Marian did as instructed. She heard a lot of scuffling outside as Ward and the other bartender sent the Chinamen “flying through the door.” Within five minutes, the rest of the tong, “a hundred Chinese guys with guns, weapons, knives,” lined the sidewalk in front of Enrico’s. “Like in a movie,” Fechheimer observed. The cook came running in from the kitchen. “They’re out back too,” he cried.
“I know what to do,” David said. He picked up the bar phone, dialed 911, and demanded to be arrested. It took three squad cars to get the soused private eye out of the bar. They booked him into Central District Police Station a few blocks away in North Beach. While Marian, Roz, and Eunice scrambled about the neighborhood trying to raise bail money, Brautigan went down to Central Station with a book of his stories and sat outside his friend’s cell all night long reading to him. “He stuck it out with me until six in the morning,” Fechheimer recalled.
Attracted to dangerous characters with an edge, Marian soon became romantically involved with David. He invited her on a trip to Africa. Fechheimer wanted to retrace his youthful Wanderjahr across Kenya and knew from Marian’s own tales of third world adventures that she was unafraid of hard travel. Preparing for the journey, Marian asked her estranged husband to take care of their two children. At the end of January, Hjortsberg, along with his girlfriend and her young son, moved back into the spacious old house at Pine Creek.
Gatz and Peter Fonda were both born on February 23, albeit a year apart. The Pine Creek place was perfect for parties, with large rooms flowing one into the other, allowing for easy circulation. It made sense to host a shared birthday celebration. About sixty people showed up on the night of Saturday the twenty-first. The impromptu guest list included the Fondas, Jeff and Sue Bridges, Tim Cahill, singer-songwriter Kostas, Dick Dillof, and Phil White Hawk, a Native American musician.
An antique upright piano stood in an alcove off the main living room. With so many musicians in attendance, it became the center of the action. Jeff and Peter uncased their guitars and got into the jam. War correspondent Philip Caputo, recovering from a wound received in Beirut, heard the commotion from his cabin at the Pine Creek Lodge—where he worked on the longhand legal-pad first draft of what would become his bestseller, A Rumor of War—and crashed the party. Phil was made welcome and left in the early hours with a long list of new friends.
Another set of party-crashers from the lodge wasn’t quite so welcome. The new owners had a pair of wild teenage daughters. Away for a short vacation, the owners left the girls in the care of their easygoing grandmother. Not long after dark, the sisters showed up with a group of high school kids. Gatz told them it was an adults-only party and no minors would be served. They left, but not before stealing a case of beer cooling on the porch.
The next morning, the mother of one of the town kids phoned to thank Hjortsberg for giving her son such a wonderful house present. He didn’t know what she was talking about. “You know, that lovely silver tray,” she said. “You told him he could go down to your big red barn and take anything he wanted.” Puzzled, Gatz hung up and went to his barn to check things out, thinking the teens might have used the place for an orgy of their own. Everything looked just the same, without any sign of disturbance.
The bit about the silver tray troubled him, nagging through the fuzzy hangover fog. It dawned on Hjortsberg that his neighbor Richard had an even bigger red barn than he did. Nursing his third cup of black coffee, Gatz trudged down the frozen road to Brautigan’s place. He slid the barn door open on its overhead trolley and stepped into the dim cavernous space. Hjortsberg’s worst fears were confirmed. The place had been vandalized.
Discarded beer cans and empty bottles lay scattered across the wide-planked floor. Old tools and farm equipment, not used by Richard but much treasured by him, had been abused and tossed about like junk. Worst of all, White Acre, Brautigan’s beloved Plymouth Fury, backed inside for the winter, had graffiti spray-painted across its roof and sides. A six-foot length of two-inch pipe had been thrust through the hood like a spear. Looking in at the engine, Gatz found all the sparkplug wires ripped free, the carburetor and distributor missing.
Wandering about the trashed barn in numb disbelief, Hjortsberg came across a stack of cardboard shipping cartons in the far corner. Most had been torn open, disemboweled of their contents. Tom and Cindy Olson were selling their log home in the subdivision behind Brautigan’s spread, and he had let them store their things in his barn until they found a new place. Gatz had discovered the mother lode that yielded the purloined silver tray.
Not knowing where to find Richard and assuming he might be off in Japan, Gatz’s first furious instinct was to call the sheriff. But because the girls’ parents were friends and neighbors, he phoned the grandmother. When Hjortsberg told her he planned to get the law involved, she begged him to wait. She would have her granddaughters contact all the kids involved and convene a meeting at the Pine Creek Lodge. Gatz gave her twenty-four hours.
The next evening, Hjortsberg stood in a small living room crowded with sullen seated delinquents. He excoriated his unhappy audience, telling the teenagers they all belonged in jail, assuring them that was exactly where they’d find themselves should Richard Brautigan ever learn of their crime. The only way to avoid the clink, Gatz said, was to clean up the barn, restore Brautigan’s car to its original condition, and return the stolen items. All the kids agreed to cooperate.
A day later, Hjortsberg met with Tom and Cindy Olson in Richard’s barn to inspect the pile of returned loot. After checking things over, they agreed everything was there, deciding to move all their stuff to a safer location. Gatz had a quick look around after the Olsens left. Things were off to a fast start. Cans, bottles, and trash had been cleaned up. The old tools all hung back in place. Best of all, the Plymouth Fury had been scrubbed clean of graffiti, and the impaling pipe had been removed. The teen contingent swore that among their peers were skilled mechanics who would have the car running like new in no time. Hjorstberg said that was fine as long as it got done before Richard returned.
Brautigan was not all that far away at the time, traveling back to Boulder on Friday the thirteenth for a couple weeks in February. He stayed once again at the Hotel Boulderado, getting together with Ed and Jenny Dorn, hanging out in their kitchen like always. Dick Dillof was also in town, visiting the Dorns and performing. Afternoons, Dick played on Pearl Street to a small pedestrian crowd. He looked up and saw “a tall, gangly stork-like man” weave through the gathering with a bag of peanuts. No one knew who he was. Dillof didn’t let on it was Brautigan.
Deadpan, Richard unzipped Dick’s fly, placing an unshelled peanut in his crotch. He closed the zipper so that the peanut protruded from his pants. Next, Brautigan stuck peanuts into Dillof’s right nostril, one of his ears, and the hole in his hat. To finish things off, a peanut was inserted into the dobro’s resonator. “Sir,” Richard said archly, drifting back into the sidewalk audience without another word.
Later they got together, “happy to see each other,” and spent the evening “roaming around town and carousing.” A book of short stories about Dick’s adventures hopping freights and riding the rails was soon to be published. A paperback original, Hobo was released by Tower Books in 1981, with the author listed as Richard Dillof, “known on the road as Rattlesnake Dick.” Dillof hoped that Brautigan, in spite of his stunts, would be enthusiastic and encouraging about the project.
Seated in a café discussing literature, Richard called “good and loud so everyone can hear” to a pretty waitress passing their table, “A drink for my friend.” The waitress paused. “One Shirley Temple for my friend,” Brautigan ordered, ending any chance for further lit talk with Dillof. “Strong with the Shirley. Hold the Temple.”
Richard checked out of the Boulderado on February 24. On his way back to San Francisco, he detoured to Bozeman for a few days and hung out with Greg Keeler. He made no attempt to contact Gatz Hjortsberg during his brief Montana stopover. Keeler in
vited Brautigan to take over his evening contemporary poetry class for a one-time guest appearance. Greg had never seen his friend teach before. Scanning the room for pretty women, Richard spoke of the influences on his poetry and “talked about how he saw various movements in American writing,” themes honed to perfection on his recent book tour. Greg thought “he was good. [. . .] The class hung on every word.” Keeler knew he had never held his students’ attention like that, a fact perhaps not lost on the acting head of the English Department, who sat in on Brautigan’s lecture and “loved it.”
Around the same time, in the beginning of March, Marian Hjortsberg came back to Montana from Africa. Gatz packed up his familiar third-floor Pine Creek studio for the last time, hauling his typewriter and works in progress to his office in exile, rented rooms on a hill above the Livingston railroad yard. Adrift again in Frisco, Brautigan experienced a similar displacement. Home was where he hung his hat, some nights at Eunice Kitagawa’s apartment, others in his cramped rented office on Broadway. By the middle of April, Richard had moved into the Kyoto Inn for an extended stay.
The energy generated by Brautigan’s recent book tour attracted the attention of People magazine. They assigned writer Cheryl McCall, who had written the story on the Montana lit/art scene a few months before, to put together a piece on Richard. Roger Ressmeyer, a San Francisco photographer since his graduation from Yale in 1975, known for his work with celebrities (rock stars, politician, musicians, writers), was the editors’ choice to handle the camera work. From conversations with Richard, McCall became fascinated with his eccentric inability to drive a car. She decided to build the story around Brautigan’s distaste for automobiles, piecing together bits of their extended tape-recorded interviews into an as-told-to mini–memoir.
The day of the vernal equinox, following a formal portrait session, mostly head-and-shoulder shots, Ressmeyer took a number of impromptu pictures on the autophobia theme. Several involved Richard being hauled around Frisco in a rickshaw by his sturdy friend Dwain Cox, cable cars, Alcatraz, and the Golden Gate Bridge variously in the background. An abandoned railroad siding provided another location, Brautigan wandering like a hobo with his knapsack. In a lighthearted moment, Richard executed a jumping jack of joy in an automobile graveyard.
Another idea was to stage a literary gathering and invite a bunch of Brautigan’s old writer buddies. City Lights wasn’t interested, so Enrico’s became the obvious choice. People put the word out, hoping to draw about two hundred people. Curt Gentry figured he couldn’t make it, as something else had come up. Don Carpenter called his home from the bar at the last minute. “You’ve got to get down here,” Don pleaded. “No one showed up.”
“Richard was having problems,” Gentry observed. “Michael McClure didn’t want to have anything to do with [him].” Curt headed loyally down to the Broadway café, where he sat at a sidewalk table drinking and swapping stories with Brautigan, Don Carpenter, and last-minute stand-in Enrico Banducci while Ressmeyer snapped pictures. A quality of artificially induced merriment pervaded these images. Out of all Richard’s purported friends through the decades, only two took the trouble to help out when he needed them.
Ressmeyer also shot a roll of film in Brautigan’s narrow studio above Vesuvio, capturing him in a black Hotel Boulderado T-shirt, lobbing crumpled paper hook shots at a distant wicker wastebasket, and working at his electric typewriter by the tall lone window. The project occupying Richard’s creative time was So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away, the melancholy novel about his youth in the Pacific Northwest.
With a central theme focused on the accidental shooting death of his ninth-grade classmate Donald Husband, Brautigan threw all the other ingredients from his hardscrabble childhood into the mix: poverty, an indifferent mother, living above a mortuary, fishing the neighborhood logging ponds, jigging for frogs, early entrepreneurial efforts: collecting discarded beer bottles with his wicker baby buggy and selling night crawlers to gas stations. Everything from his past that Richard had long refused to discuss, even with his closest friends, he now resurrected as fiction.
Sometime around the middle of April, the grandmother looking after things at the Pine Creek Lodge phoned Gatz Hjortsberg to say all was well: the teenage mechanics had Brautigan’s car running like new. Pleased, Gatz nonetheless thought it best to drive to Paradise Valley for a firsthand look. The moment he stepped inside Richard’s barn, Hjortsberg knew that even if White Acre’s engine revved up like a drag racer at the starting line, it wouldn’t do the trick. The kids had replaced the punctured Plymouth Fury hood with one they found at an auto junkyard. The secondhand part came from the appropriate year. It fit perfectly. Just one problem remained. The hood was blue.
The next night, Gatz convened another teen culprit meeting at the lodge. He told them they’d done a great job and had nearly wiped the slate clean of all wrongdoing, but he warned that the replacement hood would never fly. Brautigan wasn’t color-blind. If his car didn’t start, it was no big deal. Junkers don’t do well sitting idle through long Montana winters. But there was no denying a hood of a different color. Hjortsberg cautioned that Richard would be back by summer, no telling just when. If they didn’t get the Plymouth repainted white before his arrival, the jig was up. All their hard work would mean nothing. An outraged Brautigan might even call the cops. The teenagers promised to take care of the problem.
Around the same time, Richard Brautigan worked with his ballpoint pen in his North Beach office, worrying various drafts of a brief précis of his growing novel on torn scraps of paper. He came up with: “So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away is an American tragedy that takes place in the 1940’s. It remembers the independence and dignity of a small group of people whose life-style was already doomed, even as they lived it, thinking that it would go on forever. The first television antenna on an American house was their tombstone.” He sent a copy to Helen Brann. She mailed it to Seymour Lawrence at the end of April.
On April 23 Brautigan settled his tab at Enrico’s with a check for $500. He paid the Kyoto Inn $439.51 on Friday, May 8, squaring his account in preparation to depart for Montana. Richard changed his mind at the last minute and stayed on at the hotel through Saturday night. He arrived back in Montana that Sunday, stocking up his larder the next day with $70 worth of groceries at the Livingston Safeway.
With a book to finish, Brautigan didn’t wait long before heading to his studio in the barn. The surprise sight of a blue hood on his white Plymouth struck with the force of one of his own disjointed metaphors. Richard wasted no time getting in touch with Gatz to demand an explanation. When Hjortsberg told him what happened, Brautigan flew into a furious sputtering rage.
“Why didn’t you call me?” Richard fumed. Gatz said he didn’t know where to find him. He could have been anywhere. The whole idea had been to simplify the situation. It was all about neighbors. Pine Creek Lodge being part of the local community, Hjortsberg hoped to take care of the whole mess without getting Brautigan involved. Richard had returned to find the cleanup completed and all the Olsons’ stolen property returned. Repainting White Acre was in the works. Brautigan had nothing to worry about.
Gatz felt he had handled the incident well and perhaps deserved some faint praise. He’d devoted hours of his own time to orchestrating the project. Instead, Richard grew more and more strident, lecturing his friend like an insane school principal. “There are two kinds of delinquents,” he ranted, beginning a long tedious reprimand, “juvenile delinquents and adult delinquents. Juvenile delinquents vandalize private property. Adult delinquents shirk their responsibilities.”
And so it went, on and on, Brautigan tracking on the subject of “adult delinquency.” Hjortsberg swallowed his pride and took the whole onslaught without further protest. When Richard sputtered to a conclusion, Gatz apologized profusely, hoping he’d heard the end of it. He never imagined what was still to come.
Over the next several weeks, Hjortsberg was awakened repeatedly by late-night call
s from a raving, drunken Brautigan. The inebriated message remained the same, delivered in an almost incomprehensible stutter. “Ad-d-d-dult . . . d-d-d-delinq-q-q-quency,” Richard stammered into the phone, repeating his boozy mantra again and again. Four in the morning became Brautigan’s hour of choice to deliver his carbon-copy message. Finally Gatz had enough. “Richard,” he yelled, “don’t ever call me anymore! I never want to hear your voice again as long as I live!” He slammed down the receiver for emphasis.
Hjortsberg wasn’t the only one hearing about delinquency that summer. Greg Keeler wrote of sitting with Richard on his back porch listening to “long painful discussions” about “the teenagers who had ‘vandalized’ his barn.” Marian Hjortsberg got an earful when she drank wine with Brautigan in the evenings. He also griped about his divorce. Agriculture provided a diversion. Richard announced that he planned to put in a garden over at his place.
Marian said she’d gladly help get things started. She already tended a big garden of her own and told him, “I can’t come over and weed.”
“I don’t want you to,” Brautigan said. “I want to get it in and have a stand. I want to have a vegetable stand right on the road in August.”
“What’re you going to plant?” Marian asked.
“I’m going to plant onions and potatoes.”
“How come nothing else?”
“Because, I just want spuds,” Richard told her. “And the sign is going to read richard’s alimony spuds, and I’m going to go out there and sell spuds to passersby.”
“We used to talk about alimony spuds all summer,” Marian recalled. “He never weeded the garden, of course. The grasshoppers came, and they ate the tops off even the onions.” David Fechheimer got most of the crop. He kept the gift potatoes in a burlap sack in the freezer of his San Francisco home. On an attached tag, Brautigan wrote, “Richard Brautigan’s Montana Spuds.” To commemorate David’s recent adventure with Marian, Richard added these words: “They’ve gone to Africa and traveled together and traveled in style.”
Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan Page 130