the Tokyo office of the International Communication Agency (or ICA, later renamed the United States Information Agency), learned of Brautigan’s travel plans, they invited him to participate in a program conducted under the auspices of the American Embassy.

  Anxious for work in hand before his author left the country, William Targ wrote Brautigan in August, asking where to send the limited edition’s colophon page for signing. Targ finally spoke on the telephone with Akiko near the end of the month. The next day, he mailed 350-plus colophon pages to Montana in a beat-up tan attaché case. Richard and Aki took it with them when they left for San Francisco before the end of the month.

  Brautigan worked steadily on his novel, finishing a first version at the end of August. On the title page he typed, “This is a very rough draft and will be rewritten extensively. It is not publishable in this form.” On September 5, Brautigan received a special visa from the Japanese Consulate-General permitting him a 120-day stay in Japan “for cultural activities.” Akiko assisted him in getting this and wanted to accompany her husband on his trip to her homeland. Richard convinced her she wasn’t allowed to leave the country because she’d applied for American citizenship. Aki didn’t know if this was true. An obedient wife, she swallowed her hurt and anger, staying home on Green Street. Always a professional regarding work, Brautigan sent the signed colophon pages back to William Targ before taking off for Japan.