Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  One Saturday in early June, Richard went out on the town, starting at the Wrangler, where he drank up $50 before moving on to the Sport for dinner and more booze. Another $100 later, he felt no pain, his handwriting reduced to a wavering sprawl. On such nights, being not willing to drive became Brautigan’s greatest gift to the world.

  The article in People, “A Happy but Footsore Writer Celebrates His Driver’s Block,” appeared in the “Coping” section on the eighth of June. The byline read, “By Richard Brautigan.” A short introduction mentioned that the story stemmed from a “conversation with” senior editor Cheryl McCall and referred to Brautigan’s monthlong book tour as “four months of campus-hopping,” perpetuating another of Richard’s elaborations.

  As late spring moved into the full dazzle of summer, Brautigan kept busy working on his novel. He’d missed his deadline by three months but was not bothered by being late. Richard cared more about seeking perfection than the tantalizing second half of his advance. He wanted to get this painful quasi memoir of his youth just right and worried over every word and sentence. His social life continued as always: bingeing in town, barbecues at the homes of friends, hanging out with Greg Keeler. Ianthe had gotten engaged to Paul Swensen. For reasons he never explained, Brautigan didn’t care for the young man.

  One afternoon, talking with Ianthe’s fiancé on the phone, Richard motioned Greg Keeler over. “Here’s a big local bruiser,” he said. “Tell this guy what you’re going to do to him if he doesn’t treat my daughter right.” Brautigan handed the receiver to Keeler, who “gave the poor kid some sort of macho bullshit.” On reflection, Greg felt happy that Ianthe and Paul “both seemed to be good sports about antics like that.”

  Eunice Kitagawa came out to Montana for a two-week visit in July. Brautigan introduced her to Keeler and the Donovans. She and Greg hit it off right away and maintained a casual correspondence after Richard’s death. Greg found Eunice, “of all of Richard’s female companions [. . .] the easiest to get along with.” Brad and Georgia also “liked her a lot.” Greg thought Eunice “was so kind and considerate,” a good thing for Richard.

  Richard taught Eunice to fly-fish during her short stay. He and Kitagawa also drove down to Yellowstone Park (she did the driving), looping around through Old Faithful and the West Entrance to return by way of Gallatin Canyon, with a dinner stop in Bozeman. Other than this excursion and a couple fishing trips, Eunice remembered they “basically did nothing.” According to a mutual friend, “Richard liked [Eunice] but he wasn’t sexually attracted to her, so he wanted her to do the housework and have Masako come be the fuck thang.”

  Brautigan’s fantasies of an Asian harem tending his every physical and emotional need remained a remote pipe dream. The immediate reality of everyday life contradicted his wild imaginings. Brautigan cooked his meals and did his own housecleaning. Most nights he was home alone, slumped on the couch in front of his TV. Richard spent his days by himself as well, forging his art in solitude, as all writers do. For company there was always Greg Keeler, usually available for the price of a phone call. And the bars of Livingston were only a cab ride away. In mid-August Sam Lawrence stopped off in Montana. On the night of the thirteenth, Russell Chatham hosted a dinner party at his place at the upper end of Deep Creek Road. Gatz Hjortsberg came, bearing a bottle of wine. He and Brautigan maintained a cordial, if distant, formality.

  Unexpected phone calls offered an enticing change of pace. On a morning at the end of August, Mike Art phoned Brautigan from Chico Hot Springs. He said Rip Torn was staying at the resort with his twin sons and wanted to get together. Richard hadn’t seen Rip in a decade, not since the weekend in Westport with its surfeit of middle-class suburban comfort. Troubled by the long estrangement, Torn asked Art to serve as his go-between. Rip had just finished filming Jinxed! for director Don Siegel.

  Richard said he’d be there for drinks and dinner. He promptly called Greg Keeler, asking him to come on over and “bring Dickel.” To sweeten the deal, Brautigan told Keeler they’d be going to Chico in the evening to meet Rip Torn. Four hours later, after Dickel was gone, Richard and Greg “stumbled” to Keeler’s car and drove south down the valley to the hot springs. Rip and his boys waited for them in the dining room. Brautigan had last seen Tony and Jon when they were little kids. He was “tickled” to encounter them again as teenagers, beefed up from a summer of hard work on Joe Sedgwick’s Big Elk Creek Ranch north of Two Dot, Montana. “I like these boys,” Richard said. “I liked them when they were tykes, and I like ’em now.”

  Keeler observed an initial friction between Rip and Richard. They were like duelists, with cognac selected as the weapon of choice. “Two or three fifths” were consumed, the teens drinking right along with the adults and “the old hackles settled.” Without quite meaning to, Greg got stuck “buying most of the drinks.” He complemented Torn on his role in Heartland (1979), a well-received film about a homesteader and his mail-order bride, made in Montana for under a million dollars. Rip appeared “appropriately modest,” telling a long story about the false teeth he had to wear to play Richard Nixon in a TV drama. He also said that Robert Redford was “maybe going to start a playhouse in Paradise Valley,” a subject of profound interest to the actor.

  At some point during the drink-a-thon dinner, Torn and Brautigan traded hats. Rip exchanged the black cap with a cat logo on the front that he’d worn in Jinxed! for Richard’s blue Elmer Fudd lid. After the swap, Tony Torn got sick. The boy retreated to Rip’s rental station wagon to sleep it off. Richard suggested a walk in the cool night air might clear their heads. Strolling down the gravel road, Brautigan called out to the surviving twin, “Hey, Jon, can you catch?”

  Jon, famous as the family fumbler, replied, “Okay, sure,” and Brautigan spiraled a brandy bottle across the road. Jon caught it one-handed, hugging the precious cognac to his chest. Everybody cheered. Driving Richard home at 2:30 am, Greg Keeler realized it was his wedding anniversary. In a deep funk, he careened “screaming” over Trail Creek Road to Bozeman and made his feeble apologies to his wife. It was the last time Greg ever drove home drunk from Richard’s place.

  Ten days later, the “Poets and Other Strangers” group from Bozeman staged another reading at Chico Hot Springs. Richard had originally agreed to participate, but when they printed his name on a bunch of posters without permission, Brautigan “went ape shit.” He blamed it all on Greg Keeler. Reprimanded, Keeler phoned the reading’s organizers, asking them to print a retraction in the Bozeman Chronicle, per Richard’s request. One of the other poets called Greg “a spineless sack of pus.” Nevertheless, he read with the rest on the thirtieth. Brautigan did not join them at Chico.

  Around the same time, Richard got word from Eunice Kitagawa that she was returning home to Honolulu to work in her mother’s restaurant. She didn’t want this to end their friendship and hoped they might still get together occasionally in spite of the distance. Eunice was not adverse to long plane rides, reminding Brautigan of her two trips to New York during Thanksgiving week the year before.

  Soon after, Ianthe called to say she planned to marry Paul Swensen, hoping for her father’s blessing. Richard disapproved of their union and told her so. He also said he wanted her to be happy. After hanging up, Brautigan felt “squeezed dry,” like “he had crossed one of the saddest bridges” in his life. A week later, up in his barn studio, Richard wrote a story about his feelings. His first title, “The Death of My Name,” was crossed out. After another false try, he came up with “My Name Forgotten in the Grass.”

  Brautigan’s typescript consisted of a single brief paragraph. “She is my only daughter,” he wrote, “and the end of my family name. [. . .] My name became the shadow of an old deer bone cast among the green grass that once knew its name.” Richard struck out the end of the last sentence, rewriting in pencil: “the green grass that doesn’t know its name.” When Ianthe phoned her father back, inviting him to the ceremony, set for Saturday, September 5, in New York, Brautigan
said, “I’ll come to your next wedding.” They didn’t speak again for eight months.

  The Monday after his daughter got married, Richard mailed a finished copy of So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away to his agent in New York. Before submitting it, he gave a copy of the manuscript to Marian Hjortsberg for proofreading. Brautigan wanted her to “check the spelling.” At that time, he “formally” told Marian that he planned to dedicate the novel to her and Becky Fonda. That Wednesday, Helen Brann shipped the book to Seymour Lawrence in Boston, calling it “a superlative example of Brautigan at his best.” In a PS, Helen wrote that Richard preferred to wait a year before the publication date.

  In spite of his enthusiasm for the first forty pages, Sam took his time reading the novel, not informing the Dell hierarchy until near the end of the month that Brautigan had “delivered a complete and acceptable ms.” and was now due the balance of his advance. The same day, he sent Richard a telegram care of his attorney, Joel Shawn. This took a lighter tone: “My adviser Pisov Sheet says your new book pure dynamo and will make a million lire.”

  Brautigan kept busy closing down his Pine Creek house for the winter, having Bob Gorsuch drain his pipes, hauling his Chatham paintings, TV set, fishing rods, and firearms over to Marian’s place for safe storage. He paid his outstanding bills, writing numerous checks, including one to Mountain Bell for $564.08. In moments of solitude, Richard racked up a lot of long-distance time.

  Brautigan left Montana for San Francisco on September 27. Four months later, he wrote about this day: “I felt as if a period in my life had come to an end and I was now embarking on the next stage of my life.” He again took up residence at the Kyoto Inn. For the next two weeks, Richard resumed his Frisco routine, slaving away in the room above Vesuvio (“a period of intense income tax activity”), picking up mail at Joel Shawn’s law office, and hanging out at Specs’, Cho-Cho, and Enrico’s. He felt exhausted, both in energy and spirit, from a long summer working on his novel. Prior to leaving on a trip back east, Brautigan wrote Mountain Bell another check, in the amount of $370.33, to cover the remainder of his late-night Montana phone calls. Along with booze and bar tabs, the telephone remained his major expense.

  On Saturday afternoon, October 10, Richard flew to Buffalo, New York, booking a room at the venerable Lenox Hotel. Built originally as an upscale residential apartment building in 1896, the Lenox had been home to F. Scott Fitzgerald for ten months in 1898–1899 when his father had worked as a salesman for Procter & Gamble. The Lenox Apartments were converted into a hotel in 1900. Eighty-one years later, it was a bit down at the heels, in spite of a respectable North Street address and three surrounding McKim, Mead and White–designed mansions.

  Brautigan phoned Robert Creeley the next morning. Bob invited him over. One advantage of the Lenox was its location, an easy walk from where the Creeleys lived. Richard like the city of Buffalo. He found the architecture “very charming” and enjoyed strolling past the “huge brick houses” built back in a time when they were still affordable. “A time that will never come again,” Brautigan noted.

  Creeley and his wife, Penelope, lived with their baby in one of three cottages on a small quiet lane that reminded Richard of Hampstead in London. At 2:00 pm that Sunday, Richard gave a reading “from personal poetry” at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, a beautiful beaux arts building in Delaware Park. Begun in 1890 and intended as the Fine Arts Pavilion for the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, the gallery wasn’t completed until 1905, when it became part of the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy. Brautigan’s reading was sponsored by the Black Mountain II poetry series, a name adopted by the SUNY Buffalo Department of English because so many former Black Mountain College faculty members (Creeley, Charles Olson, Erik Bentley) taught there. The department also published a journal called Black Mountain II.

  Once Brautigan’s presentation concluded, he returned with the Creeleys to their cottage, and the serious whiskey drinking began, continuing into the evening. The more Richard drank, the more he complained about his divorce from Akiko, claiming she took even the doorknobs and the toilet paper when she left. By the time they all went out to dinner, Penelope Creeley was sick of hearing Brautigan’s misogynistic comments. His sexist attitude drove her crazy. Seeking a bit of peace, she dropped her husband and Richard off at the home of Bruce Jackson, a fellow faculty member at SUNY Buffalo.

  Creeley and Brautigan staggered in just as Jackson and his wife, Diane, an ex-nun who also taught at the university, sat down to dinner with a houseguest. Edmund Shea had originally been introduced to Jackson by Herb Gold and had come back east to visit his mother, who was dying in Boston. Steeped in grief, Edmund traveled up to Buffalo to get away for a few days and to visit Bruce, another gifted photographer. Much of Jackson’s work had been done in prisons. He had also published Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me, a book of “toasts,” a form of “the dozens” that was a precursor to rap music. Bruce had just uncorked a treasured bottle of chablis, not the cheap swill popular with pot smokers but the real deal, an appellation contrôlée from the Chablis district in France.

  Edmund Shea had never tasted a true chablis and looked forward to savoring his first swallow. He tried steering Brautigan toward hard liquor in hopes of preserving the good stuff for more refined palates. Already “three sheets to the wind,” Richard said, “No, I’ll just have some white wine,” proceeding to guzzle the precious imported chablis. Brautigan wasn’t talking to Shea. He’d been mad at him for several years over some silly dispute about borrowed money. That night was the last time Edmund ever saw Richard.

  Monday morning, when Brautigan phoned Creeley from his hotel room, Bob “sounded tired and distracted.” A young woman who lived alone in the cottage next door had been raped during the night. Richard walked over and sat in the kitchen “where the atmosphere was very slow and formal with shock.” He drank cup after cup of coffee with Bob until two police detectives arrived. They asked “thoughtful and serious” questions. Brautigan felt “the shadow of the young woman’s ordeal” had darkened the atmosphere for him in Buffalo.

  Scheduled to give a lecture at one of Creeley’s university classes, Richard fulfilled his obligation with the pall of the previous night’s rape hanging over him like a poison cloud. A sense of foreboding followed him for the remainder of the day. The next morning, Brautigan phoned the Creeleys and found Bob sounding “very shakened.” His wife had been awakened by an intruder wandering around their bedroom in the middle of the night. Penelope saw a man she presumed to be the rapist and alerted Bob. The stranger fled, grabbing Bob’s pants on the way out.

  With some consternation, Richard walked over to the Creeleys’ cottage and “listened to a story of horror” from Bob. The intruder had broken in through a “heavily secured” window in the bathroom. He had not bothered to take the tape recorder or the stereo. Why the man had stolen only Creeley’s trousers remained a mystery. Perhaps he reasoned a man without any pants was less likely to pursue him. The Buffalo police detectives had come and gone that morning, as clueless as everyone else. Coffee no longer seemed like the appropriate beverage. Bob Creeley poured them all some whiskey.

  While Richard and Penelope “numbly” sipped their drinks, Bob went outside. He returned looking grim and led them around behind the cottage. Creeley pointed to the spot where he’d just found a large butcher knife lying on the ground. It had not been there the day before. Richard thought it looked like something used in horror movies. The police again were summoned. The two dour detectives returned, not saying much, collecting the butcher knife in an evidence bag.

  The Creeleys decided they didn’t want to spend another night in their cottage on the little storybook lane. Brautigan had planned to go next to Canada and visit Mina and Rosalyn Mina, who had opened a delicatessen in Toronto. Bob and Penelope offered to drive him there. The odds of getting a good night’s sleep without being awakened by knife-wielding rapists seemed a lot better up in Canada.

  Richard checked out of the Le
nox Hotel, paying $20 for his four-night stay. Economy remained a primary concern. As of mid-October, the balance in Brautigan’s main checking account stood at $131.85. Four days later Joel Shawn deposited $20,313.89 in the First Security Bank of Livingston, Montana, the proceeds from the second half of Richard’s book advance, plus some additional foreign royalty money. Brautigan did all his banking in Montana, maintaining two accounts, one intended only for the expenses of his three rental properties, although he frequently used it to pay for meals at Cho-Cho or an evening’s drinking at Enrico’s.

  The drive from Buffalo to Toronto was a little over one hundred miles but took more than two hours due to occasional delays at the border. The Creeleys crossed the Niagara River to Fort Erie, Ontario, on the Peace Bridge, about twelve miles upstream from the falls. Richard always enjoyed his role as designated passenger. It got no better than this trip, full of sparkling conversation and views of Lake Ontario. Arriving in Toronto, they checked into an old hotel popular with the local bohemian crowd and went out to dinner.

  In the morning, Richard set off with Bob and Penelope to search for Roz and Mina. They found them at Slices West, the Minas’ new deli on Queen Street West in a neighborhood two blocks east of Parkdale, a “hub of drugs, alcohol and crime.” Mina thought the Creeleys were “two of the most kind and wonderful people” he’d ever met. They didn’t stay long, leaving early to head back to Buffalo. Brautigan located his querencia, a tall stool off to one side of the shop, away from the customer flow, where he sat and peacefully watched the Minas slice meat and cheese, making sandwiches to go.

  Like most actors, Mina E. Mina often had to look for other work to supplement his sporadic income. He’d been a college drama professor and a chef at a large Canadian resort. The delicatessen was the latest in a string of ventures guaranteeing the bills got paid. To make sure he always had a part to play, Mina assembled a one-man show, How to Be a Great Writer, putting together various pieces written by Charles Bukowski. He played Henry Chinaski, Bukowski’s manic imagined alter ego. Because the set was a table and chair, and his only props a typewriter, a battered suitcase, and a six-pack, Mina could put the show on almost anywhere and performed the piece in venues as varied as Chico Hot Springs and the Odyssey Theater in Santa Monica.